Ode to Welch High School

This is being published as received in an email and when you read it you will understand why.
(warning -- get the kleenex ready.)

This  poem was written by an online friend of mine from McDowell County, who graduated from Welch High School.
She asks that if you give this poem to anyone, that you leave her name on it as author.  The poem speaks so eloquently of the times in which we went to school and became adults.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did..... Kay
 

From the Fifties

We are not the boomers --
Those plentitudinous progeny of pent-up, postwar passions.
We are the students of the fifties;
The spawn of Fibber and Molly,  Dick and Jane,
Abbott and Costello, and  Cato and the Green Hornet.
We are the spray paint of American graffiti,
The cream and the crust of American pie.

We learned of right and wrong from Gene Autry,
Red Ryder, and Johnny "Mack" Brown;
And we rode down  many a happy trail with Roy and Dale.

To fight a disease with no cure,
We faithfully put our dimes into slots.
We hit a jackpot payoff with Jonas Salk.

We were rebels without a cause,
Roused by the music of Duane Eddy,
Walkin’ with Fats and Ricky,
Moving with the rhythm of Elvis and Jerry Lee.

A little gray-green box brought our radio programs to life,
And brought the world into our living rooms.
It reflected on us the inequity of the life we had known;
And a color-blind high school principal
Taught us to apply color blindness  to people, too.

We liked Ike, and  we loved JFK,
Only with LBJ did we dare go all the way;
But  Goldwater was right, so it was still wrong.

Our Saturday afternoon serials came to life
When a  magnificent seven donned  space suits,
Pursuing not a final, but a new, frontier.
Their  reach brought  space  more within our grasp,
But  the new frontier ended near a grassy knoll in Dallas.

We had heard the wail at the birth of rock and roll;
And we sang the blues the day the music died.
We have danced the tango and the cha-cha, the twist and the stroll.
We’ve done the pony and the swim, the frug and the jerk;
We have  mashed monsters as well as potatoes.
From square dancing to break dancing,
From turkey trot to funky chicken,
From Mexican hat dance to macarena,
From sock hop to hip-hop,
From hokey pokey to achy-breaky,
But it’s still rock and roll to us!!!

We hung up our rock ‘n’ roll shoes,
Trading our white bucks and saddle oxfords
For the wingtips and high-heels of corporate America,
The sandals of Woodstock,
The steel-toed shoes of the coal mines,
And the combat boots of Vietnam.
Some of us wore the peace symbol of the sixties;
Some of us now  wear a reasonable facsimile on the hoods of our Mercedes.

Oh, the roads we have traveled......
From Flash Gordon to Mir;
From the man-in-the-moon to men on the moon;
From a computer the size of a room,
To a computer in every room.
From Superman to the superhighway.
We have seen the Iron Curtain opened,
The Berlin Wall torn down,
And permanently irreparable cracks  made in the glass ceiling.

Some of us took the road less traveled by, some the other;
But wherever the search for fortune has led us,
The lessons learned, and the dreams born, in the fifties
Have served as our guiding stars.
But, always we have heard the voices
That echoed through the halls of Welch High;
Many now are still.
Now, as the sun of our golden years
Shines ever more warmly upon us,
We find our memories and our hearts
Turning ever to “our dear school on the hill.”
                                        -Iris Harmon Bentley  (WHS '60)
                                         July 1998