The Roots Run Deep Chapter 2

Chapter 2 - The High School Years

Wayland Academy Years

The High School Years

It was in the early summer of 1965 that my dad asked me if I would like to go away to a private school in central Wisconsin called Wayland Academy. I had no idea what this really meant and I never looked on it as a form of punishment because both mom and dad had great hopes for me and wanted me to have the advantages of a prep school education.

I was lucky to have been born in later life when my father was running a successful grocery business in 3 states. The tuition was about $2,000 a year which was a lot of money at that time.

We drove to Beaver Dam, Wisconsin to visit the school and for me to make the final decision to attend in the fall.

Now, I was a small-town boy. Sheltered in many ways from the outside world so for me, this was the opportunity of a lifetime. I would spend the next 4 years living 3 hours away from home in a very nurturing environment with other boys and girls much like a college campus but without the freedom, so in some ways this was a continuation of my early sheltered life. I would not wake up to this fact until four years later when I went off to college in Madison, Wisconsin.

When I arrived on campus that September, I was confident that I would be able to stand out like I had in Junior High. I was so confident that I even asked the prettiest girl in the freshman class, Kay Wagenknecht, to the first dance. Little did I know that I was not going to be the life of the party or the one going home with Kay.

Kay Wagenknecht

I was not an athlete, a scholar, or a natural comedian and at 5 foot 7 and completely unworldly, I was out of my league. Needless to say, I spent the next 4 years hanging out with the third string boys and only once asked a girl out to prom my junior year and she was a foreign exchange student from Venezuela.

Lucky for me I made some of the best friends of my life in those 4 years. Friends I have stayed in touch with and even some of the girls that I hang out with at our class reunions.

The education was good and challenging but that is not what I remember most from those years. It was the fun we had making master keys and crawling through the air ducts to explore all of the private areas of the school. We were all smaller boys who did not quite make it on the A teams. Paul Gustafson, Joel Peterson, Dave Mead, George Davis (a town student) and me.

Freshman year our rooms were in the basement of Wayland Hall, the oldest building on the campus, built in 1855. The building had been classrooms in the past but now was the boy’s dormitory. We were two to a room and my first roommate was another student from LaCrosse, Peter Tausche. He only lasted one year as we picked on him mercilessly all year. There was a thing called a grundy rip which was when one or two boys would come up behind you, grab your underwear and pull it up, ripping it off you. Peter had to call home frequently to get replacements and his parents finally complained to the school that this must stop.

After Freshman year we got to choose our roommates for the next year, so I had roommates I enjoyed. I roomed with Joel Peterson sophomore year on the third floor, Dave Mead Junior Year on the first floor and Michael Platt my senior year in the new senior dorm.

Wayland gave me the opportunity to interact with people from different social circles, many of them from wealthier families, but we were all on the same level except for the various cliques that I imagine exist in every high school in America.

We had senator’s sons, daughters of wealthy banking families, even the son of Oscar Mayer. We had athletes, brains, beauty queens, musicians, comedians, artists and the beautiful people. I did not fit into any of those groups, but we did have our own group of ordinary boys who loved to experiment with life.

Joel was the bartender and always managed to find a way to bring a bottle of something for us to sample on those Saturday nights when there was nothing else to do. He especially loved Johnny Walker Red that he would get from his father’s liquor cabinet at home. It was the Johnny Walker that did me in my freshman year. I had never really had brown liquor before and after a night of heavy imbibing I woke up with something more than a hangover. I was in a space that years later I would experience as a “high”. It was like I was living in a tunnel and everything was far away and the voices where echoing in my head. When I was still in this space on the third day, I thought I better go to the infirmary and talk to the nurse. She understood what it was and let me stay in the infirmary for a day, after which I was recovered. She also never turned me in, for which I am forever grateful.

On prom night, freshman year, someone told us that you could get high by eating morning glory seeds so we bought a few packages and proceeded to chew them up. This was my first experiment with mind altering chemicals and I wasn’t sure it would do anything, but it did. We all got to feeling really good and decided it would be a good idea to go swimming in the shower on our floor. Now this shower was a tile lined room with six shower heads and about a 3-foot-wide entrance with a one-foot lip in front. We covered the drain and sealed the entrance with one of the boards from a bed and turned the water on. We filled that shower up to about four feet and swam the night away. Shortly after that time we learned that the seed companies began coating the seeds with something that would make you sick if you ate them, so we never tried that again.

When Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks came, I would spend the time at Joel’s house, Dave Mead’s house, Michael Platts house or one of them would come home with me. I always liked going to Joel’s house because his dad owned the Regal Cookware company and I would always come home with some nice kitchen appliance. It was also at Joel’s house that I tried pot for the first time.

We were in his basement with Chris Hepp and Paul Gustafson and someone had a joint. I remember the Beach Boys “Good Vibrations” was playing and I always think of that night when I hear that song. I don’t think I felt anything that night so I can’t say if it was any good or I just did not know what to expect. Later that year I would experience the real effect in the basement of the Ward’s Dairy Bar, across the street from campus.

As I was not one of the popular or athletic students on campus, I did not have a girlfriend until my senior year, thanks to our ability to go off campus and fraternize with the girls in Beaver Dam. It was at Ward’s that I met Claudia. She was cute and she thought I was a catch as well. We hung out at Wards and downtown on Saturdays.

It was downtown where I had my first experience of talking my way out of being accosted by a local hoodlum. We were at a local pizza place and I was confronted by a kid about my age who wanted to start a fight with me because he thought I was one of those rich Wayland kids.

I don’t remember what I said to him at the time, but it completely defused the whole situation and we left on good terms. I’m not sure what skills God gave me or why I can come across as a non-threatening nice guy, but I’m thankful for those skills.

My relationship with Claudia lasted through my freshman year at Madison and then trailed off when I moved back to LaCrosse to finish my college education.

Claudia and Marc 1969

One interesting and ultimately quite remarkable happening began when Claudia and I exchanged class rings during my senior year. This was a sort of rite of passage that most teens of my time engaged in. The interesting thing is that one day as I was walking back to the senior dorm her ring slipped off my finger and fell into the grass. I was frantic and spent a long time retracing my steps trying to locate the lost item. I was unsuccessful however and had to let her know what had happened. At the time I know she was upset and she came back and told she had also lost my ring as well.

I was pretty sure her story was bogus but what could I do? Being the gentleman, I conceded with her and let it all go.

The remarkable ending to this story is that even though we had lost touch since my freshman year in college, she came to my 50^th class reunion in Beaver Dam and returned the ring to me. You would not believe how surprised and thankful I was to see that ring again.

After I graduated, I decided to stay in Beaver Dam and got a job at the Green Giant factory in town. I lived with this nice old woman who rented me a room and did my laundry every week, with her homemade lye soap. The clothes were clean but always a little stiff.

My job at the factory consisted of meeting the green bean trucks that came into the factory every night from 7pm to midnight. I would climb up on the truck and put a 3-foot thermometer into the beans to record the temperature and then take a small sample of the beans back to my shed to cook up and prepare a report. It was easy work and when the trucks stopped coming, I could just crawl up on my bench and take a nap. As factory work goes, this was a very cushy job. The only better job was the dispatcher who worked in the shed next to mine.

High school will always be the highlight of my youth. It was structured and challenging but it is where I met a great variety of people I would not have met at a local high school. It also gave me a little edge when I went to college as I had learned how to study and had been given a classic education that I could use the rest of my life.

It was during the summers of my Junior and Senior years that I started dating two girls from Brownsville and Caledonia.

Beverly Bessie was very attractive and played hard to get. I don’t remember how we hooked up but I began to drive to Caledonia to hang out with her, mostly at her house. Her mom had gotten pregnant early in life and had instilled in Beverly the desire to hold out for the right person and right time. She knew exactly what I wanted but she would only go as far letting me cop a feel now and then. Regardless, I was very attracted to her.

Karen Nelson was a car hop at Gram’s A&W in Brownsville. I was driving a VW then and after seeing her a few times I asked if I could drive her home. She was a year younger than me.

When the day came that she agreed, we drove down the river, parked and made out. It gets really crowded in the back seat of a Beetle.

Beverly and Karin

Our family had moved to LaCrosse during my Junior year so it was a drive to visit both girls.

Karin’s parents had a small hobby farm just outside of Brownsville and they both worked factory jobs in LaCrosse. The famous memory her family would remind her of, whenever they could, was that the outhouse was constructed the day she was born. It kind of had “A Little House on the Prairie” feel to it. They sold the farm the next year and moved to La Crosse, Wisconsin, across the river from La Crescent, Minnesota

My folks still owned the house south of Brownsville and did have it on the market but nothing was selling at the time. So naturally, it was a perfect place to have a party. We had keys to the place since Dad would have us come out sometimes to check on it.

Alcohol was legal in Wisconsin at 18 to buy 3.2% beer. Of course, we would have nothing to do with that, so I procured one of my brother Norm’s old driver’s license and headed down to Mary’s Tap to buy cases of the real stuff.

Mary’s Tap was the perfect place to buy beer or other liquors because Mary was pretty much a drunk. She questioned the license just enough let me get what I came for. From there it was off to Brownsville.

We had several parties out at the house but there was only one I remember well. It was one of those parties where you invite a few close friends and then they invite others. Needless to say, there were quite a number that I had never seen before.

All in all, there were no major incidents and when we left, there were just some cans to pick up both inside and out. A successful party.

A couple days later Dad goes out to the house and I have a slight twinge of fear. I hope we did a good job of sweeping the place clean.

When he got home, he had the perfect explanation for what he had found. He was upset with the realtor for showing the house to someone with a dog and the dog peed on the carpet. Well, I could have come up with something a little more logical, like someone had a party there and beer got spilled on the carpet.

But I wasn’t about to share my thoughts on the subject. Best to leave the story just the way he told it.

At the end of my senior year at Wayland, after graduation, I was able to join a group of students and the school’s art teacher, Beverly Dohman, on a trip to Greece. This was my first time out of the country and my first time on an airplane.

We landed in Athens and got on an old converted boat that might have been a fishing trawler at one time. This was not a cruise ship by any stretch of the imagination. We had places to sleep and gather on board but little else. We cruised around the Greek islands and stopped in Istanbul before heading back to Athens and exploring the Parthenon and other famous spots.

While I was there, I hooked up with the Dohman’s daughter, Bonnie, and we spent time getting to know each other and I think we could have been a thing if I was not still going out with Claudia and then off to college. Years later, Beverly told me she wished it had worked out between us. Beverly was always one of my favorites and we would always make time to see her at every reunion we went to.

Back to Karin.

During the summer after my freshman year at Madison I decided to look Karin up, as she then lived in LaCrosse. I got her number, called her and asked if we could meet.

This was one of those photographic moments in life that never leaves your brain. I walked into her parent’s house and met her in the basement rec room. She was sitting or leaning against the far wall looking very attractive. She was downright cute. After getting a good look into her eyes I was struck by the yellow shorts she had on, as they accentuated everything that counts. Those shorts and cute Karin in them was all I needed to fall in love with her.  It makes me feel good all over again just to remember that moment.

So now, let’s head of to Madison Wisconsin and my freshman year in college.

Our Greek Art Trip 1969