Robyn Kuester, the person in charge of our web site, sent along your request for information for your History project to everyone who had an e-mail address listed on our alumni address book. I guess this makes it official, you know you are old when the year you graduate from high school is assigned as a history report, bummer.

Well let's see if I can provide you with a window to the past. Starting with clothes, the girls wore short dresses, the mini skirt was in fashion. This proved to be a problem for those who enforced the dress code, they were always on the look-out for those who were pressing the limit. Those in question would kneel down and they would measure the height to the hem. The dress code also changed that year, to that time girls had to wear dresses to school, we could now wear pants. From that time forward I never ever wore another dress, it was jeans and T-shirts for me!

The boys wore jeans, for the most part. If they wore dress shirts, the tails had to be tucked in. I saw more than one guy get called out into the hallway to tuck in his shirt. Hair for the girls tended to the long, straight " California Surfer Girl" style, me among them. California was very hot and in vogue, heck it was the center of the universe. One of my friends, who had naturally curly hair would get up early to press her hair straight with a steam iron. She would always be mad on days with high humidity, because her hair would kink up again. The guys wore their hair short, no sideburns, that wouldn't be in fashion until the mid 70's.

It's sad to see how the press and the movie industry tries to portray the 60's, we were not the tie-dye free-love hippie stoners you see in movies. To be sure there were some around like that, but let's face it, normal everyday types don't sell at the box-office, or get a lot of space in the newspaper. Slang in use was mostly things you'd hear today, I guess the surfer crowd is back in style. It was things like "cool" "I'm hip" "gnarly dude" "outer space" "cowabunga" "hang'en the edge" "far out" "ain't gonna happen" "right on" "right arm" "crazy man" "hang tight" "heavies". Is that enough for you?

It was about 30 miles to the beach from my home town, and the beach figured in heavily into the social scene. To answer your next question, yes, I surfed. When I was younger, my mother would take me to the beach very early in the morning, when the real surfers were there. For the price of some donuts and milk, I was taught the fine art of surfing. Let's see, rock bands.... it depended on what you liked. The Beach Boys, the Beatles (by the way I saw them in concert at the Hollywood Bowl) the Rolling Stones, the Iron Butterfly, Simon and Garfunkel, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, John Denver, the Dave Clark Five , Neil Diamond, America, the Turtles, Pink Floyd, Diana Ross and the Supremes ( I saw their last concert in Las Vegas, it was great!) , Black Sabbath ( I also saw them, they were just getting started and Ozzie Osborn was just a face in the band.) Helen Reddy was just making her influence felt on the social scene. "I Am Woman" became the anthem for the Women's movement.

Traditional roles were being challenged, and the world was wide open, if you were interested in something,you went for it. Case in point, I was and engineering major, both mechanical and aeronautical. Important events......there was a big riot in Los Angeles called theWatts Riots. People had never seen anything like it. As an aftermath of the riots, people were looking for ways to bridge the race gap. We adopted Watts High School as our sister campus. There were a number of seminars where their students came to Troy to get to know our students. They were pretty interesting, we talked, and we listened. There were no black students at Troy, we weren't segregated, there just weren't any black families that lived in our district. Some of the things that the Watts students shared with us was pretty disturbing. I remember one guy in particular, his mother was a prostitute. She would disappear for days at a time leaving him in charge of his younger brothers and sisters. Lots of times they went hungry, because there wasn't any food in their house. They would get breakfast from a group that was feeding kids like them, they were called The Black Panthers. It really gave us something to think about, they were more to us than just statistics.

The most important thing that took place in 1969, the 20th Century, and arguably the Millennium was the landing on the Moon. Everyone who was alive remembers where they were and what they were doing when Neil Armstrong stepped out on the lunar surface. I was home sick with a case of tonsillitis,but I wouldn't have missed it for anything. For one of the few times in our history, this Planet was one group, holding our collective breath, huddled around TV's all over other world waiting for the word to come. It was so strange to look at the moon that night and realize that there were two humans up there. The other high point of drama was when they lifted off. Their firing mechanism was having a problem, and they had to improvise a way to engage it. That came in the form of the ink cartridge from Armstrong's pen. As we watched the Lem lift off the Moon's surface, it felt like all the good wishes and hopes of the whole world were helping to lift them back into orbit.

Some of the other events... The Vietnam War was in full swing, it was on the news every night. I am not aware of any from our class who were killed in Nam. There were some protests, but again you get a real slanted picture from the press accounts.Berkeley didn't represent the rest of the nation, but the cameras liked conflict, it boosted the ratings. 1969 was also my freshman year in college. I can remember someone calling the local network and guaranteeing violence if they would send out a news crew. There was a confrontation at the flagpole in the quad, a group of students thought they were going to haul down the flag and burn it. They hadn't counted on the ROTC and Veterans showing up. They yelled and screamed, but in the end they didn't have the nerve to try to get to the flag since there were about 500 angry men standing in their way. So it was a wash, the news people turned off their cameras and went looking for their ratings somewhere else.

No matter which side you were on, it was a real dark time for this country. The most interesting insight I got on the War came from one of my fellow students. She was in my history class and there was a lot of discussion about the war. She was Vietnamese, and I thought it was funny that she never entered into the discussions. One day the rhetoric was flying hot and heavy, when she finally got to her feet. She was so mad she was shaking, but her voice was calm and soft. She told the speaker who had been berating the Army that he didn't know what he was talking about. He had called the Viet Cong "Freedom Fighters", and that really brought her out. She was a quiet person who didn't say much in class, and talked less about herself. It seems she came to America after she was adopted by a U. S. Army Officer. He had come into her village shortly after the Viet Cong had left. They had come to conscript the young men of the village into the VietCong. Her father was one of the village elders, and they wouldn't allow them to take the young men away. The VC killed all of the elders and dragged their conscripts away, her two brothers among them. When her adopted father found her she was in shock, sitting with her father's head in her lap and his body was several yards away. She let them know that the VC were not freedom fighters, just thugs looking to hold on to power. She shamed them by telling them that they lived in the greatest country on the Earth, and the discussion they were having in class would not be tolerated, people who didn't agree with the VC died. Class ended for the day on that note.

We're pretty much like you, racing from class to class, trying to balance our school work with our social life. Troy was a new high school. We were only the third graduating class. It was a state-of-the-art school, the best science labs, rooms that could be changed in size by moving the wall panels that were on big over head rails. The rooms had no windows and no doors, just an entry area that was always open. We had carpeting and sound-proofing, so it was pretty quiet. We were located across the street from Cal State Fullerton, and we had TV hookups so we could see their lectures and special programs. Some of us even attended classes there as part of the advanced placement program.

Our class periods were split into modules of time, we just called them MODS. Some classes that required more time, like math, were more mods than others. We always had a tour of educators going through our classes, getting ideas for their own schools.

Parties were about what you'd expect, Homecoming, Sadie Hawkins (where the guys sweat out an invitation to a dance),the Christmas Formal (this was particularly amusing, the Snow Queen had one of those big Southern Bell type dresses that expanded out in three tiers. Well, as she and her date were beginning the first dance, alone on the dance floor by the Christmas tree, he stepped on her dress, and they stumbled and fell into the tree! What a show stopper.) There was also theme dances, Roaring 20's, Dog Patch U.S.A.,and of course the Senior Prom.

The biggest party of all was our Graduation Party. There the class of 1969 got short-changed. The class of 1968 got to go to Catalina, a great resort island off the coast of California. They were so rowdy that Troy High School was invited not to come back again! That meant we ended our high school careers at Disneyland. I know that probably sounds pretty good to someone from Ohio, but Disneyland was exactly 6.3 miles from my front door, and many of my friends worked there. We made the best of it, it was an all-nighter with only high school seniors allowed in the park. I've never seen so many people my age in one place before, and we did have a great time.

Well, Marcela, I hope I have provided you with some background information you can use in your report. Hope you get a good grade, the internet is a great tool when you need more that a library can provide.

Best wishes for your success, Pam Pousson, class of 1969  kpousson@onemain.com