Going back to high school

Reminiscences and reliving the experience at my 100th anniversary high school reunion

Originally published in Illumination on May 31, 2023

In my teens, I tell people, I attended Lowe High.

“I knew a lot of guys who went to Lowe High. Very high,” I continue the punchline.

W.D. Lowe Secondary School, formerly Windsor-Walkerville Technical School
(or “Tech” as it was known) and Walkerville Technical School before
that, celebrated its 100th-anniversary reunion on May 20, 2023, with a
dinner and dance at the Caboto Club in my hometown, Windsor, Ontario. It was a surrealistic soirée, stepping back in time more than 40 years as the place you were at then dissolves into the present.

High school reunions can be such a strange flashback experience. I was reliving my high school prom which was also my first date with Lori Carlesimo, the girl who would become my wife five years later. A few days after the reunion, we celebrated our 37th wedding anniversary.

There’s a psychology to high school reunions. The Chicago Tribune called it “reunion regression” and said it can bring a “dreaded reckoning” for some and vindication for others, anxiety and the reality of not living up to others’ expectations or triumph at having survived into adulthood and thrived. Some experience their high school crush and how it was crushed. Others may recoil at memories of being bullied and stay away altogether.

You may find yourself, like me, talking to a friend and asking if his brother will be attending only to learn you’ve been standing next to him for the past five minutes. (If he changed that much, what do I look like? you wonder.)

Beyond an opportunity to “reminisce, reconnect and discover,” the Tribune’s Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz wrote, “the collision of past and present is also a time of self-reflection, measuring who you are against what you wished for yourself and what you think your peers expected of you.”

For me, high school was mostly an under-the-radar experience. I was not part of the jock squad in a school that excelled in some sports. I didn’t really fit in among the stoners although I hung around with several of them. I wasn’t a nerd. I didn’t belong to clubs, besides the high school newspaper The Courier. I was into music and did the occasional lunch-hour DJ turn in the cafeteria, spinning tracks like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” or Rush’s “2112” at a time when kids were listening to disco, but that was about it.

I did not have a good Grade 9 experience at Lowe. All that fakery and the cliques I didn’t fit into — I had a miserable time. Rush’s “Subdivisions” — “In the high school halls, in the shopping malls, conform or be cast out” — seemed to be written about me.

On the first day of my next year, I was prepared to switch to a new high school but decided to just keep walking toward Lowe where I would stay until my Grade 13 graduation in 1982.

At the end of 1981, I asked Lori to our Grade 12 prom. I had liked her since Grade 9 but it took some time to get up the nerve to ask her out. You’ve heard of speed dating? Well, this was slow dating on the glacial scale.

That night — June 19, 1981 — was magical and we fell in love. At the reunion, the DJ played my request for Juice Newton’s “Angel of the Morning” which was a hit at the time of our prom. The memory of Lori singing the chorus in my ear on the dance floor was still in my head as we swayed to the song 42 years later.

See, high school reunions need not be traumatic events. Like life itself, high school is what you make of it and Lowe indeed had its highs as well as its lows.

I was a C-average student until Grade 11 when I took a history class with David Merschback, the most inspiring teacher I ever had. I became an A student after that and started to explore new worlds of ideas and art and writing that led to university, a career in media, and a path to lifelong learning.

I can recall one day when he walked into class, late, wearing a long overcoat with a turned-up collar and one hand buried inside. His shifty, sparkling eyes scanned the room and he moved toward the windows, looking outside and then closing one blind. He peered through the crack and repeated the pattern until the room was enclosed and dark.

Then he went to the front of the class to face the students and spoke. “Comrades,” he told the hushed class in a faux-Russian accent, “today ve start lesson on ze Russian revolution.”

A year later, as editor-in-chief of The Courier, I received a letter from Merschback praising one particular edition as being especially good.

That’s what a great teacher does — motivates, inspires and sometimes just notices his students. Merschback died in 2015 so I never had the chance to tell him how much I appreciated him. Lori recalls a business teacher of hers, Ted Emmerson, who died too young. At a time when most teachers never paid attention to average students like her, Emmerson reached out to Lori and told her she was eligible for a business award because of the number of credits she had taken and encouraged her to apply.

Our school excelled in the trades and John Davidson was my carpentry teacher. He hired me to work with him in his construction business during the summers in my last year of high school and throughout university and we became friends and kept in touch over the years.

There were other memories and memorable people from back in the day. People and places that helped me become the person I am today.

You need not be like the social psychologist Laura Martocci’s character who says she would only go to her high school reunion “if I could go as Carrie.” Or like the response of people to Diane Divecha, a developmental psychologist, when she said she was going to her 40th high school reunion: “(I) might as well have said I was jumping off a cliff.”

I certainly wasn’t jock-popular. In a city that author Bob Turner called the “Basketball Capital of Canada,” Lowe was the hoops mecca of Windsor. Gerry Brumpton, who died in 2019, was our legendary basketball coach. He led the Trojans, as we were known — or Rough Riders before 1974 — to a string of city championships and two all-Ontario titles. He didn’t know me from a hole in a basketball net and nor did any of the other sports coaches or Lowe’s longtime fearsome principal Roy Battagello who died in 2005.

Brumpton’s biggest basketball star, Mike Brkovich, was perhaps the greatest Trojan of all. He would go on to play for the Michigan State Spartans and win the 1979 NCAA title, playing alongside Magic Johnston in defeating Larry Bird’s Indian State Sycamores in the final game. I was invisible to him too and the rest of the star-studded basketball Trojans.

On the night of the reunion, I was making my way to the dance floor and experienced that familiar dread feeling of high school when I ran into that stand of tall redwoods who once wore the green and gold Trojan uniforms. Age hasn’t stooped any of them and I was right back to feeling small and insignificant in their towering presence.

But that doesn’t mean I was invisible to other former students who have made major strides in life and stand out for their successes in their respective fields.

There was Bill Marra, for instance. He was on the newspaper staff with me and would go on to become a successful city councilor, a one-time contender for mayor, and is now CEO of one of Windsor’s hospitals. Other friends and former Trojans made noise as musicians, teachers, business leaders, or tradesmen.

We were there, soaking in the old times and making new memories at the reunion. We were present while Harry Delisle, a former student who’s older than the high school, was introduced. The 101-year-old who graduated in 1940 was a gold medal winner in the school in rifle shooting and went on to fight in the Second World War.

• High school memories flitted back as the evening unfolded:
• the history teacher who whipped a chalk brush at me, narrowly missing my head,
• the English teacher who would summon a student (always a girl) to the cafeteria for toast and coffee each morning and leered at her on the way out and back into the classroom,
• the metal casting teacher who kept hair rollers on his desk,
• the time I spontaneously combusted in the middle of one class. (Kids, don’t put books of matches inside a tight jeans pocket, especially if you’re going to sit next to a window on a hot day. It doesn’t end well.),
• my creative writing award in Grade 12 for a story that was a thinly veiled ripoff of an episode from The Twilight Zone (and contained too many adjectives and adverbs), and
• the muscular classmate with the thick Yugoslavian accent who beat the pants off me in a wrestling match earlier in elementary school. (We were in the same weight class — he looked six foot four and full of muscle, as the Men at Work song said, and I was full of fat.) Before prom, I asked him if he had a date and he responded, “No. I go solo.”
• All these old memories and reconnections are what makes a high school reunion worth it, not least of which is learning that the profits from the evening went to Noah’s House, which provides mental health support for youths in Windsor.
• It was, as my high school prom promised, an “evening to remember.” Even considering the fact that I nearly choked on some chicken during dinner.

But that’s a story for another day.