Be True to Your School

I do not consider myself a literary critic of any importance. I do like to read, and there is a very short list of books that I have not been able to finish at least. A friend recently told me about a book with the title of this blog by a guy named Bob Greene. Now Bob has been in a bit of hot water and has been somewhat disgraced by his former professionals in the newspaper business. I don't care to make a judgment about that.

What I do want you to know is that this guy followed me around day and night in my high school years. I didn't know that I was being followed, God forbid! He did this though, and we even had some of the same friends. He did all this, and I never had a clue. The only real difference is that he kept a daily journal in 1967, and I never gave a journal a thought. I was a bit ahead of his time, in that my high school days ended in 1957, but I still think he was shadowing me. He says all the events in the book are true, as are the people real. He has changed a few names to protect a few dignities, and I am sure that I am one of those.

Bob Greene was a tennis player in high school. Our school had no tennis team. We still had some of the same coaches and teachers too. He seems to go out for every meal. I don't know where he got that kind of money to spend at the Toddle House, but I went to Toddle Houses too. Greene had some of my teachers, even if he lived in Ohio and I lived in Tennessee. Mr. Schacht, his algebra teacher sounds like Mr. Shelton, my algebra teacher for one day (he died that night, not due to my presence, he just died). Greene also had a group of friends uncannily similar to the same rogues that I had as friends.

Greene's book is a nice read because you can read entries for one or two days, a week, or longer if you wish. Greene and I did a lot of cruising in cars and on foot, sometimes with cohorts and sometimes alone. He and I both had a first love, and he went through the same bittersweet agonies as I did. He and his buddies would go to other towns to meet new girls just like Ashby and I used to go to Humbolt and Memphis in his mom's hot-wired Caddy for the same thing.

Greene's school had fraternities and sororities like mine. That's a whole other blog entirely, and likely now, it is an anachronism.

More about this book, as I finish the last half.