Soaring with the Eagles....

The Niceville High School Eagles that is!

This summer in July, my high school senior class of 1977, will be holding a reunion in our hometown of Niceville, Florida. It will be our 30th year since graduating which I have a very hard time comprehending. I've starting working on a Web site for our class, you can visit it by clicking here.

Sometimes it feels as if it was just yesterday when I was walking the halls of NHS, trying to be a very cool student. I relished being a senior, it was my all time favorite year out of the thirteen that I had attended. Being a military brat meant that I went to a lot of schools, some good and some bad - unfortunately most of them were bad. I'm talking about schools with lots of racial violence, crime, drugs, and varying degrees of uninterested and uninteresting teachers. By the time I reached junior high school, I absolutely hated going to school.

Then we moved to northwest Florida during the last semester of ninth grade, which at that time in the mid-70's, was still considered junior high school. Lewis Junior High in Valparaiso (the "twin" city that sat right next to Niceville) was unlike any school I had ever attended. The school was practically brand new, and some of the teaching methods were also new. I immediately fell in love with the school and made lots of new friends and so my interest in attending school quickly improved!

The next year I found myself in high school and I liked it just as much as Lewis Junior High. By the time I reached the end of the first semester of 10th grade, my life had really improved and I felt that I was actually a part of something special - no more feelings of being an outsider and ALWAYS the "new guy". I made some good friends, got involved with some clubs (I was the president of the karate club), and I was really enjoying myself.

That is until my folks dropped a bomb on me.

We had been living in Air Force housing on nearby Eglin Air Force Base since our arrival in Florida. Suddenly my folks decided that they wanted to move off base into a civilian neighborhood. Unfortunately though, they wanted to move to Fort Walton Beach instead of Valparaiso or Niceville. I could not convince them to change their minds and so, again, just like 20 times before, I had to change schools.

I really tried my hardest to keep a stiff upper lip and to make the best of the situation. It didn't take me long to realize though that my new high school could never come close to replacing NHS. It was much, much larger and most of the kids came from a much higher financial class than I did. I was not welcomed with open arms as I had been in Valparaiso and Niceville - in fact, I was down right ignored and made to feel like a total outsider.

By the beginning of 11th grade, I was ready to drop out of school. I started suffering from depression and it took all I had to drag my carcass to school every day. At the time, I did not own a car but I did have a motorcycle, which I chose to drive to school even in bad weather, so as to not have to daily ride the school bus and listen to jokes made about where I lived. My neighborhood was a "dump" - at least that is what the "preppies" constantly called it. It wasn't really though, it was just lower middle-class.

Finally, I had had enough and I told my folks that I either needed to go back to Niceville High School or school was over for me. To my surprise, they took me serious. My dad immediately went down to the school board and got a waiver for me to change school districts. He then purchased a REAL inexpensive car for me to drive - it was a 1965 Ford Falcon with about a zillion miles on it! While handing me the car keys, my father explained to me that I would have to go get a part-time job in order to pay for the car insurance and for the fuel needed for making the 30 mile round trip to school every day.

I was estatic!

Within just a few short days I was back at Niceville High School where I was heartily welcomed. I was also working part-time in the early morning hours before school, and in the afternoons at a bank in Niceville. Eventually I secured a job delivering newspapers in Fort Walton Beach. Getting up at 3:30 a.m. every morning, 7 days a week and having the largest motor route in town. I made real good money but boy I was very tired all of the time!

To me the only negative thing about going back to NHS was having to graduate. I actually considered the idea of purposely failing the twelfth grade so that I could enjoy one more year at Niceville High School. I just was not ready to leave school. I had spent so many of my years just trying to "survive" school, that I had been unable to prepare myself for life beyond it. I had no idea what to do with my life. I was young, I was impetuous, I was frustrated about the future, and so, after a year of just bumbling around, I joined the U.S. Coast Guard - and that my friends, is a whole other bunch of stories.