Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your High School Years

It seems a little early in the year to be reminiscing about high school, but that's what we're doing tonight with Randy Seaver for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun!

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along; cue the Mission:  Impossible! music!):

1.  This week we travel down Memory Lane again.  Tell us about your high school years with answers to ten questions.

2.  Put them in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a link in a comment to this post.

Okay, here are my answers:

1.  What was your high school's full name, where was it, and what year did you graduate?  Niceville Senior High School; Niceville, Florida (of course!); 1979.

2.  What was the school team nickname, and what are/were your school's colors?  It's the Niceville Eagles, and the colors are maroon and gold (or something similar).

3.  What was the name of your school song, and can you still sing it?  I'm not sure if Randy means the school as a whole or my graduating class.  I remember my class' song was "Fantasy" by Earth, Wind & Fire, which I can still kind of sing.  If the school had/has an overall school song, I have no idea what it is, so I certainly can't sing it.

4.  Did you have a car?  How did you get to and from school?  I did not have a car in high school.  I didn't even have a bicycle.  Most of the time I got to and from school by the school bus, which came out to County Line Road.  Nicevile is in Okaloosa County, and I lived in Villa Tasso in neighboring Walton County, just over the county line.  Sometimes my mother would drive me (and later my brother also) to school, such as in bad weather.  At least once the mother of one of the my classmates, who also lived in Villa Tasso, drove my brother and me to school, because we had flooded roads, and my mother's Corvair was too low to the ground to drive through the high waters.  (When the water starts coming up through the floorboards, you know it's time to use a different vehicle.)

5.  Did you date someone from your high school?  Or marry someone from your high school?  Were you considered a flirt?  Ha!  I had one date in high school (see #9).  I'm still not married, therefore so much for that question.  And I definitely wasn't a flirt.  Social pariah was more like it.

6.  What social group were you in?  Like Randy, I was a social outcast, with the smart geeks and nerds.  My few friends were the other students in the advanced classes.  My school was also heavily cliquish.  The only times the "cool" kids talked to me were when they wanted help with their homework (I'm looking at you, George Skipper).

7.  Who were your favorite teachers?  The only teacher from high school whose name I can remember right now is Mr. Clifford, who taught math.  I really enjoyed his calculus class.  That's funny, I remember more of my junior high school teachers' names than high school.

8.  What did you do on Friday nights?  Stayed home.  I wasn't asked out on dates, I didn't go to sports events, and I was a geek.  Actually, once a gaming club started, which was held at the Niceville/Eglin AFB YMCA building, I think I sometimes did that on Friday nights, although we also gamed on Saturdays.

9.  Did you go to and have fun at the Senior Prom?  My only date in high school was for the Senior Prom.  I was asked only five (yes, five!) days before the prom.  I found a dress to wear at a thrift shop for $5 (I'm wearing it in this photo; I think I still have it).  Even though my date (I really don't want to attest to his name in public) pretty much ignored me at the prom itself, I did have fun, because I ended up hanging out with a friend of mine who was there without a date.

10.  Have you been to reunions, and are you planning on going to the next reunion?  Surprisingly enough, considering the history I've described, I have been to reunions, I think three of them.  I went to the 5-year reunion because I was working at USC in 1984, the year Los Angeles hosted the Summer Olympics, and all nonessential staff were told "you are taking vacation during these two weeks, thank you, see you later."  Coincidentally, the reunion fell during those two weeks, so I figured I might as well go, and it made for a good excuse to visit my parents.  I think that was also the year my brother graduated with his Master's degree, so we all ended up going down to Gainesville for that while I was out there.  I went to either the 10th or the 20th reunion (maybe both?), which I had forgotten about but was reminded of when I went to the 40th reunion in 2019.  That one I had planned to attend primarily so I could again visit my parents while there, but before the reunion took place my father passed away and my stepbrother moved my stepmother to Texas so he and his wife could take care of her there, and I didn't see either one of them.  I did get to visit my stepfather, though, so it was somewhat successful in that regard.  And am I planning on going to the next reunion?  I really don't know.

Kind of like Randy, I really didn't enjoy high school, except for the learning part.  I was not in the right social circles, I'm plain as a mud fence, and intelligence wasn't highly regarded.  Not a great place to be.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Share a Childhood Memory

Sometimes Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenges are great for sparking ideas for future blog posts as well as the one for that night.  Once I started thinking about childhood memories, several came to mind all at once.  So it seems that I'll have good fodder for future subjects to write about!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music here) is:

(1) Have you written your memoirs yet?  If so, please share with us one story from your childhood.  If not, then start your memoirs!   The story could be a memory of your family life, your schoolwork, your neighborhood, etc.  It doesn't have to be a certain length, just something you recall.

(2) Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this blog post, or in a post on Facebook.  Be sure to leave a link to your work as a comment to this post.

The Sugar Ant Invasion

This incident happened when I was about 13 or 14, I think.  My family had already moved to Villa Tasso, a small setttlement (unincorporated part of Walton County, in the very southwestern corner) in a rural area of the Florida Panhandle.

Florida is a great place for bugs of all kinds.  I used to joke that if there was a bug anywhere in the world, there was at least one of that bug somewhere in Florida.  It's bug heaven.

My family lived in two mobile homes that had been connected by a custom-built addition between them.  Being out in the country, there was no citified sewage system, so we had a septic tank.

One day I was in the bathroom at the back part of the second mobile home, doing what one does in a bathroom.  After I finished my task, I stood up and turned around to flush the toilet — to see hundreds of big sugar ants swarming out of the toilet bowl!

You can be sure I beat a hasty retreat out of the room as I started yelling for my parents.

We discovered that a break had occurred in the line connecting the toilet to the septic tank, and the ants had been attracted to all the goodness leaking out.  I was just the lucky person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In writing up this little memory, I wanted to find a photograph of a sugar ant to accompany the story.  I discovered that sugar ants are properly a subset of carpenter ants.  I also learned that what we used to call sugar ants in Florida might not actually be sugar ants, as the information I can find seems to indicate that they don't occur in Florida.  What I remember is they were big and black and headed my way, and there were way too many of them.  They might have been black carpenter ants; this guy looks kind of familiar.

By Muéro at English Wikipedia.  Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons, Public Domain
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3385453

Hurricane Eloise, September 23, 1975

Hurricane Eloise, September 22

The recent news about the very destructive hurricanes in the Atlantic and Pacific this year have caused me to think about the one severe hurricane I was in.  Although it seems relatively small compared to the sizes of hurricanes nowadays, Hurricane Eloise was the most destructive of the 1975 Atlantic hurricane season, at least according to Wikipedia, and the name is on the retired list.  Today is the 43rd anniversary of it making landfall in Florida.

As with all hurricanes, you "watch" for the "warning."  This means that the hurricane watch comes first, when they start telling everyone in the area that you need to start making your preparations to leave in case the hurricane stays on its current path.  The hurricane warning is issued when the hurricane is actually expected to hit the area.

At the time of Eloise, my family lived in Villa Tasso, Florida, a small unincorporated community (maybe 200 people?) in Walton County, on the county line with Oklaoosa County.  Villa Tasso is right on the water, on Choctawhatchee Bay.  Being close to shore during a hurricane usually means more destruction due to storm surges.

When they issued the hurricane warning for Eloise, my parents decided we would not leave the area.  We did evacuate our home in Villa Tasso, which was two mobile homes connected together (because everyone knows that God hates mobile homes), but we went to stay in my father's garage in nearby Niceville (in Oklaoosa County), which was built of stone and had a very high probability of surviving the predicted storm.  It also was not as close to the water.

For three days my family of five (father, mother, brother, sister, and me) and my father's business partner were stuck in that building, with the business partner's two Doberman guard dogs locked in a room in the back.  The building was a great place to ride out the storm and took no damage.  My mother was talking on the phone during our stay and was zapped by lightning on the line.

When the rains finally let up, we drove back to Villa Tasso to see what had happened to our poor mobile homes.  Several trees on our property had been knocked down by the hurricane, but, amazingly, only one had actually hit a trailer.  Even at that, all it did was scrape the edge of the roof and land on the porch.  Our home had survived the storm!

After going through just one hurricane, I decided I didn't want to do that ever again, so when I graduated high school I chose to move back to the West Coast, where all we have to deal with is earthquakes!