Has It Really Been Forty-One Years?

‘Madison Graduates 180’.

One-hundred-eighty, according to the Mansfield News Journal.

Only 180? Can that be right?

Seems like a paltry number when compared to that June day in 1975 when I sat in one of the multitude of rows of green and white-clad graduates. I can’t remember the exact number in my graduating class, but I can tell you this: it was somewhere around four hundred fifty, give or take a dozen.

At that time, we were the largest class ever to graduate from Madison High School, which added ‘Comprehensive’ right after ‘Madison’ soon after we left. I don’t know why they did that, but it was right after they opened the new wing of the high school. The Class of ‘75’s record was broken a couple of years later, I believe by the Class of ’77.

And now they graduate one-hundred-eighty?

I remember these things about graduation: it was a beautiful day, warm but not hot. Big puffy white clouds set against a crystal blue sky. The ceremony seemed to take forever. I just wanted to walk across that platform in the middle of Ram Field, grab my diploma and get into the ‘real’ world. Leaving afterwards in my beat-up blue AMC Rambler, Rare Earth’s ‘I Just Want to Celebrate’ blaring from my 8-track tape player as I drove home with the windows down, longish hair waving in the breeze.

I had no clue what the next step would be.

Well, I did have somewhat of a plan. I knew college wasn’t for me; I’d just kind of breezed through my senior year because I’d only needed 3 1/2 credits to graduate. During one semester I had four study halls. Four, out of eight classes during the school day. I didn’t really apply myself to anything that year and couldn’t see the value of sitting in classrooms for another 4 years in college. That being said, here was the Grand Plan: if I didn’t have a full-time job by July 1^st I would enlist in the US Navy.

I got a full-time job eleven days before my deadline. I worked at Wolf Plumbing and Heating, installing seamless aluminum spouting on houses. Not very glamorous and definitely not a career.

After that I bounced around between a few jobs, got married at nineteen to my high school sweetheart ( we were too young and I was too immature ) before finally taking a position with the Ohio State Highway Patrol as a cadet/dispatcher.

That job set the hook.

Thus began my journey in the law enforcement world. I’d always dreamed of being a police officer, ever since I was a kid; the Blamers, who lived two doors away on Hout Road, had a couple of boys I hung out with…Dean Jr and Dale. If I wasn’t at their house they were at mine, and I’d heard a lot of cop tales from Dean Sr,, who was a Sergeant at Mansfield PD. He would come home from work and talk about things that had happened during his shift, exciting stuff for a thirteen year old to hear. I remember thinking wow, what a cool job! He gets to see everything that most people only read about in the newspaper!

I would find out during the thirty-one years I spent wearing a badge that that wasn’t always a good thing, that some of those things would cause sleepless nights and nightmares, memories that still haunt me to this day.

It’s been a very long journey from that June afternoon forty-one years ago and now, here I am so many decades removed from graduation day, living less than two hundred yards from where that stage sat that I couldn’t wait to walk across, retired.

What a ride it’s been.