Those "Good Ol' Days"

 Welcome to FP65!  As you know, it has been nearly 45 years since we walked the halls of dear old Franklin Pierce High School.  Our school then was a fairly new one. Having been built in 1952, it was the first "California style" school built in the state of Washington.  It's classrooms and offices were built on one level spread out with breezeways instead of multiple stories.  You can read a brief history of the school here.  In 1965, Mr. Nelson was the superintendent, Mr. Whitesel was the principal and Mr. Brown, the vice-principal.  The Mustang galloped the nation’s highways, YESTERDAY the Beatles needed HELP! with MICHELLE and the Rolling Stones couldn’t get no SATISFACTION.  On our TV’s, the Man from UNCLE was Bewitched by the Addams Family, while Batman was stranded on Gilligan’s Island with Hogan’s Heroes.  Movies we watched included The Sound of Music, Dr. Zhivago, Thunderball, Cat Ballou and the Beatles’ Help!.

Vietnam was coming more and more into our consciousness when the US commenced sustained bombing of the North and US combat troops increased from 11,300 three years earlier to 184,300 in 1965.  The first significant protests in America against the war occurred when student demonstrators marched on the Oakland Army Terminal, the point of departure for most US troops.     

Some other Milestones included the deaths of Winston Churchill, Nat King Cole, T. S. Eliot and Adlai Stevenson.  In February, Malcolm X was assassinated at a Harlem rally. In August, blacks rioted for six days in the Watts section of Los Angeles leaving 34 dead, over 1,000 injured, and nearly 4,000 arrested.

In Science, Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson's discovery of cosmic background radiation confirmed the "Big Bang" theory.  Early Bird, the first commercial communications satellite was launched. Wally Schirra and Thomas Stafford aboard Gemini VI performed the first rendezvous with another spacecraft, Gemini VII, with Frank Borman and James Lovell.  Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov performed the first spacewalk on Mar. 18, while Edward White II became the first American to walk in space on June 3.

In Literature, popular books and authors included Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse, An American Dream by Norman Mailer, The Source by James A. Michener, Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President, 1964 and The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming

The cost of mailing a letter was a nickel, McDonald’s hamburgers were fifteen cents, gas was nineteen cents and health warnings had just appeared on cigarettes.  Brooke Shields was born, lava lamps became popular and the silicon chip was invented. 

Well, a lot happened in 1965.  I have only touched the surface of some of those events.  As I get the chance, I will be posting additional pages dealing with these topics and more for those that are interested. 

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