My graduation photo, and the banner photo is some of our senior girls on a float in the Fall Fair and Festival Old Settlers beauty contest, fall of 1970.

The High School Years

I've talked about my freshman year, tad bit already, but here I will encompass the whole four years, in sections of classes, social status, subject, sports, and friends. Socially, I was not a popular student, I wasn't the one others students hung around, or lapped up everything I said or did, but I wasn't a loner either. I had my clique. I wasn't the top student in grades, and I just sort of floated, my sophomore year. I learned that I could loaf around the first semester, not pay attention and get a D, and the second semester I could apply myself and get a B and end up with a C, and everybody was happy. I never applied myself that year. I hated school. I didn't want to be there, but I was forced to go, at my parents insistence, and strangely I did set my eye on graduation; I did want to graduate; it seemed. I never did homework or studied; I just listened to the teacher, and a classroom I drew during class.

One of the classrooms that I sketched during a lecture. 

I was afraid of math, so I took basic math and shop. I guess the school thought I'd learn enough math in the shop to get by in life, and that decision I made in freshman year. As most of you know, I love science, but biology, yuck, and I failed it the first time around. I was an average student, and not popular. Somehow, someway, I manage to get on the B honor roll my senior or junior year in school. I was a stagehand in the junior play, and I played freshman B-team baseball, and was a manager for the basketball team. My problem with sports was that I wasn't consistent. I'd sink a basketball, but when I dribbled the ball I couldn't see down the court, as I was too busy making sure the ball returned to my hand in the dribbling process. I played track and field every year, but like everything I was mediocre. I threw the discus, and ran a relay. I went out for baseball, but never played, just sat on the bench. One student asked me, "You're never going to play so why try out." I replied the tryouts got me into shape after winter, which it did. I loved baseball, and I was born to be a fan, but never a player, like everything else, I was not aware of what was going on around me on the field. Now put me on the bench and I knew everything that was happening; perhaps I should have been a coach.

No, I was meant to be an artist, and poet. In either my junior or senior years, I was selected to be a student representative for my school for Student Government Day in Jefferson City, Missouri. I sat in the actual chair of a Missouri Legislator with the brightest and smartest of all Missouri high school students, and we were told by the Speaker of the House, "You are the best that Missouri has to offer, you are the cream of the crop." Whoa, how did this happen? That lazy sophomore who listened closely one semester to pull a C grade, the dyslexic elementary student now sitting in the House of Legislators. Well, I was an alternate, on the B honor roll, and the other student was sick, wham, me there, him not, or so I was told. Yes, the older, wiser Olan studied both semesters and was making good grades, not the best student, but a B or B- one. I even retook biology and got a passing score. We met our representative for our district, and we met the Governor, but most of all I was interested in the great murals painted in the capitol building, by the great Missouri artist, Thomas Hart Benton. Two of us boys were invited to the Lion's Club to give a speech in our town. And my speech was about artwork and figures. I heard the teacher who sent me say, "I knew he was the right boy to send." I think to myself, "Ha, sent a boy to learn politics, and all he talks about is art."

In my senior year's English Literature class, we were asked to write a short story of so many words. When I came to grading it I got an A. She stopped by my desk and said, "You have great potential as a writer." It stuck, but I knew I would never be a writer, too much work, and my focus was too much on dribbling the ball and not enough on what's happening down the court.

Girls

I was a late bloomer, as far as sexual attraction to girls goes. Growing up girls to me were just another form of human, with little anatomical differences. I entered puberty at about the age of eleven, when I grew a single hair in my pubic area. I screamed, "Mom, what is this hair doing there?" She replied, "That's normal, you're just becoming a man." That was the extent of my sexual education from my mother. Suddenly, the differences between boys and girls was for a purpose, reproduction of the human species. What I learned about sex I had to learn at the downtown drugstore's magazine rack, Playboy section. All I knew about sex came from other boys and Hugh Hefner. I do remember, one time, my mom's futile attempt to talk about sex to me. We went weed hunting for her dry flower arrangements, something we would do each spring, and she cut off a branch of pussy Willow buds, like she does every year. Then she did something different, she looked at it and stroked it. "This is a pussy, she stroked it some more and said, "See it is soft." I already knew about human sexuality. She stopped and never said another word about pussies. I would say Mom was Stoic, British in mannerism; we drank hot tea with cream and a lump of sugar, and we were not a touchyfeely family; it was awkward for us as a family to hug and kiss. After I entered puberty, awkwardness was all you could expect from her.

Models I drew from a magazine during my high school years.

These four boys, in high school, where the dudes I hung out with after school, on weekends, and during the summer days: John, Lennis, Jake, and Clyde. Clyde I've mentioned in an earlier section as the five year old I met on the way back to grandma's house, Lennis was a friend I had in six grade through to high school, and Johnny and I became friends our freshmen year. In freshman English literature class, John was the boy who sat directly behind me and pestered the hell out of me. Now, I'd known him all my school life, but through elementary school we were always in different homerooms, and we weren't in many classes together in junior high school. One day, a freshman class, he pushed his desk up directly behind me and said, "You want to wrestle." I said, "Sure." So, this started a lifelong friendship. Every morning, for a few weeks, we'd wrestle. A large group of kids gathered to watch us, and cheered on one or the other of us, but most matches ended in a tie. When the first bell rang, we got up and went to class as though nothing had happened. To write about John will take a whole chapter, so I will go on with the other friends first.

Jake and I hung out until our junior year when we got into a fight in the middle of class. We were hauled off to the principle's office, lectured, and we had to spend time in detention. We stopped hanging with each other after that. There were two people in town who got away with nicknames for me, Jake and Buzz, Becky's dad. Jake always called me Smithy, and Buzz called me Oly. I worked with Jake, I played basketball with Jake, and we hunted together. By work, I mean Jake's father would often take us along to his janitorial job at the school in Clifton Hill. We would work with him by mopping, emptying trash, and then we were allowed to play basketball in the gymnasium until his father was done. We did this for two years or so. His father owned hounds, and they need running on regular bases. Without exercise, they would be useless as hunting dogs. We never actually hunted, but we would run them at night for hours up and down the bottomland. The voice of a coonhound is a beautiful thing, like a song. We would sit and let them get ahead. We'd put out our "torches," and sit on a log in a dried up creek bed and tell stories.

Sometimes, we'd even run them in the hunting season of deep winter. One particular night it was -7 f (-21.6 c) degrees, and one of the dogs, a Bluetick, started chasing a deer. This meant trouble for us, as he could run miles and we would not be able to retrieve him. We started running as fast as we could across farms we had no business on. At a dead run I saw Jake jump, and suddenly I was cut down. At first, I didn't know what had happened. My pant legs, from the knees down were gone, ripped off. I'd hit a single strand of stretched barred wire electric fence, and that was what Jake had leaped.

"Smithy, are you okay?" he asked. I looked down with my flashlight, to see only a bloody mess. The dog came back on his own after he had had an encounter with a skunk. We had no choice but to put him in the front of the cab between us, as we made our way back home. When I got home, Mom tended to my wounds while holding her nose, and made me bathe in a special solution, over and over again. I'm sure no one at school could stand the smell of either one of us, and I still have scars on my upper legs from the barbed wire.

Lennis and I were buddies from school and church, and we were friends, mostly on his farm or at his house. We are still friends, just don't speak or write. Instead I speak to him through his wife. Lennis, for some reason, doesn't communicate with me, and I chat with his wife, and she tells him what I want to know. I met his wife before he met her. It was a year after my car accident, when I went to Junior College in the neighboring town of Moberly. My doctor's suggested I tests out my recovery by going to college nearby, before traipsing off to Eugene Oregon, 2,000 miles away. I met her in Moberly, and we became friends, but I wasn't interested in making permanent bonds with a Missouri girl, as I knew I was going to college in Oregon the next year, so it was casual. One year, when I returned home for the summer break, I painted a portrait of Lennis' father, who had passed away, and then I did one of his mother and father together. I looked him up and took the painting to him. I knocked on the door and Alice answered; she'd married my friend.

Playing cards: Starting left and going clockwise; Clyde foreground, John, Marva, Dale, and the back of my head. This my backyard, and the in the upper left corner is the ag portion of the high school building, like I say, right next door.

Continued...