Subject: Thoughts
Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 21:19:38 -0400
From: Tom Jones
Organization: Exit41
To: ALL

I have been really blown away by the depth of memories that have surfaced from all of you during the past several weeks. These are really interesting because, with one very short exception in 1986, I haven’t been back for 40 years. And believe me, it wasn't intentional. It's always been high on the list of things I wanted to do but - poof - forty years went by.

My eight years in Peoria almost perfectly coincided with the Eisenhower years. We left Washington in 1953 (third grade) right after Eisenhower took office and left in the summer of 1961 (11th grade), a few months after Kennedy was inaugurated. My family would all agree, the Peoria years were the best we spent together, they were almost mythical.

I have thought long and hard about what made them so special. Clearly the times were very unusual. Yankelovitch Partners Monitor which has surveyed American values and opinions for many decades, looks at these years as the single longest sustained period of positive attitude in the country in the last 100 years.

The time was special ? cynicism was low, belief in government structures was high, economic bad times were simply slow downs in the great post war boom. All in all, it was a great time to grow up.

If the time was special, Peoria was special too. In all my adult life, I have held on to a special prejudice. People who grew up in the Midwest are terrific. They’re friendlier, they team better, they have generally smaller egos, they move a little slower, a little less obsessively, and they’re far more courteous. They’re equally interesting and they’re every bit as bright as their cousins on the coasts.

A few years back, I was at a family reunion and, just for fun, we tried to name the people who lived in each house in our block when we lived in Peoria. We were able to get a full block away before we started to miss houses and we were able to get two blocks away before the density dropped below 50%. Now I’ve only lived in our current neighborhood in Massachusetts for twenty years but it drops below 50% when I get two doors away.

I think that Peoria was particularly unique. When I left Peoria, I spent my senior year in a high school in suburban Detroit that was more than twice the size of PHS. However, in everything from athletics to the classroom to the SATs to my status in the class; life was much much easier. Any one of twenty people I knew at Central could have easily been valedictorian at my new school. I was stunned. For some reason, in Peoria the quality of the kids and the quality of our education were both much higher.

So now it’s time to come back home.. come back to the place where I grew up.. come back to the place of larger than life personalities - all seventeen years old. Thomas Wolfe’s comment aside, I am really looking forward to it. I know it will be very different and that it is unlikely that each of you will look the same as I left you. But I assume it will be one of the most memorable experiences of my life.
* * * *
As an aside, does anyone remember crazy mazee? It was a statue of a sitting woman in the cemetery near Bradley Park that legend said would turn a page in her book every night at midnight. I also remember Grandview Drive as the romantic epicenter of the universe. Do you remember the really unusual smell that covered our town every few weeks which none of us could really smell but visitors found so repulsive ? it was from Pabst when they blew off the hops. No one has said, do they still walk in circles at PHS at lunch and before school? I remember listening to Dodgers / Yankees WS games during recess at Whittier. And the first moment you saw the Edsel? And, in our home, the Velvet Freeze hotdog with that chili sauce was elevated to the ultimate food.

See you next week.

Tom

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Tom Jones
EXIT41
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Andover, MA 01810
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