E-mail: lowell“at”revlowell.com

Moments to Remember

• Though summer turns to winter
  And the present disappears,
  The laughter we were glad to share
  Will echo through the years.
  
  When other nights and other days
  May find us gone our separate ways,
  We will have these moments to remember.

The “good most of the time” kid from Of Boys & Guns: Childhood Memories of a Chicago Neighborhood, 1942 to 1952 converts from Jewish agnosticism to Christian fundamentalism and becomes a big fish in a really big pond!

 From the Introduction:

This is an account of how at Chicago’s Austin High School in the years 1952 to 1956 I found God and love—or thought I did. It is, at the same time, an attempt to recreate what the world was like in those years—those Eisenhower years of quiet conformity, romantic yearnings, prosperity, and dreams of even better days ahead. We “teenagers”—a new word then thanks to Bill Haley—were living on the cusp between Doris Day and Little Richard, between Billy Graham and Hugh Hefner! We were eagerly waiting for our chance to go to college, begin careers, marry our high school sweethearts, move to the suburbs, have our two to three children, and enjoy all the material rewards of the good life. Drugs, rebellion, war between generations, sexual revolution, dropping out, flouting middle class values—these were the last things on our minds. However, just beginning to creep into our consciousness like faint music from across the water were block busting, school desegregation, rock ‘n’ roll, beatniks, and James Dean.

 I will always consider Austin in the 1950s to be the greatest high school in the history of the world! It was certainly America’s largest coeducational school, with more than four thousand students and activities and organizations for every interest. Its very awe-inspiring magnificence seemed to elicit my most outrageous behavior. I think, for example, of my stealth campaign for vice president of the student body. It all began with a skeleton key. When I was in grade school, I walked home for lunch each day. If my mother happened to be away, e.g. shopping in the Loop, I was to let myself into our apartment and make my own lunch. I was given a spare key but I frequently forgot it. When this happened, I would walk to a nearby hardware store and buy a skeleton key, which fit most locks in those days.

When I was running for vice president, in the second semester of my junior year, I was pitted against representatives of Austin High’s power blocks—there was a Jewish candidate, a Greek, and an Italian. I had to find some way to distinguish myself, to stand out from the pack. First, I needed a campaign slogan. My choice was “Streiker—a name to remember.” My friend Paul Sengpiehl, who pronounced his last name “sing-peel,” was running for president. His campaign slogan was, “Think orange peel, banana peel, Sengpiehl!” Using a skeleton key that I had purchased years earlier, Paul, my friend Stan Borbe, and I waited until after 4 P.M. when the campus was deserted and unlocked the doors of every class room except for the science laboratories and vocational shops, which had special locks, and wrote our slogans on the black boards. Now and then, we would think we heard approaching footsteps in the hallways. We would duck down out of sight, fearful of being caught. When we peeked out, we would see janitors passing by as they swept and mopped the floors.

To achieve “plausible deniability,” I wrote Paul’s slogan and he mine so that if interrogated I could say I had not written mine on the boards. Angry teachers who questioned me accepted my story. The fearsome Miss Catherine Doheny, who could intimidate a heavyweight boxer, was the exception. She demanded that I come to her classroom with a pail of water, soap, and a sponge, and that I expunge the slogans. One did not argue with Miss Doheny and so, of course, I washed her blackboard.

Why was this election so important to me? That’s like asking, Why was "Red Ryder carbine-action, two hundred shot Range Model air rifle BB gun with a compass in the stock and a thing which tells time" important to Ralphie Parker in the classic Jean Shepherd tale? Or why was the Holy Grail important to the Knights of the Round Table? The election was important because it was, that’s all! Because it was a contest for a leadership role in the institution that I loved and to which I gladly devoted my time, talents, and energy. In the pages that follow, I hope I show you why and that I may enlist you in loving with me the Austin High of the 1950s and the world in which she existed.

[Note: Chicago’s Austin High School graduated its last class in June 2007.]

To read more, click here.

This is a sample from my new book, How I Found God and Love at Austin High, 1952 to 1956. The retail price is $20.00. For a postpaid, autographed, and inscribed copy send your check for $20.00 to