^{The orignal Montgomery Blair High School}

And it came to pass that the 60s showed up on my driver's license as well as my high school diploma. And it was weird. But it was also wonderful, because as the Universe would have it, my high school would be celebrating its 75th anniversary, which would fall on homecoming weekend, the same weekend as my 45th class reunion, having attended what several alumni luminaries from Montgomery Blair High School (in Silver Spring, MD) referred to as "the best high school in the world."

That last comment isn't exactly hyperbole. It may well be the best school in the world. It certainly is in the running, and has been for a long time.

This past Friday the Big Weekend began with a celebration of 75 years of excellence, held at Strathmore Hall off Rockville Pike in either Kensington, Bethesda or Rockville, depending on which corner you're standing on at a given moment. None of them are Silver Spring, but it's about time the west side had to put up with us for a few hours.

It was, to not put too fine a point on it, incredible.

I attended high school from 1960 - 1964 when as Carl Bernstein put it in his remarks about his own checkered career at Blair, "...they felt it was better to let me graduate than have me on the grounds another year." Bernstein and a buddy, you may recall, had a huge hand in bringing down a sitting US President and precipitating the greatest Constitutional Crisis in our history. Not bad for a guy who helped paint a school government campain sign (for a fellow misfit who shall remain nameless) on the slate roof above the august facade of the "old" Blair (a new, not necessarily better, complex was opened in 1999 a few miles away to the huzzahs of some and the wailing of many others).

^{Carl Bernstein, still a little to the left}

Ben Stein, who lived next door to Bernstein back then and who launchd his own rather eclectic but very successful career as a speechwriter for that President his buddy from next door helped topple, was the master of ceremonies. Ben sounded as though he'd gargled with razor blades, which given his already hypnotic drone, was rather like listening to Bob Dylan read James Joyce's "Ulysses." At least he came through and did the job.

^{Ben Stein, still crazy after all these years}

Friday evening was a celebration of the most extraordinary of ordinary people. Between the still ebullient athletes who helped lead Blair on a reign of terror in three or four sports in the early 1950s and again about a decade later when I was there, and the celebrities who sprang from its bosom, one can only assume John Fahey (who by rights should have attended Blair but instead went to a DC school nearby) told us long ago there was something in the water. There were springs in Silver Spring as one might guess, and also in nearby Takoma Park. I know of one in Takoma Park (which supplied about half the student body at Blair) had magical properties, but to have lived anywhere near the long-dried-up Silver Spring on the property once owned by Francis Preston Blair (there's a lotta Blairs thereabouts) seemed to convey some sort of magic which has imbued my alma mater for seven and one half decades now.

They don't even age.  I was accosted at one point by two couples I didn't recognize, asking if I'd take their picture for them with someone's camera. I was happy to oblige and then amazed when my daughter pointed out their name tags had the years '46 and '47 on them. They looked barely older than me, and these folks just missed being in WWII!!

My daughter (class of '98, last to graduate from the "real" Blair), accompanied me on Friday night and seemed as at home with the huge crowd as anyone there. She is militantly proud of her Blair roots, as are most people who attended there. The one exception would seem to have been Connie Chung, last inductee into the Blair hall of fame Friday, as she followed a loud and reckless introduction by her husband Maury with a rambling diatribe about what an outsider she was, what a nobody, and well, all I can say is: What a liar. I could, I suppose, give her the benefit of the doubt and write it off to too many cocktails prior to her turn at the podium, but after the glorious achievements and adventures accounted that night, it was rather like stepping in a pile of road apples after attending a great wedding. Enough said about Chung, Maury's term of endearment for his wife, who apparently has forgotten more than most of us collectively remember, including her own popularity and involvement. The rest were appropriately grateful and enthusiastic about their stories and the others they wove into one magnificent tapestry of community, family and a time and place unlike any other. As the 1997 yearbook proclaimed (above a night photograph of the impressive federal-style main building with a bolt of lightning crossing the sky above it), "Never before and never again."

^{Chung: "I need a drink." Uh, n0 dear, I don't think so.}

Ordinary people. It's a funny way of referring to those we know or knew and know again who just lived and loved and had their being across an arc of 75 years, people like Tommy Norris, class of '62, one of the just plain nicest guys I've ever known, who enlisted in the Navy right out of high school, went (of course) to Vietnam, came back and was trained as one of the first Navy Seals, then was sent with four other Seals on a mission to rescue a downed Navy pilot and one of his crewmen. Tom and company managed, over the course of many days of non-stop firefights, to reach and ultimately rescue and return his fellow fighters, and for this was nominated for the Congressional Medal of honor -- which at the time he turned down, saying he hadn't really done anything worth all that fuss. He was then sent on another, similar mission, and was shot in the face and captured, nearly died, but was, in his turn, rescued by another small group of Seals, one of whom was also nominated for the Medal. This second rescuer said he would only accept the honor if Tom Norris did first, so Tom relented, and is now the only living person to have been involved in two Medal of Honor actions. It took I believe eight painful years of reconstructive surgery to restore his boyish face -- and it certainly was restored and remains youthful and handsome. When he left the Navy he went to work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and, early on, accepted an assignment (and let the the hateful self-styled "patriots" out there take note) to infiltrate the Idaho home chapter of the Aryan Nation. He not only successfully passed himself off as one of them but acquired enough damning evidence to bring them down, in league with Morris Dees, who would soon found the Southern Poverty Law Center. Tom continues to live in Idaho, partly because he's found something about it to love, one of those great mysteries of the universe, and partly so everyone there knows he's there. If the Beast ever develops a pulse there again, he'll be the first to know.

^{Tom Norris: Just some guy -- with a medal of honor}

I've already mentioned Ben Stein, who is probably most famous as the droning science teacher in "Ferris Beuller's Day Off," but who has done a lot of other things, some of which have worked out well, others that have not. Considering his seven Emmy awards, his 30 books and his mind-boggling choice of commercials for which to shill, one has to at least apply the Stopped Clock rule to Ben. I'll tell you this: you (or I) may not agree with him much of the time, but if you want to debate him you'd best do your homework, and beneath that very strange exterior lies the soul of a romantic.

The same can be said of Carl Bernstein, who someone pointed out lived "to the left of Ben." Yet to this day they remain good friends, even though the "discussions" can often become quite heated. When I was at Blair they were both ahead of me but I was influenced by both, Ben for his incredibly quick, Churchill-like wit and Carl for his subversive ways and incredible pool-shooting abilities.

There was, of course, Goldie Hawn. Goldie can barely go outside her house without attracting clouds of media insects, and so moves mysteriously and appeared to us on a video feed from "somewhere in DC," she who cheated off me in algebra. Well, to be gallant, I gave her answers. She couldn't have cheated had I not made it a fait accompli. We grew up together, our dads were Masonic buddies. It was the least I could do. (Note to Chung: if you did cheat as you claimed in your remarks, you didn't have as good a source as Goldie did, and she's never ratted me out).

^{Goldie, sincere as always; I love you G.}

Tom Brown, class of '58, is the only person to be named All American in two college sports in the same year, having played both football (accounting for his scholarship) and baseball at the University of Maryland. He also played outfield and first base for the Washington Senators in 1963, before finally making up his mind and joining up with the Green Bay Packers for four years, and with the Washington Redskins in 1969. He now runs baseball and basketball leagues for youngsters ages 5-12 on Maryland's Eastern Shore. He was a 3-letter man at Blair, but college limited him to two areas of endeavor aside from learning stuff. He collected two Super Bowl rings while with Green Bay.

Sonny Jackson...well, what can one say about a guy who could do everything including fly? Without an airplane? Sonny was the first black kid to play for the Takoma Park little league team, he quarterbacked Blair's football team to the first-ever Montgomery County football league title, he lead the basketball team to its second straight state basketball championship, and he played shortstop on Blair's championship baseball team. He was the first black person ever to be offered an athletic scholarship by the University of Maryland, shortly followed by another from the Catholic league, and I still have that really strange newspaper clipping from 1962 that reads "Terps to Have First All-Negro Backcourt." Maybe that's why Sonny really turned down the scholarship in favor of the then-Houston Colt 45s. Having grown up in a family of 11 children I would imagine the money (a $30k bonus, about 1/100th what some of them get today) played a role. At any rate he went on to become a stalwart shortstop for Houston, then the Phillies, and has had a lifelong career in baseball, making the switch from shortstop to third base coach.

Bob Windsor, who also wound up in the pro football ranks (with the San Francisco 49ers as a second round draft pick) could do everything too, and at 6-4 didn't need the ability to fly. He could just reach up and put the ball (basketball) through the hoop. Bob set a single game high-scoring record in 1961 with 38 points, back when there was no 3-pointer (or it would have been about 45).  He played everything, as had Sonny Jackson, but was over 200 pounds by his senior year and made a lot of opponents just fall away as he approached, fearing they'd be flattened. Genial as ever and a lot more talkative than he used to be, Bob lives out here in Laurel now and like so many of those I saw over the weekend, looks very little different from all those years ago.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the great Morgan Wooten, class of, I believe, 1952, who not only led Blair on one of its early basketball winning streaks (43 straight I think it was) and of whom John Wooden, former coach of UCLA and considered one of the best ever, said, "I know of no finer coach at any level - high school, college or pro. I stand in awe of him." When Wooten retired in 2002 he was, in fact, the winningest coach in all of basketball. At DeMatha (Catholic) high school Wooten turned an unprepossing little school into a national and then world power, and in all that time never can anyone remember him turning red in the face, let alone screaming or throwing a chair. Far from it. Introduced by one of his former DeMatha players, sports reporter James Brown, Wooten, who survived a near-fatal illness and liver transplant in 1996 only to come back and pick up where he'd left off at DeMatha, was the same as I can ever remember him, permanently middle-aged, gentle, genial, funny and kind.

^{Morgan Wooten, winningest basketball coach, winning personality}

They were from all the decades: Kiran Chetry of CNN, for instance, who was graduating as my daughter was starting there. 

There were more -- quite a few more -- but one thing they all touched upon was the sense of pride -- in school, in their families, in Silver Spring, and having had a unique and quite wondrous high school experience.  They all mentioned the diverse student body, the lack of conflict, the kindness of teachers, the awe they (and we all) had felt upon entering the vastness of that crazy-quilt campus, and the way their times there had helped prepare them for life in a way they could not imagine having been otherwise prepared.

There was something in the water there; there had to have been. It may still be there. It certainly was during the 90s when my daughter attended. Her circle of friends, still, just as Stein noted, her closest being from high school not college, is one of the most beautiful and accomplished group of young human beings one could ever hope to imagine, representing every race, religion, personality, nationality and lifestyle, not to mention nearly every one being highly successful at whatever field was chosen.

There was still something in that water. I don't know how it is at the new school, which is a nice enough and quite enormous postmodern complex that resembles nothing so much as Arundel Mills Mall both inside and out, but I hope the spirits of those who made Blair what it was still inhabit those halls and infect those kids with the kind of almost insane pride at their very ordinariness and made of them various sorts of heroes.

None is more proud than my kid, who'll turn 29 in a couple months, and that in itself fills me with even more pride at having attended (yes, for an extra year) the school named for Abe Lincoln's Postmaster General.

He had the right name, I guess. If you google him you'll find brief historical notes, but the ones that struck me as most appropriate are on Wikipedia,where he is said to have been "hot tempered" and how in 1864 he "launched an all-out attack on Republican liberals." Yes, so where else could a Ben Stein and a Carl Bernstein live next door to each other and not wind up in a duel? Besides, had it ever come to that, Tommy Norris would have stepped in and broke it up.

We're the Blazers. Learn it. Know it. Live it.