Be True To Your School: A Diary of 1964

By Bob Greene

Stars:

Chronicles the true-life drinking and necking escapades of a teenage boy in Ohio in 1964 (who later grew up to be a folksy newspaper columnist you may have read before).

If you happened to have attended a fair-sized public suburban high school in any era, as I did, you may relate to this boy's long-winded passages of self-absorbed dating prattle such as "After school I walked by Kathy. She said "hi." It could have been a repulsed hi, or it could have been like before we were together," followed secondarily by flip outside-world observations such as "President Johnson won the election tonight."

The main difference between this boy's high school era and mine is that he found himself listening to new Beatles and Beach Boys songs for the first time on the radio in his car with all of his crew-cut pals while I was more likely to have been listening to Rick Dees counting down Bon Jovi, Whitesnake, and Milli Vanilli on my Walkman while cutting Algebra in the park behind the high school.

On a side note, there is chronicled an excessive bit of constant, semiconscious drinking, to a degree that would be politically incorrect to the first degree in any sort of modern era. In one diary entry, the boy's father, incredibly, buys him a pipe. Imagine that happening today.

At any rate, it is interesting to contrast this boy's high school experiences with your own, and that is, I think, the value of the book. You may discover, as I did, that he is too earnest and life-embracing, as he seems to be a bit of a child of privilege, and his clueless fumblings with girls may depress you about young men of any era. Nonetheless, this silly narrative clips right along and is more entertaining than, say, the TV show you might watch instead of reading it.

Since I kept more diaries than Bob Greene could shake a stick at, I am tempted to post some of my own late 80's-era suburban prattlings on this very site.

Beware.

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