The summer before ninth grade was one of the watersheds of our education. It was the summer that Van Page died.
In fact, our ninth grade yearbook was dedicated in memory of Van, a reminder of service to Christ, that it wouldn’t always be hard.
From what I understood at the time, Van died in an attempt to help someone else. It may not have been a smart thing he tried to do, but the heart, the motive was right, what we all remember of him.
I felt Van was a good friend of mine, but I wouldn’t by any means claim to have been one of his closest friends in the class. I would appreciate those of you who did know him well to make comment after this column about him.
As usual, I don’t have a lot of memories of 9th grade. Oddly, my most persistent memory at this time is about soccer practice. This was the year I was on the varsity soccer team for the first time. We had been allowed to create special t-shirts for practice. Since it was the summer of “who shot J.R.?” and since my initials are J.R., my brother Robert created a shirt with J.R. on it for me. I still have it in my drawer and wear it occasionally.
Our class count was up to 25 this year. I also notice on the faculty page of the yearbook they got Mr. Wyse and Mr. Mullikin’s names backwards. Probably a big thing then, but small to the web story I saw today about the yearbook for an Arizona high school release here in 2014 — with the year 2013 on it, a quote across someone’s face, all sorts of wrong names, etc. After seeing that web-clip, I am glad for the efforts put in by the people who put our yearbooks together all these years, to help us have these recorded memories (before the days the web made everything “saved forever”).
At The Rainbow 