To this day, a good portion of the really important people in my life are those kids that I shared so many of the years with at Mounds View. Aside from my brothers, I’ve very few people that are in the category of Best Friends. Two of these, though, are classmates from those 7th-12th grade years at MVHS. Although we now live in different far off states, we’ve invested the time and energy to stay close in the relational sense. I look forward to seeing them and the other members of our tight band of MVHS kids next summer at the 50-year reunion on the 31st of July, 2004.

The world we’ve passed through during these 50 years has been subject to amazing changes in every imaginable dimension. Some of us “caught the bus” and rode those changes to interesting places. Others lived in more traditional areas of endeavor, but were nonetheless hugely affected by the way the big changes affected the world about us.

Mounds View High School’s first decade (my era) was likely its quietest, in terms of sweeping changes in the larger world. The Eisenhower years were pretty placid, but the Kennedy era was, while tragically short, much faster paced. The winds of change have blown with increasing briskness ever since. If there was a single serious world issue while I was at MVHS, it was likely the prospect of nuclear war. We didn’t talk all that much about it, but it was there. While still an ever-present possibility, the collapse of the Soviet Union allowed us to take a deep breath and relax some on that score. Blowing up the planet is a concept that almost everyone can instinctively grasp. Our personal roles in avoiding that fate weren’t much in our minds in the 1950s and 1960s. Thankfully, our national leaders and those of the other nuclear nations did think hard about the issues and we’re still mostly all here.

Now there’s another issue that isn’t being much discussed by most of us. Global warming seems to be a distant worry and is sort of vague and abstract on a winter afternoon where there’s lots of snow outside my windows. I hope that 50 years from now, MVHS has a 100-year reunion/memorial/whatever celebration that has graduates who are thankful that our leaders woke up and started doing the right things to avoid the tragedy that Almost-President Al Gore explained in a major speech a few weeks ago. His summary of the real science on global warming warned that 50 years from now, without major changes in how we’re doing things, we'll no longer have a polar ice cap during the summer months. If that happens, a person need not be a rocket scientist to see that mankind will have enormous difficulty growing crops, etc., and do the other things we take for granted in our daily lives.

In the mean time, I love to go up to that recently remodeled, now 50 year-old building and take in Ziggy Kauls’ basketball teams racing up and down the now regulation length floor. I’ve always wondered whether MVHS’ other head basketball coach (Jim Geske) had deliberately had the original floor laid out with college length spacing of the baskets and end lines. Back in those days, when we went off to play at the older schools (Anoka, Columbia Heights, Stillwater, etc.—the ones that still had those little cracker box gyms that were shorter than regulation high school length), it seemed like we could sprint all night, since it took so much less effort to get to the far end than it did when we were practicing at home in MVHS’ gigantic gym. When those kids came to our place, they’d better be far ahead by halftime or we’d wear them out for sure by game’s end.

Go Mustangs!

- Thanks to Burt Ewing