Half a Century Later

September of 1975, we began our final year of high school. This was the year that many of us had been waiting for because this was now the time that we would begin the next journey of our lives.

There were many that would go to college, many that would begin careers, many that would leave and never look back. Wait! Just wait a minute. The 1976 graduating class of Burrton High School had 35 students. There weren’t “many” who did anything. We were a unique group of people with unique dreams and ambitions. We were an ecclectic group of people who may have applauded, lauded, and maybe even loathed on another at various times in during our high school years. In the end though, we were friends.

Our social network was to look into the eyes of each person in our class, know who they were and at least know something about them. Some of us were on the same telephone party line and we didn’t have to look up each other’s numbers, we just knew them. We were the Boomer generation. Gen-X’ers were maybe just beginning school or not born, and millennials were still a few years off.

The first personal computer had been invented and advertised to the public, in 1971, but who needed it? We had telephones, the mail, pictures, libraries, and adding machines, and the thing cost over a thousand dollars. You could buy a Ford Mustang for around $3000, and that would help your social network much more than a computer would. (Specially, since none of us were rocket scientists.) The company that built that computer sold 40 of them and went out of business, in 1973.