45 years ago today the Foothill High School (Sacramento, CA) Class of 1973 graduated at dusk on the football field at American River College. Jerry Wilkinson was our valedictorian speaker summoning wisdom, as I recall, from Cat Stevens’ song, “On the Road to Find Out”.
Post-It Notes were not even a thing yet. Saturday Night Live was not even a gleam in Lorne Michaels’ visionary eye.
But did we? Did we find out? Did we ever find that road? Some of us did, I suppose. Others are still out there searching, God bless ’em.
Of course, we didn’t even have GPS back then. Peter Falk’s grandfather in the classic film The Princess Bride might have scoffed, “Sure, we had GPS when I was young. It was called MAPS!”
Post-It Notes were not even a thing yet. Saturday Night Live was not even a gleam in Lorne Michaels’ visionary eye. Personal computer? A couple decades on the horizon. A pocket-sized Texas Instruments Calculator was an amazing concept that cost several hundreds of dollars. Now they are given away like pencils. Microwave ovens and telephone answering machines were just finding wider use outside their creative labs.
So many dreams were waiting to be discovered. So many roads to find and traverse.
