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What really happened to the Class of 1969?

By Micheal Boddy
Posted Monday, October 30, 2006

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During a recent stroll through cyber space I finally remembered to check on some things I had wanted to find out about. One of which has ties to Veterans Day, which will be celebrated with a parade here in Angleton on Saturday, November 11.

Basically I wondered how many of my high school friends and classmates, the class of 1969 at Nathan Hale High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, had fallen during the Vietnam War.

It was a lot more difficult than I thought, in fact I was unable to determine if even one had fallen. The alumni page gave me no clue. Among all the faces in the year book, young men with close-cropped hair wearing coats and ties, and young women with either long hair ironed to look like Cher, or teased to look like everyone who didn't want to look like Cher, there were few that I remembered, at least on first examination.

On the memorial page there was but one entry, who, oddly enough, was actually a friend of mine. I know he didn't die in Vietnam, or on any other battlefield, because he had asthma. Unless the site hasn't been updated for a decade or so, we seem to be a statistical improbability: A graduating class at a large high school in a town that had over 200,000 residents at the time, that had only one person die in over 30 years.

So on I went to other pages and found another person of interest. I can't remember if I actually knew him while we were in high school, but our paths crossed almost two decades later while I was working at The Houston Post. He was the agent for Morganna, The Kissing Bandit, and he looked familiar. While she was awaiting trial one morning in Houston, she and a man, who I believe she introduced as her agent, had time for an interview.

Of course one of the questions I've never asked, without knowing someone grew up in Tulsa, is where they went to high school. Perhaps I should have that day, but he fell somewhat into the twin shadows of Morganna's legendary actions and physical attributes.

As I scanned the pages closer, more and more names came back to me, names I hadn't thought of in more than three decades. Still there was no hint.

I knew my best friend in my senior year had been drafted and we had been reunited and became running buddies again after his return. He had spent an uneventful tour in the motor pool in Saigon and later used the G.I. Bill to get a plumber's license. As far as he was concerned, the Army was the best thing that ever happened to him.

The search took another direction from there. I went to several sites with information on The Wall, the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Of course without knowing all of the names, the searchable parameters on the site were limited to hometowns, and none of the names jumped off the pages as someone I remembered. I'm sure someone I knew didn’t make it home, but there seemed to be no way to find out without remembering their name, and that was impossible. I've never been good about placing names with faces anyway, so spread that out over more than 30 years and you can imagine my quandary.

It was tempting to send some news about myself to them, but what would I say?

The Morganna agent seemed to have been the highlight, so there apparently were no budding software barons, or baronesses, that came out of that class. If any had become famous actors or actresses, they must have changed their names and significantly altered their bios.

A journalist who has had his ups and downs in the field might have looked pretty good.

At the very least I looked good in the yearbook, though you'd have to look for me under another name, and the names only pop up if you use Internet Explorer, which I don't. Look for Mike Leister, the last name of my stepfather.

I tried changing it to my given name in high school, but since I had always gone by Leister in school, it was a problem. Sort of like the time I decided to use my middle name, Dale, instead of Micheal. That was shot out of the saddle in the first class on the first day of my sophomore year when I didn't respond to a teacher's roll call.

Dale who?

Micheal Dale. What were my parents thinking?

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