The Class of 1964's Senior Prom Night

Tommy Towery

LHS '64

Fifty-eight years ago this week, Lee High School experienced its first senior prom - held by the Class of '64. I have written about this dance before, but this time I have added some personal notes and expanded a little more on my memories of that night. As they used to say in the TV Show Dragnet, "Ladies and gentlemen: the story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent." 

Friday, April 24, 1964

115th Day - 251 days to follow

Rain

(Reprinted from "A Million Tomorrows...Memories of the Class of '64")

The last step in my final preparations for the big dance was going downtown and buying a bottle of English Leather.  That was the big cologne for men at the time, probably another part of the revived American love for anything B.  (Editor's Note: English Leather was originally created in the 1930s by the Vienna-based MEM company. Because the scent was similar to what Russian saddlers used to tan leather, it was originally called “Russian Leather”. In 1949, the scent was introduced in the United States as “English Leather” because of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.). The only other big name in cologne for me was Jade East which was quite a contrast from the English Leather.  Each had its own marketing techniques. Jade East was launched in 1964.

English Leather was sold in wooden boxes which added a touch of class to it.  Even the top of the bottle was made from wood.  Jade East took a different approach.  It was bottled in a plastic bottle.  It was no ordinary plastic bottle.  It was jade green and was in the shape of a happy Buddha.  To get the cologne out, you had to pop the head off the Buddha.  It was an irreverent act to perform on the deity worshiped by so many people in the world.  I once heard a Buddhist ask how we would like it if they marketed a breakfast cereal called "Christ Crispies," in the shape of crosses and other such religious objects.  It was about the same feeling that I had when I saw "Jesus Jeans" for sale in the Mediterranean.  Eventually, Jade East quit bottling its cologne in the happy little bottle.

Jade East lost out to the elegance of English Leather for the senior prom.  This was the first big purchase of cologne I had ever made.  Before that day I always used Avon or Old Spice or Mennen's After Shave that were usually gifts.  I had never actually gone into a store and bought a bottle of anything for myself.  I used to go into Woolworth's and buy Evening in Paris in the little purple bottle for Christmas presents.  This was different.  This was the big night, and the big date, and this was special.  So, for the night, English Leather was to be the smell that would go down in my memory as the smell of my youth.  It remains so today.

Finally, the big night arrived.  (Editor's Note: I elected to double date to the prom with a good friend who I will call Troy and his steady at the time. His date who I shall call Helen, had set me up with a good friend of her's who I called Jean as my date. I had not even gone out with her before.) Troy picked me up at 7:00 P.M. then we went and picked up Helen K. and Jean.  Went to Lee High School for the '64 Senior Prom.  The four of us showed up at the school and wandered into the lunchroom where the big event was taking place.  The theme of the night was "Syronora," a befitting theme for a good-bye occasion.  As if it were taken out of the script of "Footloose," rock-and-roll was not to be our music of the evening.  That type of music was not acceptable for the senior prom.  People hadn't gotten dressed up in their nicest outfits to get out on the dance floor and dance to jungle music.  Whoever was appointed to the music committee decided that slow music would be better to dance to.  Of course, none of the committee ever went to dances like the rest of us seniors and didn't have a clue what type of music we really wanted.

I had been to a dance almost every weekend during my senior year.  I had seen good bands and bad.  I had seen battles between bands.  I had even seen and danced to the "Thirteen Screaming Niggers." 

(Editor's Note: Before you slam me for a racial comment, here is an extract from the Southerngaragebands website about this group. They really did exist.)

THIRTEEN ORIGINAL SCREAMING NIGGERS - Home base unknown

JoJo and the Thirteen Screaming Niggers were an outrageously named band that folks just HAD to go hear and see perform. Crowds were not disappointed This band ROCKED!!!

The band played mostly university fraternity dances and private parties. Considering their name, colleges and universities would hardly sanction an official performance by this band. Yet crowds LOVED them.

They performed in the 60s, a time of unrest, political upheaval and racial injustice. The civil rights movement and anti-Viet Nam protests were peaking. Yet people from both sides of the political spectrum could unite for a night of fun and dancing and put their differences aside.

The band was a novelty, but their music and showmanship was fantastic. Considering the times, there were obviously snide remarks and racial slurs about the band. However when the band performed there was no face to face name calling, knifings, or shootings. At the band breaks and after their performance, the predominately white crowd would mix and mingle with black band members. They were united in the brotherhood of "soul music" and race did not matter. On THIS night, all were brothers.

Black musicians gained respect from thier white brotheren. Hand shakes and hugs were not uncommon. This was a precusor to modern day race relations where the color of one's skin did not matter. The important thing was a love of sweet soul music. Today's generation could learn a lot from the children of the 60s.

(Editor's Note: It is my personal opinion that group was the inspiration for the band called Otis Day and the Knights featured in the 1978 movie National Lampoon's Animal House.)

 I had never seen or even heard of "Dixie Belle and Her Combo."  Their name was as bad as "Dixie and the Dancekings" from Burt Reynold's movie "WW and the Dixie Dancekings."  Only Dixie Belle wasn't country and western.  She and her group played elevator music and that wasn't rock-and-roll either.  In 1964, the only fast song that any of the ballroom combos seemed to play was "Kansas City."  When someone requested something fast they got the ole' "Kansas City here I come."  The song just didn't sound the same played with an organ and drum as it did when played on an electric guitar and saxophone.

(Editor's Note: I used the power of the computer to search all the documents known to man and collected over the history of the internet and the only mention in all the recorded knowledge about Dixie Belle was a story I did myself when I wrote an article about my senior prom on my high school website many years ago. There is no other documented information, no photographs, no recordings available about the combo selected to play for our prom that night.)

So, the evening was spent sitting around trying to act sophisticated and dancing nice to the slow piano-bar type music.  The air was filled with the "swish-swish" sounds of the girls' formal dresses.  We slow danced instead of getting out on the dance floor and doing what we really wanted to do.  We sat around at the lunchroom tables, looking at the crepe paper and balloons, and drinking unspiked punch.  Sometimes, as if in a fit of pity, several of the boys asked the female teachers to dance.  The male teachers didn't need to be brave to ask the teenage girls to dance.  Some had wanted to get their arms around the students all year I suppose.  Everyone had a proper time and too soon the evening came to an end.  The girls in their nice gowns and the boys in their coats and ties moved their way to the dance floor and danced the last slow dances of the evening to bring the night and their big dance to a close.  Troy wanted to get a jump on the crowd in the parking lot and so one song before the dance was over, my date of the evening and I danced to our last song together.  It was not only our last dance of the evening, it was the last dance of our short-lived relationship.

I have no photos of the night of the Senior Prom of the Lee High Class of '64 - not even one of me and my date for the evening. I have a feeling I could not afford to take advantage of the "professional photographer" made available for the seniors. I do not even have a photo of my date for the evening except for one from the yearbook.

I got to thinking about how few pictures most of us have of that time in our lives and contrast those to the number of photos kids today take with their phones. And yet, I also wonder how many of those photos will still survive when the seniors of today reach the age we are now. At least when we took photos we had printed copies of them. What will happen to the digital ones kids take today? In the changing technology will there be any device that can still display them 50 years or more from now? How many people still have VCR's to watch the VHS videos made only 20 years ago? Who knows how long the digital media and devices will last without crashing? Who knows how many photos will disappear or be discarded as one piece of technology is replaced with a new piece or one format is upgraded and deletes older formatted files?

My advice is to still print out some of those digital files and make a hard copy which might still survive for future generations.

Also, the following emails are bad. If you are one of these folks please let me know your real address today.

gg32068@yahoo.com bad

jharr50807@aol.com

smlovell@indiana.edu

twynn@sunnyskyproducts.com

hutchins@imapmail.org 

rdavidson@packagingcorp.com

I am trying a new notice email and need to see if it works. Please let me know suggestions or comments about this method.

Comments on Last Week's Issue

Wayne Gentle, LHS ‘65, "So sorry to hear of Ken’s passing. I had not heard. Thanks for all your efforts each week."

Darla Steinberg, LHS ‘66, "I gave my six-year-old grandson a good pair of roller skates for Christmas. He taught himself to skate in one day. Their house has indestructible wood floors so he was skating around the house most of the time he was not sleeping. His mom and dad even bought skates and they all went to a rink in Athens. I understand skating is making quite a comeback and Rockefeller Center Ice Rink has been turned into a roller rink…as seen on the Today Show. Usher was quite the star skater! "

Photographic Memories - Who Are They?

Each week I plan to share a group of photos from the 1960 "The General" yearbook without disclosing the names of the individuals. You may stop and try to identify them here, and when you are through you may scroll to the bottom of this page to see the identities of your classmates in the photos.