My Senior Prom Night

Richard "Rick" Simmons

 Was a Member of LHS '64

Last week's issue requested someone to send in prom night photos. Above is one I have. I am in the black tux seated in front...Vicki is the girl across from me.

Some of you remember I moved from Huntsville to Metairie, LA in June following our Junior year. I missed the entire First Graduating class with Lee where I had started as a 7th grader.  I could have been very bitter for my father taking an advancement by leaving the Missile Division at Chrysler Corp. at Redstone Arsenal to the Saturn Project in New Orleans, but the hurt faded quickly as I made new friends in my neighborhood, new church, and then East Jefferson High School in Metairie.

One of those new friends from Church was Vicki Utterback who was preparing to enter her senior year at Riverdale High School.  (As a note: with the start-up of racial integration, Jefferson Parish (county) schools instituted a test program to segregate the boys at East Jefferson and the girls at Riverdale several miles away. Vicki and I were just friends, though I tried a couple of times to date her...with no success.  When prom time came up in the spring I had been invited to escort young ladies to their sophomore and junior proms and already had a date to my senior prom scheduled with a girl from my church.

One Saturday afternoon, I believe in early May, I was helping my Dad with some outside repairs on our house when my mother came out to tell me that Vicki Utterback was on the phone and had asked for me. I had met her then-boyfriend at a church youth group picnic in City Park...he seemed like a nice guy.  She told me that her boyfriend had joined the Navy and had received orders and he would not be able to escort her to her senior prom. She was calling to see if I could take her.

The rest is history...

We dated for several years and married in June of 1967.  She helped support me through my senior year at LSU New Orleans, endured my six-year Marine Corps experience, my 30-year data processing career, the failure of our 3-year coffee house, and the beginning of what I have enjoyed...driving school buses. She passed away after a 3-year battle with cancer in May of 2013.

Back to prom pictures.  I have one...from Vicki's prom. We attended the prom for a couple of hours and left with two other couples for a late dinner in the Blue Room of what was then the Roosevelt Hotel located several blocks away in downtown New Orleans.  Frankie Lane was doing a dinner concert that evening.  We really had a great time the entire evening but the dinner experience stands out in my memory.  The below photo was taken of our table.

I may have missed the senior high experience with my friends at Lee...but life turned out OK...a "God thing" I suppose.

Note: I married again in November 2014...Maryann has attended the last two reunions with me.

Last week's experiment with the method of announcing the new issue met with several problems. I had to go back and email many of you with the correct link to the current issue rather than the method I was trying. When looking at the reader audience, I find that the number of people who use Knology as their email provider is vastly outnumbered by the people who use other email services which do not have any problems with my email not being identified as spam. That being said, to better serve the majority of you, I have reverted to the old method of sending the direct link to the current issue in the email announcement. I hope the Knology readers will use the old method of navigating to the current issue.

In addition, I am also including a survey below to determine how you read the issues each week. I am not tracking names, but ask you to please complete the survey so I can see how I might better serve you.

Comments on Last Week's Issue

Richard "Rick" Simmons, LHS ‘64, "English Leather and Old Spice were my favorite lotions of the day."

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.