UNDER CONSTRUCTION.

The Class of 1967 has quite a collective history. Some of us played together as toddlers. and others went on to marry. We'd love to publish your memories about those days (funny stories, favorite classes or teachers, best hangouts, memorable sports events, school pranks, special friends. Just click on Contact Us.

To get you started, here's a summary of some events that served as a backdrop to our high school years....

Perhaps it was a good thing for our parents that Valium was introduced our freshman year. Our adolescent hormones butted up against a lot of earth-shaking changes.

The Civil Rights Movement was fomenting. In 1963 there was the March on Washington in which Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his “I have a dream” speech. The next year three civil rights workers – Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney – were murdered in Mississippi. 1965 was marked by the arrest of King and others in Selma demonstrating about voting rights and by the shooting death of Malcolm X. Racial agitation continued, erupting into violence in 1967 in Detroit and other cities and resulting in the intervention of the National Guard. The movement made progress, though: In 1967 Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as first black US Supreme Court justice.

The Vietnam War, which was to play so big a part in our immediate futures, had its roots in our freshman year, when military advisors were sent into Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed in 1964 and by 1965 U.S. troop began arriving.

The trauma of the recent Kennedy Assassination was still fresh, and it resurfaced when Jack Rudy shot and killed Lee Harvey Osvald in 1963. Conspiracy theories abounded and culminated in the Warren Commission, but never really evaporated.

The nuclear threat that had caused us to learn to “duck and cover” as kids was not getting any better. While Khrushchev was deposed in 1964, China became a force with which to reckon. It exploded its first atomic bomb that year and its first hydrogen bomb in 1967. It was only slightly reassuring that the U.S. and USSR were then forced to the table for the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.  And the first commercial nuclear reactor on U.S. soil opened in 1967.

Another threat with implications for us today in the Middle East, the Six Day War in 1967 ended with Israel occupying the Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, Gaza Strip and West Bank.

“Gee-whiz” science was emerging. We had astronauts in space (the Gemini series), although we were chastened when Virgil Grssom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee died in a fire during a test launch of what would have been Apollo I in 1967. But there were many successes. The first heart transplant was performed in 1967. And quarks and pulsars made their mysterious debut.  An advance that perhaps dismayed our parents was the approval of birth control pills in 1966. In spite of these advances, science fiction fans of the late 60's would never have predicted that many technological devices of novels, comics and film would become a reality in our lifetimes.

Our “culture” was certainly concerning some parents. Ironically, The Graduate was released the year of our graduation from NPHS.  Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and psychedelic bands like Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead represented musical groups most parents found either irritating or alarming.  Sex, drugs and rock and roll seemed to go hand-in-hand.

An essential development for us aging Baby Boomers, Medicare was enacted in 1966.

And, as a perspective on the cost of living, a first class stamp cost just 5 cents all through our high school days.