Flashback Friday

With all the talk of Judge Kavanaugh's boarding school days, 100 keg quest, drunken parties and possible sexual shenanigans, I thought I'd post a picture of my parents at a fraternity gathering at Monmouth College most likely around graduation.  No, not that they did those kinds of thing.  It was a different time.  I like to think their ornery moments were more of the mischievous type rather than the ones Kavanaugh and his friends partook. This looks more like it could have been a cast photo out of the The Godfather.

Glen (second from right) had returned from the war and resumed his studies and graduated in Spring of 1946.  Marjie, next to him, would quit her studies and go with him to the hometown of his parents, Verne and Orpha, in Seaton, Illinois.  Herb would teach for a year or two at the school there and then help has dad at the grain elevator.  

Now, looking at the picture, one would assume that everyone was a good law-abiding citizen, clean cut, apple of their mother's eye, chaste, and attended church every Sunday.   And yet, I think it's safe to say that all of the above had tasted beer and knew how to party as well.  He was a member of a fraternity, she a sorority.  Frankly, I don't remember many stories, if there were any, of their college days.  By the way, the other girl in the picture was Marj's best friend, Kathleen McCrery.

There was a story told of Herb and his college frat brothers taking the Seaton Park Christmas tree one year.  And then the time Herb and a couple of his buddies hopped atop a boxcar somewhere near Monmouth and rode it through Seaton and over into Iowa as his Dad looked stunned from the weigh house at the elevator in town.  Yes, they were different times from Kavanaugh's and mine.  They swallowed goldfish for fun, and because silk stockings were banned for the war effort, girls painted their legs to look like they had them.  Oh, yeah, that little thing that made the guys and girls grow up fast, World War II.  Thus, the Greatest Generation put away their childish things and saved the world for us.  Yeah, I can see that in the picture, too.