In the 1968-69 school year, an alphabetic accident of surname coincidence caused ISTOHOW to be seated to the right of AIRWUG1 in a geometry class at Davidson High. AIRWUG1 became the "older brother I never had", and the lynchpin for the group of left-leaning hippie pinko communist long-haired activist radical type high-school friends. Not to mention dedicated driver, since ISTOHOW was not aware at the time that you don't really have to be able to see to get a driver's license...
(There was also a reactionary right-wing crew-cut war-mongering fascist group for which RLDJr was the lynchpin, but that group never really adapted to the Karass. There was another group that was entirely normal, and therefore not very interesting. Most of them are doctors and lawyers now...)
ISTOHOW and AIRWUG engaged in a number of interesting activities. I really enjoyed watching AIRWUG take his mom's car completely apart (well, it seemed like that's what he was doing...) to replace a faulty cigarette lighter, for instance. (BTW, this was definitely pre-Volvo.) ISTOHOW was no help with the mechanical part, but was able to provide moral support and keep Mom from finding out exactly what the odds were that it would be back together before it was needed for transportation... Many of the others were more enjoyable, but shall not be chronicled here.
The 69-70 school year saw ISTOHOW transferred mid-year to Murphy High. This expanded the leftwing group to include two people named Ralph. The female Ralph was, last I heard, living again in the neighborhood she grew up in. This year ISTOHOW actually had two classes with Dukie, but was oblivious to that fact for another couple of years.
The summer of '70 was interesting in that AIRWUG and RLDJr had summer jobs in Biloxi cleaning up after Camille, and even, as I recall, shared a motel room there. That may have been the most unlikely Karass of all time... ISTOHOW visited one weekend by bus from Mobile, and will not disclose the condition or circumstances of said room...
ISTOHOW's dad's employer went bankrupt that year, and his sister enjoyed a compound fracture of her left leg. ISTOHOW himself dislocated a hip but dared not tell anybody because too much else was already going on, but that caused him to miss the opening of "Woodstock" (the movie) with AIRWUG. AIRWUG introduced ISTOHOW to the Tolkein books this summer - ISTOHOW is still working on memorizing the entire trilogy.
The 70-71 school year saw ISTOHOW transferred back to Davidson, where he entered his "stupid" phase. Lots of skipping school, running away from home, etc. By this time Haywood Holderness had become pastor at Grace Church, and started coming up with better things for teenagers to do. I do not know for sure these items are related, but I would not bet against that... If memory serves, it was this year that ISTOHOW met Dwight, but memory doesn't serve to recall the circumstances, just that ISTOHOW spent way too much time hanging around with "the tree" while at school, and with Robbie while not.
In the summer of '71 one of the things HH came up with was a Karass for teenagers that met on Wednesday nights. It was here that ISTOHOW met Dukie while paying attention, and was talked into subsequently switching from Math V to Debate for his senior year which was, you guessed it, back at Murphy.
The 71-72 school year was mostly AIRWUG-less, since he had graduated and was off to Boston and Emerson College. ISTOHOW and Dukie got to go on lots of trips for debate tournaments, spending much of the time avoiding the other team-members. Between the Presbyterian youth stuff and sixth period Physics class, Noel had joined "the group" by the end of the year.
The summer of '72 included Gas Price Wars (19.9 cents/gallon at Sears), so ISTOHOW was able to get Dwight or Airwug to "truck" just about anywhere. Usually it was down to Dauphin Island, where Dukie was living at her grandfather's retirement beach house whilst working on the "Casino Pier." ISTOHOW was working as a stockboy/bagboy/cleanup crew at the Delchamps at Pleasant Valley and Government Boulevard. As a consequence of his working Saturday's as a bagboy (meaning he had enough tips to qualify as being "rich") some amount of time was spent at the Pasquale's Pizza down the strip from the grocery. (I'll never forget the time Airwug stuffed a young female into a shopping cart and brought said shopping cart into Pasquale's.... This would be considered "abuse" today, but at the time even the cute young female thought it was all just "good clean fun" - unless of course, she still holds a grudge...)
It was in late summer when the ISOBARB Karass began to coalesce. But that's another story that could best be told by others.
ISTOHOW left the grocery store after contracting a hideous virus, probably from cleaning the meat grinder. The disease resulted in a scaly, itchy, rash that covered ISTOHOW from the neck down. When not bathing in oiled oatmeal (ahhhh) or receiving ultraviolet treatments, ISTOHOW tormented the other Karass members by making them watch him squirm and scratch. When in a really foul mood he'd even roll up his sleeve and make people look at the scales where skin should be... The Karass agreed that if ISTOHOW's affliction turned out to be contagious that it would cheerfully kill him. Fortunately for all it wasn't, but...
Upon recovery ISTOHOW found himself unemployed. Fortunately for ISTOHOW, he'd by this time had 10 years (well, 10 summers) experience working with (well, hanging around with and being occaisionally allowed to help) his father's surveying crews. After a part-time stint with a certain SOB (his initials - and as an extreme example of Karass trivia, a neighbor of AIRWUG's!) ISTOHOW became a rodman on a surveying crew for
David Volkert and Associates.
ISTOHOW performed spectacularly for all jobs that did not require hand-eye coordination. Unfortunately for ISTOHOW (and his employer) hand-eye coordination was a significant part of the job. Knowing that any advancement in the surveying-crew-pecking-order kind of depended upon being able to see at least from your nose to your toes, the crew chief arranged to have ISTOHOW dismissed (for his own good) during the week between Christmas '72 and New Years Day '73.
ISTOHOW really was very good at some of the tasks in that job, and was painfully aware that there were some tasks that he just could not do, no matter how how hard he tried. That would've been depressing, if there'd been time to think about it.Mainly because of ISTOHOW's father's reputation for competence and integrity, ISTOHOW was offered the opportunity to work for a testing laboratory as a "soils technician." This was really neat, because in 8 short months it convinced ISTOHOW that he could, in fact, do just about anything that he had to do, and more importantly that no matter how boring a desk job might be manual labor was at least as boring, and a desk job comes with air conditioning. A winter and summer on the back of a drill rig convinced ISTOHOW that college might be a good idea after all.
ISTOHOW continued to work on the drill rig and in the testing laboratory during school breaks for some time.
This is a picture taken by AIRWUG1 in the summer of 1974 (ISTOHOW is the one in the striped shirt, which still hangs in his closet by the way.)
There's a good story that goes with this picture, and even though it kind of sounds like something Dave Barry would write, I am not making this up... During the excavation for the George C. Wallace twin-tunnels that carry I-10 under Mobile River, they discovered the foundation of the original French Fort Conde that went with the founding of Mobile (the tricentennial will occur in 2002). After the tunnels were built, the historical societies got the Powers That Be to authorize a re-construction of the part of the old fort that would fit in the space left by the highway construction. In order to test the soil's load bearing capability, so help me what they told these two college kids and one high-school dropout (the team leader, of course) to do was take their drill rig and "come as close as you can to the tunnel without hitting it." Photo credit goes to AIRWUG, who was certain that we'd make him famous...
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