BY LEW MOORES
The Cincinnati Enquirer
John Schneider and Ronna Greff Schneider fell in love at the 1968 Walnut Hills prom ...
(Yoni Pozner photo)
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They have grown out of that look of innocence, that sweep of hair, those white blouses and thin, dark ties that adorn their portraits in high school yearbooks.
They are 30 years older, grayer and tweaked by time. They lead busy lives, with careers and jobs and children. They juggle tight schedules and outside interests. Some have spent life after high school sprinting from stick to stick -- from one spinning plate to another, just like on the old Ed Sullivan Show, daring gravity and trying to keep them spinning.
As busy as they are now, they came of age during what was arguably the most turbulent year in the second half of this century of American history.
It was 1968.
... and 30 years later they are still together.
(file photo)
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Three decades later, the year -- and the era -- still resonate. It was both an intellectually exciting and politically stimulating time, but beyond the march of history their memories include other events as poignant -- relationships, proms, athletics, school plays, studies, teachers who made a difference. It was, after all, high school.
Just three days after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on a Memphis motel balcony in April 1968, Ronna Greff and John Schneider went out on a date.
They were seniors at Walnut Hills High.The school was closed in the aftermath of the assassination when Mr. Schneider asked Miss Greff out. They hit it off and went to the prom together that May.
"We've been together ever since," said Mrs. Schneider of their 27-year marriage. She is a law professor at the University of Cincinnati, her husband is a cardiologist.
There were more than 3.5 million babies born in the country in 1950. From the high school class of '68 came an attorney and math teacher, a veterinarian and college football coach, a Vietnam veteran and legal assistant, a health inspector and real estate broker. Business people and parents.
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We are in a time of unprecedented turbulence, of danger and questioning. It is at its root a question of national soul.
-- Robert F. Kennedy in his 1968 campaign
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Martha Ransohoff Adler two years ago came across her journal from the spring of 1968, the year she was graduating from Walnut Hills High School and was editor of the school yearbook, Remembrancer.
She wrote in her journal of relationships, of what kids were wearing, what movies they were going to and who was saying what about whom. In long-hand, she wrote about the ebb and flow of high school days and weeks.
"I'm reading this journal and there's not a single mention of what was going on in the world around me," says Ms. Adler, who lives in Washington D.C., today.
"I was mortified. I grew up in a family where civil rights was very important. I cared when these things happened. But not a mention. I know the dates and months when these (events) happened, and all I'm talking about is what my boyfriends were wearing. It was revealing because it spoke to how wrapped up in the regular teen age stuff I was at that time."
They are a mere handful of the thousands of students who graduated from Cincinnati area high schools in 1968, heading for college, the workaday world, marriage, military service, points unknown. Theirs is a snapshot of America in 1968, the layer just under the surface of the headlines.
Those who graduated from high school that year were turning 18 as Vietnam began to unravel and two national leaders were gunned down. They watched or even participated in demonstrations, and many either believed or would come to believe they could make a difference. They had to register for the draft the year word came back from the other side of the world that older classmates were dying. Many of them would follow their older classmates.
They were turning 18 -- still too young to vote then -- the year an American president withdrew from the race, when even he had been challenged from within his own party, and when a handful of American cities -- again -- were wracked by violence.
Colerain High School was a blast for Don Rice.
"Some of the best times of my life were spent at Colerain High," he recalls. "We had a great class, we had good people."
Then Vietnam became more than just an undercurrent in the life of Don Rice. He was drafted shortly after graduating, trained and sent to Vietnam. He was, he said, slammed headlong into the fast lane.
Don Rice with a buddy in Vietnam.
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He was a sergeant in an Army mortar squad on a fire base in the central highlands of Vietnam when they were overrun by a division of the North Vietnamese Army.
During the ensuing battle, Sgt. Rice was badly wounded and left to die. He was hit in the leg, chest, through the arm. He lost an eye.
"I was left in the jungle and some of my buddies seen what was going on and come out to get me," said Mr. Rice.
He spent two birthdays in Vietnam, two years he could have spent driving convertibles and chasing women, he says. Instead, he spent that time in jungles, then recovering in a hospital. Rehabilitation was slow. Talking about his experiences was as hard.
"When you come back you pretty much want to be quiet and go off and do your thing," said Mr. Rice. "Build your own house or whatever. That's basically what I did, just kind of got away from it."
He gradually reintegrated himself in the world. He rehabilitated himself physically, got married, helped raise a family. He started a small wood-working business that's grown into a fulltime job in Colerain Township, with a shop called Woodcraftsman Shop. One of his daughters is married, the other is about to get married.
Rice struggled to put his life together after Vietnam.
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"I just wanted to push myself to do something," said Mr. Rice. "We make furniture and work on the restoration of furniture. For me, it's been very therapeutic every day. I learned I had some good skills. I lost the use of my right hand, but I learned to work lefthanded. "As a young man it takes your outlook and turns it around. For me it changed my life totally. If I hadn't been wounded, things could have been different. I know guys that have drinking problems, can't hold jobs, still today haven't got it together. For me, I think it was just getting up off my ass and getting going again."
While Don Rice went off to Vietnam, classmate Gary Schroeder went off to Ohio State University.
Mr. Schroeder was a popular student, outgoing and friendly, chosen "Mr. Colerain" by his classmates. He came from a farm background and veterinary school was in his future. Today he has a veterinary clinic in Colerain Township. He has two children, a senior in college and one who graduated from high school this year.
"It was really a turbulent time, but kind of an exciting time," said Mr. Schroeder. "I look at (my children) and say, it was so exciting for me, and it seems like now it's a generation where all that change just isn't happening.
"I really think that what happened back then made a difference. You grow up during that time and you see everything happening. Looking back, what happened then really did make a difference. I would like to think that my children, when they're 48 or 50, can look back and say I was involved in something that made a difference too."
The seeds that were planted in 1968 grew to mean community activism for Douglas Springs, a 1968 graduate of Taft High School. Now a health inspector for the city of Cincinnati Health Department, he is active in his Mount Auburn community.
Douglas Springs remains active in his Mount Auburn community.
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"It was one of the most exciting times of my life," recalls Mr. Springs. "It gave me a chance to find out who I was as a person." The year's most salient moments for Mr. Springs and others were the assassinations of Dr. King and U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. At Taft, a mostly African-American high school, the death of Dr. King was particularly upsetting.
"The mood was anger, fear and a thirst for knowledge," said Mr. Springs. "We wanted to know about the African-American experience here in America."
That led to demands for more black studies and history in Cincinnati public schools, and more of an accounting to the African-American community. In any school with more than a handful of black students, there was a palpable tension following the assassination. Friendships were strained, tested and challenged by what had happened.
"It was a very trying time for Cincinnati," said Mr. Springs.
Year of symbols
Maurice Isserman is a professor of history at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., who teaches a course on the 1960s. He is a 1968 high school graduate himself.
The year 1968, he says, "is an emblematic year because it provides so many seemingly representative symbols of the entire decade." It has proved to be an evocative decade, and 1968 an evocative year, for students who clamor to instantly fill Mr. Isserman's course. Much of it has to do with an affinity youth feel for other youth, even reaching across a generation or two.
"They identify with young people first and foremost," said Mr. Isserman. "They identify with civil rights workers, with anti-war protesters, with GIs in the field. They identify with people they feel were doing something significant."
That identification -- wanting to make a difference -- is one of the legacies of 1968, and the '60s in general, say those like Mr. Isserman and Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.
Those legacies include a series of legal civil rights victories, a sense of social equality, an impact -- sometimes good, sometimes bad -- on lifestyles and a tolerance of them, a heightened awareness of the environment and belief in environmentalism, the legitimizing of public protest, respect for dissent and a redefined public philosophy that now animates the way foreign policy is conducted.
"It's an era in which they look around and don't see any clear vision of the future," said Mr. Isserman. "They see themselves as sort of ciphers in this large system. So they look back at the '60s as some sort of era when giants strode the Earth. Of course, I have to tell them that was precisely the source of '60s radicalism, that sense of the individual swept up in mass society."
Vietnam and the draft -- at least for men, but also for women with brothers, boyfriends and friends -- loomed in the future. The draft was immediate and sobering, but so was the news when real people, kids, with names and faces, began showing up on casualty lists. Students at Colerain High either knew young men in the service or others waiting to be drafted, said Joseph Epplen, an English teacher at the school and now superintendent of Mount Healthy City Schools.
He recalls the startling news when word came back of a Colerain graduate killed in Vietnam.
"For me, personally, that was a traumatic experience," said Mr. Epplen. "I saw a lot of potential and life for that young man. That touched me greatly."
Stew Mathews, a '68 graduate of Finneytown High School and now a local attorney, recalls an older student killed in action in Vietnam. "I think that pretty much impacted on everyone," said Mr. Mathews. "It brought the reality of Vietnam home. It sure made a lot of people think about their own circumstances and whether they might end up there."
Mr. Springs wondered, as did Ken Newman, a '68 Walnut Hills High graduate, now vice president of Newman Brothers Inc., an architectural and metal fabricating firm.
"I remember getting into a fight (at Taft High)," said Mr. Springs. "They sent me to the principal's office and his whole thing was, well, if you like to fight so much, why don't you join the Army? You had a lot of guys, instead of hanging out on the corner, they were going to Vietnam."
Mr. Newman was a bright student, but an underachiever in high school. He spent a quarter at the University of Cincinnati, then dropped out and enlisted in the Air Force.
"I thought I'm not going to wait for the army to come get me," said Mr. Newman. "I'm going to enlist in a branch where I feel I have an opportunity to learn something. But it was just a real tumultuous time. It was one of those defining years in the history of the country."
Michael Heizman graduated from Colerain High in '68 and headed to Bloomington, Ind., and a football scholarship at Indiana University. Mr. Heizman played three sports at Colerain, was the star quarterback on the Colerain Cardinals football team. Vietnam and the draft were hardly an abstraction, even with a student deferment.
"It seemed very serious at the time," said Mr. Heizman, who today is offensive coordinator for the Mount St. Joseph football team and teaches math in the Northwest Local School District. "At the time it was a lot of deep breaths."
Year of promise
Raymond Brokamp recalls 1968 as a heady time, a time of promise in spite of the gloom. He was principal of Walnut Hills High and is now retired assistant superintendent of Cincinnati Public Schools. "There were no limits on the kind of open consideration that was given to ideas," said Mr. Brokamp. "There was an enormous questioning about authority."
Because of that a huge premium was placed on communication at the school. And involvement and forging a sense of community beyond amorphous notions of school spirit, which was being questioned as superficial at colleges as well as high schools.
The questioning of authority and the healthy skepticism of institutions are threads that weave through the three decades and the lives of many who came of age that year.
Ronna Greff Schneider sees that era as a transcendent time, and the lessons are there to see, embodied in case law she teaches in her law classes.
"I teach Constitutional law, and we talk a lot about how you can make a difference, how you can change government policy within the law," said Mrs. Schneider. "I feel very lucky that that was the time we grew up. It was such a bonding experience. You felt like you owned the world. And I think we did.
"I think in a lot of ways I want to convey that feeling to my children. What I say to them is that it was a time when people really cared about making a difference. I think that's part of the excitement of life. It gives you a stake in making it better."
Year of risk
Martha Ransohoff Adler says that regardless of her involvement in school activities at Walnut Hills, including bringing a whimsical, culturally relevant touch to the yearbook, she was not much turned on by politics until she got to college.
But at Bryn Mawr, she discovered the world was passing her by, or so she felt. With the exception of the Democratic convention in Chicago -- where she imagined her brothers being beaten by Chicago cops -- important events barely elicited a response.
"I was at this college with a bunch of women studying Greek," she says of the two years at Bryn Mawr before dropping out. "It was a very depressing, insular place to be. I felt like I needed to break out."
She dropped out, worked as a telephone operator before going back to college at Stanford University. She forged ahead and earned a masters in social work and had a career.
"My parents gave me something that helped me survive," said Ms. Adler. "I don't look back at the late '60s as great times. I know lots of people do. I came so close to veering off the precipice. The fact that I didn't I can't attribute to anything but my upbringing. So I'm very grateful."
Greg Carnes graduated from Walnut Hills, lives in Mariemont and is a real estate broker.
"I look back pretty fondly now, but time does that to you," said Mr. Carnes. "It made me more politically conscious. It has kept me interested in what goes on day to day."
His twin sons just graduated from high school. There is no Vietnam, no draft, no Democratic National Convention.
They have come of age in a neighborhood that is the sort of idealized place that some had dreamed of. But 1968 tugs and Mr. Carnes said there is just a tinge of regret about his sons not having grown up in a more urban environment.
"At the same time it has an old-fashioned neighborhood quality," said Mr. Carnes. "You can sit on the front porch of my house and hear football games going on three or four blocks away. You can hear the band playing and the people walking up from their homes to the stadium. It's just a nice warm place to grow up."
Ronna Greff Schneider and John Schneider's names are spray-painted on a wall in the basement of Walnut Hills High, a gesture of their love. They were 18. They have now been married 27 years, have three children. After living in Boston for eight years, they moved back to Cincinnati in the 1980s to be closer to parents.
At a time when issues and emerging lifestyles tore families apart, "we remained very close with our parents," said Mrs. Schneider. "There was such a war between the generations. But you can go through turbulent times and that never needs to yank you away from family bonds. That's more important than anything.
"But the thing I really want (my children) to get from that experience is the concept that they should not ignore injustice. It's a responsibility. I want them to not turn an eye because they have a privileged existence.
"They can make a difference. One person can make a difference."
Reporter Lew Moores graduated from Glen Cove High School in Long Island, N.Y., in 1968.
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