Wednesday, August 11, 1999
Catching up with the Class of '69
Greenhills grads reflect on growing up in their protected suburb
BY JOAN WOELLNER FUDALA
Enquirer contributor
The year 1969 stands as momentus to baby boomers. Man first walked on the moon. James Earl Ray was imprisoned for assassinating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Sen. Edward Kennedy's car crashed at Chappaquiddick Island, Mass., killing his passenger. And Richard Nixon became president. Freelance writer Joan Woellner Fudala, whose Greenhills High School graduating class held its 30th reunion over the weekend, offers this remembrance of that year.
We were part of a grand social experiment dreamed up by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: a planned suburban community of affordable homes buffered by a greenbelt.
We grew up in Greenhills, a middle-class, family-oriented, safe and predictable suburb north of Cincinnati. We were the baby boomer children of World War II veterans and their community-spirited, stay-at-home wives. The 400 of us reaching maturity 30 years ago were only beginning to realize our experimental suburban village had shielded us from the social turbulence crashing down on the rest of the world.
We were Greenhills Class of 1969.
On Saturday and Sunday, I joined my classmates at a 30th reunion, our largest turnout yet. Reflecting on how we got where we are in life, most of us credit growing up in Greenhills as having a profound impact, professionally and personally.
“We really had a nice place to live and have fun,” says Wayne Butler, of Naples Fla. “We had time to grow up, to play sports, to have the summers off. We were very protected. It was what life was supposed to be like. We were very lucky.”
The New Deal
Greenhills was one of three communities in the nation designed during the Depression and intended to give families an affordable place to live near where the men of the household worked. The others were Greendale, Wis. and Greenbelt, Md.
Although the first families moved in during 1938, Greenhills really took off after World War II, when hundreds of returning soldiers used their GI Bill to buy new homes for $9,000 in the village.
Shortly after the GI's and their new brides arrived, they started a baby boom that fulfilled the dream of New Deal planners. Greenhills thrived as a family community, with schools, parks, close-knit neighborhoods and civic involvement.
Throughout our school years, dads of the Class of 1969 worked downtown or at companies in Evendale or Ivorydale. Most moms stayed home, when they weren't doing volunteer work, being Scout or Blue Bird leaders or attending Greenhills Women's Club or church functions.
Greenhills provided a carefree existence where kids could be kids.
Television was about as old as we were. We watched Uncle Al, Skipper Ryle and the Mouseketeers, but most of the time we were outside with neighborhood kids. We went to the Legion's carnival, Sunday school, Winton Woods picnics. We ate Creamy Whips. We rode on the Harbor Queen. Some of us took ballet and piano lessons.
We were crazy about the Beatles, and listened to WSAI on our transistor radios. Our first boy-girl outings were hayrides, parent-chaperoned house parties and dances in the fellowship hall at the Greenhills Presbyterian Church.
When we broke an arm or had the flu, the two doctors who served Greenhills made house calls.
We were born at the height of the baby boom in 1951. What many of us seem to remember most about growing up in Greenhills is how safe we felt.
• Jayne Kathman, Finneytown, grew up on Burley Circle and in '69, was on the yearbook and literary magazine staff.
“We were protected and nurtured by everyone,” she says. “Greenhills was planned to be a family-oriented community, and it really was. We were able to be kids. Now, 6-year-olds act like teen-agers, from what I see every day as a teacher.”
• Dick Sutphin of Mason grew up on Hadley Road. In '69, he was a star on the winning Greenhills High School basketball team.
“Greenhills was a great community to grow up in,” he says. “It had everything you needed. We rode our bikes to the stores or the pool. Everybody knew everybody. It was a safe place to live.”
• Terri Meinking of Miami, Fla., grew up on Burley Circle, where her parents still live in the same house. She was our prom queen.
“I liked growing up in Greenhills because it was safe. I also liked the idea of having the woods right there, being able to run out of the house and do what I wanted to without worrying about anything. I loved sled riding on the hills and making tree houses.”
• Don Larson was president of the Class of '69, a football and basketball star and our representative to Boys State.
“Greenhills was such a comfort zone for me,” he says. “I was safe, happy and secure. We went to school, church and relatives' houses on weekends. In the summer, we got to go to Coney Island and Reds games, and usually on a family vacation. My mom was my role model. She was just so non-self-centered and put her kids as her first priority.”
Coming of age
As Greenhills was built out, more schools were built, and Forest Park took the overflow of families. We all came back together from various elementary schools when we started junior high in 1963.
Then came high school in 1965, and with it exposure to the social turmoil of the 60s.
Weaned on the news in the Weekly Readers in elementary school, we were accustomed to hearing Peter Grant on WLW give us the news of the world during dinner.
• Gay Bennett-Powell was a foreign exchange student from England during our senior year. She now teaches at a suburban high school south of London.
“Life in Greenhills moved much faster than I had been used to in Lincoln,” she says. “This was probably because high school students drove cars more regularly than we did at home. The social life that centered at the high school was something that I enjoyed very much and had certainly not been a part of my school life at home.”
Perhaps because of our coming of age and the newfound mobility that came with a driver's license, a few of us began to see that our village wasn't as perfect as we thought. Out of 400 in our class, only one was of color. In fact, during the 1960s, only a handful of African-Americans lived in Greenhills.
There was gender discrimination. For example, Jayne Kathman and I wanted to take shop class in high school, but were told we couldn't because the boys' language would be too rough for us.
Chuck Gillespie of Columbus starred in our high school plays and sang in the Varsity Ensemble. He calls the Greenhills experience a “double-edged experience.”
“It was wholesome, healthy and safe,” he says. “But Greenhills was institutionally bigoted. We were not the World War II generation. We hadn't seen what the rest of the world was really like. Getting out of Greenhills was mind-expanding. Our class lived through tough times in the '60s.”
Our lives were steeped in discipline, rules, dress codes and curfews.
Parents, teachers, coaches and other authority figures governed us with an iron fist. Teachers and coaches still gave paddlings. We didn't dare call our parents' friends by their first names. Most of us attended all our classes and did our homework religiously. But it was hard not to be influenced by all the rebellion and upheaval we saw occurring on college campuses and in nearby places like Avondale.
As a teacher now at Winton Woods High School (created when Greenhills and Forest Park high schools merged in 1991), Dick Sutphin has a perspective of both the Greenhills Class of '69 and the Winton Woods Class of '99.
“Kids today expect to be entertained as well as educated, a product of watching so much television and playing video games. They seem to lack the level of respect we had for our teachers,” he says. “But, on a note of similarity, this year I started to see kids wearing bell bottoms, tie-dyed shirts and long hair like we did in the 1960s.”
Epilogue
Looking at our class now, we are a reflection of the enormous social changes that took place in the '60s. With choices that had never existed, many of us took paths we might not have.
Many did stay close to home for careers and family. Others live in California, Arizona, Michigan, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, Wisconsin, Idaho, throughout the South and Midwest, even Belgium and England.
We've had our share of divorces, but we've got lots of 20- to 30-year marriages too. We've lost about a dozen classmates to cancer, car accidents and other tragic circumstances.
Many say if they could live life over again, they might have done a few things differently:
• Wayne Butler recently retired as foreign service officer with the U.S. state department. He still serves as a consultant. He wishes he had learned Spanish in high school.
“It would have been so useful in my career. I went to the Peace Corps school to learn Spanish and eventually worked without a translator in the Dominican Republic.”
• Terri Meinking is considered one of the world's experts on treating head lice. She is a research professor in the Dermatology Department at the University of Miami School of Medicine.
She wishes she had taken a language other than Latin in high school. She has done extensive research in Central and South America.
“Living in Greenhills, you just didn't think people really spoke other languages, but having a conversational language course would have helped me.”
• Jayne Kathman teaches at the Xavier University Montessori Teacher Training Program.
“I wish I had taken even more time to enjoy being a kid in Greenhills and not been in such a rush to grow up like kids today,” she says.
• Chuck Gillespie now is a meteorologist on WSYX-TV in Columbus. He wishes he had dated more and participated more in sports.
“I was insecure, and sometimes acted like the class clown. I didn't really come of age until my mid-20s. But my involvement in the theater was a good thing for me then.”
• Dick Sutphin got a degree in special education at the University of Cincinnati, went back to Greenhills to teach and is on the Winton Woods faculty.
“Greenhills High School was such a good experience for me. I just wish I had gone all four years there, since I attended Roger Bacon my freshman and sophomore years.”
• Don Larson is executive vice president of Great American Insurance Co. He says he wishes he knew then what he knows now about the advice of Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
“Knowing the "think win-win' and "understand, then be understood' principles would have helped me in high school. I also wish I had gone out of my way to know more people in our class in a more meaningful way, but I lacked confidence and was pre-occupied.”
• The writer. I was editor of the Greenhills Conestoga, a Mock U.N. delegate from GHS and a Class of 1969 graduation speaker. After graduating from Ohio State, I served nine years in the U.S. Air Force, then as a public relations executive at Shillito-Rikes, Presidential Airways, the Trump Shuttle and the Scottsdale (Ariz) Chamber of Commerce. I'm a free-lance writer in Scottsdale.
“Regrettably, I've lost touch with most of my 400 classmates — including some of my closest childhood friends. I look forward to seeing them and getting reacquainted, now more than ever. I really can't explain it. Maybe it's the approaching millennium; everyone seems to be reflecting. Or maybe it's the realization that we all shared something special as Greenhills' own "greatest generation,' something the Roosevelts planned for us over 60 years ago.”
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