'Dear Hays High' a shocker in Biloxi

11/18/2009

I need help from someone historically familiar with Hays High School. Back around 1956, the Air Force sent me to Keesler AFB, Biloxi, Miss., to take a many-months-long study of Morse code.

I was with the U.S. Air Force Security Service, and this study was to prep me for an assignment at Misawa, Japan, that eventually ended up being a two-plus-year project.

Well, to make a long story short, one Saturday morning at Keesler during a Parade & Review, one of the songs played by the base band was the Hays High School fight song. You read that right. As it played, I started singing the words, "Hays High, dear Hays High ...", much to the surprise of my fellow airmen. "How do you know those words?" they asked. I told them they were the words to the school song of my high school's biggest rival back home.

I was never able to find out how that song ended up at a Parade & Review at Keesler AFB. Is the song taken from a military march? Was someone who attended Hays High School on the music staff at Keesler at that time?

It's still a mystery these 53 years later.

You know what? Hearing that song made me feel so good and at a time when I needed something to pump me up.

Can anybody out there address this mystery?

Wrinkles increase every time I give this some thought.

* * *

Big Creek in south Hays, in my younger years, afforded guests with opportunities to fish, explore, hang out or try walking across the swinging bridge without toppling over. I was pretty good at ... toppling over.

But danger was always present, too. One harrowing experience involving a close friend of many years could have ended his life. I was unaware of this situation until he told me about it after reading my first column in this newspaper Nov. 4.

The friend is Arlen Walters, a Hays native who now lives in retirement with wife, Muriel, in Las Vegas. He told about spending many a day at Big Creek and Custer Island in both summer and winter.

One winter, he recalled, he fell through the ice on Big Creek in the only spot that was more than 6 feet deep. He told of the challenges he faced trying to get out of the predicament he found himself in. If it had not been for Vic Burgardt standing close by, he said he probably would not have made it.

Soaked, scared and shaking, he eventually managed to pull himself together and walk home.

Arlen, I've concluded, doesn't have wrinkles, his are -- thanks to that experience -- fearkles.

* * *

A nephew, Sean Dreiling of Estes Park, Colo., sees limited action as a member of the Fort Hays State University Tigers basketball team.

The highlight of his career to date was getting to play the Kansas Jayhawks at Lawrence two weeks ago.

I watched the telecast, and when he entered the game in the final minute or two, I noticed he had some kind of marking on his arm. Hmm, tattoo maybe?

Don't think so. Well, in conversation with his grandmother, Jeanie, I found out it was, in fact, a tattoo.

After I learned what the tattoo was all about, I thought, "How cool!"

What Sean had done was have the Dreiling family crest tattooed on his arm.

That pumped me up to the point of wanting to perhaps do the same thing.

But after discussing it with the furniture in my apartment -- I'm the only being living there --I thought otherwise, fearing the end result might be more than just another wrinkle.

* * *

I wondered what kind of comments, if any, my initial column would generate. At the bottom of the column, I provide my e-mail address for that purpose. Out of the six responses I did get, I picked out a sentence or two from a few of them to give you a feel for what the verdict was.

Like:

* "Your uncle must have been a Democrat; we Republicans know our weeds."

* "An Independent is nothing more than a political atheist."

* "At least Dick Cheney had something to say, and, fool me, you managed to acknowledge that fact."

* "Wrinkles? I'm 81, I call them dimples!"

I think you will find this interesting. In a recent editorial in the Goodland Star-News, I was giving my opinion on the President-Fox News standoff. One response received at that paper stood out: "You are just another Glenn Beck."

Then, loe and behold, in a letter to the editor in the Goodland paper last Friday, Glenn Beck was described as, "our Paul Revere, crying out to the citizenry to wake up ..."

I'm flattered!

* * *

My father was an understanding kind of guy. He had to be with nine kids under the roof. And when he established house rules, you took heed, you didn't test them. One that quickly comes to mind was, "The front door is locked at midnight. If you show up later than that, tough, sleep on the porch!"

Well, as "luck" would have it, it did get tested. Two of my older brothers came home very late one Saturday night -- about 20 minutes past midnight -- and they wondered what to do. One suggested they quietly sneak in through a basement window. Well, in the process of carrying out that suggestion, they knocked a couple of jars of mom's canned pickles off a shelf just below the window. The sound of breaking glass certainly would wake dad, they feared. They knew they were in pretty deep on this one.

So, hoping for the best, they quietly tip-toed up the stairs leading to the main floor -- where the folks bedroom was located -- and then just as quietly they started to climb the stairs leading to the second floor bedrooms when suddenly dad's voice came through loud and clear, "Boys! Be sure to lock the front door before you go up to bed!"

Can you believe he never ever locked it?

Mom said he laid there and chuckled for a long while after that.

He was quite a guy!

Tom Dreiling is a northwest Kansas journalist, who just recently retired after 42 years in the profession. He also writes commentary for the Goodland Star-News. tad1@st-tel.net