Talking with Terry Written March 26, 2020   Five years after we graduated with the Richwood High School Class of 1965, Terry Rockhold and I were back in town visiting our respective parents.  It was near the end of our respective spring breaks. This was the spring of 1970.  Why weren't we on our way to Vietnam?  Well, I was exempt from the military draft due to poor eyesight, and Terry had a schoolteacher's deferment. At the time, he was a 7th-grade math teacher in a suburban school near Cleveland.  During his spring break he'd traveled out to San Francisco to visit his sister Karen and her husband. I, on the other hand, was studying radio and television at Syracuse University.  On Easter I'd taken a bus to Washington, D.C., along with about 40 other grad students.  For several days we met with people at various institutions, including the White House, the Capitol, and the Pentagon.  We also visited the United States Information Agency (USIA), producer of promotional films for foreign distribution. Now it was Saturday afternoon, April 4.  Terry came to the Thomas house to visit.  He sat in my Granddad Buckingham's old yellow recliner, and I got out my new cassette recorder to tape half an hour of our conversation. Seven MP3 segments are linked below.  You can imagine this as a podcast interview, if you like, supplemented with illustrations from the present day.

3:04 Hint:  Right-click on the link and choose "Open Link in New Tab."  Then you can continue reading this page while the audio plays.		Terry hadn't spent his time off merely hanging around his sister's place all week.  He played tourist, sightseeing around San Francisco and the Bay Area by bus and by boat. Another tour bus made a 300-mile round trip down to Monterey, where there were golf courses and beaches to be seen along the looping 17-Mile Drive.
4:07		That tour also visited Carmel as well as the “Antichoke” Capital of the World. The tourists ate in a fancy restaurant on Steinbeck's Cannery Row.
1:42		Earlier, on his swing through Marin County, Terry hadn't been as impressed with eating lunch at The Dock in Tiburon.
2:34		We turned our attention back to Ohio and discussed the paucity of shoppers at places like the Southland Mall in nearby Marion (seen here) and men's-wear shops in Cleveland.
3:25		As a schoolteacher, Terry wore a proper suit and tie, of course.  His 13-year-old students were amused when two of the ties he picked out were pink.
1:55		A decade before when he and I were in junior high, Mrs. Shoemaker came into her class one day with pink hair.  We thought it must have been a botched attempt to dye her blonde hair red.  Terry realized later, however, that Mrs. Shoemaker had the right idea about strictness.
2:32		He described his discipline problems with one troublesome student.  But then my recording cassette reached its end.
		The next year Terry obtained a better teaching position, at a rural high school near Wooster, Ohio, where the kids seemed much more cooperative.  I visited him once, and we went to a basketball game there. But then the draft was phased out, which mean that Terry was free to leave the classroom and begin his real career as an accountant.  He worked for corporations in Columbus, Miami, and Buffalo.  After he passed away in 2006, I remembered him in this article.
		more audio selections