[1]The Jewish Book Festival [2]always includes a Missouri’s Own event. This year, it is Monday, Nov. 2, and features four authors. They are an interesting group. Some now live far away and write about things with lots of national interest. But at least one is very particular to the St. Louis crowd, with its love-hate relationship with the infernal “Where’d you go to high school?” question.
Alan Spector, author of “Hail Hail to U City High” joins Lynne Greenberg, Thomas Bloch and Eric Greitens on Monday. (See last Sunday’s story [3]for complete lineup or go to www.jccstl.com [4] for details.
Here’s a review of Spector’s book from a guy who also claims University City as his alma mater.
“Hail Hail to U City High”
By Alan Spector
Cincinnati Book Publishers, 233 pages, $18.95
By Dale Singer/Special to the Post-Dispatch
By the time I reached University City High School as a sophomore in the fall of 1964, Alan Spector and his classmates had departed. But the spirit they left behind – the enthusiasm and the dedication described in this remembrance of teenage life in a simpler time – remained for every student to drink in and help perpetuate.
“Hail Hail to U City High” serves many purposes. It is Spector’s memoir of three years of his life that shaped who he became and who he remains today. It is a snapshot of an era that he and many of his classmates look back on with gratitude, when the nation and the suburb where they lived were headed for fundamental, irreversible changes. And it catches up with where many members of the class of ’64 are today, with all of their hopes and disappointments, triumphs and tragedies.
As memoir, the book may appeal to a limited number of people – members of Spector’s class and others of that era. Many of his contemporaries were the older siblings of my classmates, the class of ’67, and my older brother and several former colleagues were a year behind Spector, so to me, a lot of the names here are familiar, particularly those of teachers.
As a snapshot of the mid-sixties – a nation still reeling from the assassination of John F. Kennedy, not yet worried about a faraway war in Southeast Asia, on the brink of music’s British invasion and the loosened restrictions of society still to come – Spector will speak to a far wider audience. As he puts it, sex and drugs, not so much; rock and roll, definitely.
He captures the era this way:
”Ford Mustangs, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, zip codes, seat belts, IUD’s, panty hose, The Berlin Wall, birth control pills, ‘Smoking can be hazardous to your health’ on cigarette packs – that cost 25 cents, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, the first man in space and the St. Louis Arch.”
No matter what the answer is to that quintessential St. Louis question of where you went to high school, much of what Spector writes about here can send you back to the classrooms, the football games, the Friday night dances of your own teenage years. In some cases, the memories may be bittersweet, but they are indelible.
Spector’s title here comes from the first line of the U. City High School alma mater, sung solemnly on special occasions as what were then the Indians and now the Lions celebrate the special atmosphere they share.
So hail, hail to U. City High, or to arch-rival Ladue or McCluer or Vashon or Kirkwood or Fort Zumwalt or Alton or whatever school and whatever era these memories will take you back to. As the fourth line of the song says:
“Our friendship may she never lack.”
Note: Using the skills he developed as sports editor of the newspaper and yearbook at U. City High, Dale Singer went on to a career in journalism at UPI, the Post-Dispatch and now as a staff member of the St. Louis Beacon.