Nottingham High

from "Bridge Ahead, A Medical Memoir" copyright 2008 Keith Dahlberg

High school is a time of many changes for any teenager. Still more so, if the teenager is a dissident. And I was a pacifist, in the middle of World War II.
I felt strongly about this. I took my cues from my Dad, whose sermons from the pulpit were pro-people, but against all war. To him, peace did not mean merely absence of war. He believed war went against the word of God and solved very few issues. It did not mean that a Christian should be a weakling or a doormat. On the contrary, Christians are expected to be strong in order to help the oppressed, enslaved, or lost to find a personal relationship with God, and so far as possible help them find a way out of suffering and injustice.
As a young man at the time of the first World War, Dad at first had refused even to register for the draft. He finally registered as a conscientious objector, although the draft board would have allowed him a clergy exemption. He continued to preach against war during World War II, even while he ministered to the needs of two hundred service men and women among his congregation in Syracuse. The FBI had him on their list for a while; they listened to him preach, and questioned the church members, but never found anything to even suggest that he was seditious or unpatriotic. (Years later, I read their conclusion in the FBI's dossier on Dad, released under the Freedom of Information Act.) His congregation, in fact, highly respected him, even though many members had questions about his message.
During World War II, a pacifist teenager was hard for most of my classmates and teachers to figure out. Following Pearl Harbor, the whole nation had mobilized to the war effort. Buy war bonds. If you can't afford a bond, buy war stamps each week until you have enough for a bond. Turn in your aluminum cooking pots to build airplanes. Plant victory gardens. Save gas. Knit sweaters. Write the boys overseas. The time I spent at Boy Scout farm camp, in 1942, weeding cabbage fields and picking beans, was to help the national effort to raise more food, and I had no problem with that.
But I had a decision to make on my own in wood-shop class in junior high school. The whole class was assigned the project of making scale-model wooden airplanes, about five inches long, used for training aircraft spotters and gunners in instant recognition. To me, that was supporting war and I told the shop teacher, Mr. Pepper, that I couldn't do it. "I understand,was his gruff reply, but I don't think he ever really did.
It got worse in high school, during home-room period each day. Students were expected to buy at least one war savings stamp (twenty-five cents) each Friday. If even one student in the whole school did not do so, the school could not display the 100% banner on the flag pole that week. Nottingham High never got to fly the banner when I was a student. Some of my classmates resented this, although most adopted a neutral attitude. Things improved after about a year when the school held a Red Cross fund drive one day. I figured up what I had not invested in war stamps over the past months, and gave it to the Red Cross, possibly more than the rest of my home room combined. A hostile classmate accosted me one morning, "How come you can give to the Red Cross but not to the war effort?"
I told him the Red Cross healed people. I added that I wouldn’t get any savings
investment returned after the war, like he would from his war bonds. He didn't like that at all; I thought he might hit me, but I stood my ground. The class president and his girlfriend were standing nearby; both took my side and told the guy to back off. After their endorsement, things got better.
During 1945, the Baptist Youth Fellowship at church became active in drama. I had a bit-part in Elmer and the Love-Bug, found that I liked acting, and when a drama club at school presented Why I Am a Bachelor, I got the lead role, playing a misanthropic lecturer. It was a corny play, but the student body liked it. In looking back, perhaps part of its popularity was their opinion that the role fit me exactly.
In my senior year, I happened to have Miss Frederica Smith as my English teacher. "Sister Smith was a middle-aged, self-possessed soul in horn-rimmed glasses who believed in getting the whole class involved. After we had studied poetry and verse-making for two weeks, Miss Smith announced that, tomorrow being Valentine’s Day, each student would choose some character from literature and write an appropriate valentine to him or her. After making sure that the Bible was considered literature, I submitted my valentine, from Samson to Delilah, with a straight face:
All the while I’ve been making your people feel blue,
Though I’m fighting with thousands, yet think I of you.
I’ve torn city gates from their place in the wall,
But your icy cold heart I cannot move at all.
In times of distress I’ve relied on my brawn,
But that’s no help at all when to you I am drawn.
Of all the Philistines I think you’re most fair
But Baby, I can’t keep you out of my hair.

The class, Miss Smith included, burst into laughter. To my surprise, I was later elected senior-class poet based on this offering, and was invited to join the staff of the school newspaper, but I never wrote any more poems worth remembering.
The year went by quickly after that, and on June 24, 1946 graduation night came for 256 of us. Our principal, Harold Coon, was graduating too, moving up to a post in the school district headquarters downtown. There was the usual procession to Pomp and Circumstance, speeches, awards etc. My mind was chiefly on summer vacation; I would go directly from school to the railroad station and catch the night train west for my second summer of work at Green Lake, Wisconsin, along with one of my classmates.
I was startled out of my reverie by hearing my name called at the tail end of the athletic and citizenship award presentations. Mr. Coon announced that the class had voted me the one they would most like to represent them in life. I hadn’t known there was such an award, but it’s the one I would most like to have.