MEANWHILE, IN THE NEWSPAPERS.COM ARCHIVE: 
Perverts and Flashers and Drugs, Oh My!

April 15, 1982 was evidently a busy day for sexual deviants in Ferdinand, Indiana. One creeper was seen kissing children at the Ferdinand Elementary playground. A few blocks away, another guy appeared to be stalking a local housewife. And finally, over at the high school, a dude clad only in a jockstrap was exposing his naughty bits to the girls' tennis team.  

I love how colloquially this article is written. "Give the girls a show"? "Bent over for a rear view"? "Playing with himself"? Absolutely no pussyfooting around with vagaries like "committing a lewd act," and such. I applaud that choice. Sometimes, it's good to be blunt. 

I do take umbrage with the author's assertion that "these incidents turned out to be harmless." I mean sure, no one was kidnapped or killed, but I wouldn't call a mental case running around a school playground kissing small children "harmless," or, for that matter, some degenerate incel in a jockstrap flashing his dick and asshole at teenage girls. 

Looking at stuff like this, it's easy to see how my fellow GenXers, free-range kids raised by the "Eh, you'll be fine," school of child-rearing, went on to become hyper-vigilant control freaks once they had children. While I am eternally grateful that I grew up before helicopter parenting was a thing, still, I understand how and why it came about. 

We've seen and heard some shit, y'all.        

Speaking of some shit, this little item is from the July 29, 1982 edition of The Ferdinand News:

Heheheheheheheh, "marijuana trip." I kinda want to read Dr. Curt Scarborough's Basics on Abused Drugs, because anti-drug literature from the 1970s and '80s is a hoot! It's often peppered with phrases like "smoking grass" (I love it when old people call it "grass"!) and "all hopped up on the dope." Totally reminds me of the scene in Better Off Dead where Lane's dad, reading from a book titled Youth and the Drug Explosion, attempts to "rap" with his son.    

Of course, seeing as it was 1982, the warnings in Dr. Scarborough's book would soon be rendered obsolete on the day Nancy Reagan launched her "Just Say No to Drugs" campaign. Sure, people scoffed at the time, but you know what? Her efforts totally paid off. She single-handedly eradicated all drug abuse and addiction in the United States. Everyone immediately quit doing everything all at once. Kids started going to church and doing their homework instead of smoking doobs and hanging at the arcade. Strung-out yuppies flushed all their cocaine down the crapper and drank herbal tea. Famous punk artists quit heroin en masse and joined various religious orders. It's all completely true. 

So hey -- thanks, Nance!

The '80s were a trip, man.

VISIT TO MHA 
5/23/2026

John and I took a trip to MHA (my old boarding school) over Memorial Day weekend. We stayed at an adorable bed and breakfast in Jasper, reminding me how much nicer and cleaner B&B's are than mid-range hotels. 

The campus is as beautiful and serene as ever. While the dormitory is now gone--MHA closed in 2000--most everything else there is still the same, aside from the old art department building, which now houses a charming little on-site brewery. 

When we visited last summer, I noticed an abundance of painted rocks placed around the monastery grounds, so I thought I'd bring some of my own.

I painted a giraffe for Angela--she loved giraffes....

....and left it in the grotto...

Church bells signaling Saturday evening mass in downtown Ferdinand
echo throughout the campus. 

Poignant sign among the vigil lights.

I painted a few rocks bearing the old MHA logo....

(NOTE: the school was called Academy Immaculate Conception until the early '70s, 

when they rebranded as Marian Heights Academy.)

Ancient yearbook pic for reference, with the old dorms in the background.

I left my heart in Ferdinand, Indiana....

...along with a few strawberries.

The final resting place for the sisters of the monastery.

We took a stroll over to the colonnades, and I posted up on the wall overlooking the nuns' cemetery and the town of Ferdinand. Not gonna lie, this exact spot where I'm perched right here? Probably one of my top three favorite locations on earth. As a student, it's where I used to steal away for some "me time" when I wanted to journal, think, or just be. Nearly 40 years later, the feels are the same.   

Aerial photo of the campus, taken not by me.

 

"That you are here, that life exists....that the powerful play 

goes on and you may contribute a verse."

Well it seems 2020 has turned me into one of those weepy middle-aged fraus who are perpetually hand-wringing over relatives and friends who are sick, dying, or deceased, but in the words of Hard Harry, SO BE IT.  

Two days ago I got word that Mr. Duane Verkamp--my favorite teacher from my beloved alma mater Marian Heights Academy--recently passed away from pneumonia. Fuck this fucking year. 

Me with Mr. Verkamp and his wife Maureen

at MHA Alumni Weekend, summer 2000.

In truth, Mr. Verkamp was so much more than just my favorite teacher, but it's near impossible to explain what that means to anyone who didn't know him. The only way to sort of explain it--to people from my generation, anyway--is to picture Mr. Keating from Dead Poets Society, but like a mellow hippie Boomer version. And instead of a New England boys' prep school in the 1950s, the setting was an all-girls Catholic boarding school in rural Indiana in the late 1980s - early 1990s. (Also, we weren't sneaking into the woods at midnight to read poetry to each other; we were sneaking into the woods to smoke and/or make out with our townie boyfriends. But that's another story.)   

A few photos from my high school yearbook, 1990-91 (junior year)

Jeez, could they have made the faculty photos 

look any more like mug shots? 

In addition to teaching English, Mr. V was also my forensics coach.

(Forensics club was what most other high schools called debate team.)

And then there's me at 17. 

I was a naughty Catholic schoolgirl before it was cool.

There's really not much I am able to put into words at the moment; grief has made me its bitch. All I can say is that an amazing human being is gone and I'm heartbroken and I didn't picture it happening this way. In the words of that song, I always thought that I'd see him again. 

I think I've earned the right to post this: