It’s been a long time since I was a high school student. While I realize in the grand scheme of things 20 years is not the longest amount of time in the world, it has been more than two decades now since I was roaming the halls of my high school alma mater as a student.
Twenty years. In some ways it seems longer, in others it seems like just yesterday I was that carefree student finishing my high school years as the greatest decade wrapped up.
One of the reasons it doesn’t seem that long is because my job requires me to be at current high school events, from ballgames to other functions. When you constantly see high school students going about their business, you sometimes lose track of what year it is.
The students, and especially the student-athletes, I cover keep me young at heart. Believe me, I know the body is no longer young and a recent picture of myself from my senior year I posted on my Facebook page generated a few good-natured laughs.
When I was a senior in high school, I didn’t have a home computer. In fact, we didn’t even have access to the television channels other than the basic ones you received via an antennae until after I was out of high school. This, of course, caused me to miss out on one of the greatest inventions of the 1980s in MTV.
During my high school years, I didn’t know what an e-mail was. I didn’t call my friends on a phone small enough to put in my pocket. I didn’t use that same small phone to text them a message about after school activities or what we would do during the weekend.
In 1989, the vehicle I drove had a cassette player in it, not a place for a CD.
Back then, no one read a newspaper on a computer. People still enjoyed their paper the way it was meant to be enjoyed — by holding it in their hands, turning the page and going through it section by section. (The sports section was and always will be first for me.)
Candidates for statewide and national office didn’t rely on websites to help get the word out about their campaigns. Door to door campaigning, at least by candidates on the local level, was still a common practice.
During summer vacations when I was in high school, I actually remember getting letters in the mail from some friends who lived out of our free calling area. Can you imagine that happening now? What student today would dare put a letter in an envelope, put a stamp on it and mail it? It would be completely unheard of.
I’m not one who is going to try and convince you that everything was better in 1989 for that is simply not the case. I don’t think I could get by without e-mail today and the way we put the newspaper together is certainly a lot easier and takes less time.
Yet, I admit to still longing for the final days of the decade of big hair, Izod shirts, Pacman, Magnum, P.I. and moonwalking. Why? Because that was my time and my decade and it will always hold a special place for me. Yes, some things are better today, but nothing will take the place of yesteryear, at least not in my mind and in my heart.
Chris Bridges is an editor with Mainstreet Newspapers. You can reach him at chris@mainstreetnews.com.
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