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I once heard a comedian say that he went to his class reunion, and there were all these old people who claimed to have gone to school with him. The same thing happened to me at my high school's 45th a couple of years ago. Our class of 1960 met in an American Legion Hall in Missouri (a good place for old fogies to congregate). There were all us dumpy 60+ types gathered to reminisce about our suburban scholastic experiences in the days before the conquest of acne.

My fellow alumni all had sticky badges with a copy of their school yearbook photo along with their name. It was sort of creepy seeing first-hand evidence of the ravages of 45 years of time on many of the folks whom I have not laid eyes on since those ghastly days of my "geekdom" (yes, I was an unpopular dweeby little geek in high school). From the expressions of many, who would surreptitiously look at each other's yearbook photo, I gathered I wasn't the only one appalled at the condition of many of our time-ruined classmates. (I, on the other hand, make sure that all the food I eat contains preservatives. This accounts for my continued boyish looks.)

When I went to high school in the 1950s, lo those many years ago, we had a definite social stratification. Those highest on the strata were those who were more like grownups and whose parents had money. The girls with the Jayne Mansfield "headlights" and the jocks with the big physiques and hairy arms and other parts that looked good in the shower were the alpha players. The second tier people were the intelligentsia , the kids who held school council offices, wrote for the school newspaper, and who were generally the teachers' pets. (Of course the latter group included a few of the alpha players and were known as alpha-plus types.)

Then there were the rest of us, which included me. My wife, an outsider who came with me to the reunion, was astonished that many of the people we met would say things like, "Oh, you wouldn't remember me, I wasn't one of the popular kids." However, with a few exceptions, there did seem to be an inverse relationship between a particular alumnus' level of popularity and how young and healthy he or she looked. The alpha gang (girls with Jayne Mansfield headlights and knuckle dragging boy jocks) seemed to have succumbed to the erosion of time somewhat disproportionately to their years (early to mid-sixties). It seems that we who were relatively hairless in high school traded "looking good in the shower" for a somewhat more extended

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