Tag: reunions

The Arc and The Arch: Part Three

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In February 2024, John, Sharon, Tom, and I sat around a half-moon-shaped booth in Phoenix, devouring yummy, syrup-soaked, gluten-free waffles and nursing hot mugs of coffee at Jewel’s Bakery and Cafe.

They had been in town for a church retreat over a three-day weekend and were about to return their rental car to Sky Harbor Airport. Breakfast together was our sendoff before they flew home to St. Louis.

“Oh, did you see Nancy’s post on Facebook? There’s gonna be a Class of ’75, Affton High School, 50th reunion sometime, somewhere next September in St. Louis,” I reported.

“You guys should definitely do it. ” Sharon chimed in. “The four of us should go together! Don’t worry about Tom and me. We’ll keep each other company.”

“Sure. Why not!?” Tom agreed.

“I’m in if you’re in,” John stared directly at me. He and I were close junior and high school pals in Affton, though his family moved north, away to another St. Louis area school district before our senior year.

“Okay,” I concluded. “The journalist inside me is telling me we should go.”

Our scheme–hatched in Phoenix, to be realized more than a year and a half later in St. Louis–was born.

***

The sometime was 5 to 9 p.m. on September 21, 2025. The somewhere? Grant’s Farm, a rambling, forested 281-acre estate in south suburban St. Louis, named for Ulysses S. Grant and owned by the Busch family.

Specifically, our 50th reunion would occur in the Bauernhof Courtyard area there. It’s an old-world community space where–since its opening in 1954–St. Louisans have gathered to sample Anheuser-Busch products, and amble down hallways of vintage horse carriages past Clydesdale stables. It is an iconic St. Louis destination, draped in mid-twentieth-century nostalgia.

With the threat of showers in the air, John, Sharon, Tom and I arrived in the Grant’s Farm parking lot just before 5 p.m. Immediately, I began to spot familiar faces. I hugged Terri and Beth, two classmates I hadn’t seen in decades. We boarded a tram that would transport us through the woods to the Bauernhof. I inhaled the fresh-yet-familiar, dampness of the lush green forest.

The long-awaited immersion into my past Affton High School life–connecting one leg of my past as a seventeen-year-old, long-haired (remember, it was the 1970s), reserved, enterprising, unactualized gay adolescent with the other leg of my present much older, wiser, grayer, gayer, literary self–was about to commence.

When we arrived at the Bauernhof Courtyard entrance, we stepped out of the tram towards an archway. Nancy, our cheerful, detail-minded Class of ’75 organizer, greeted us with hugs.

We formed a line to check in and pick up drink tickets. Affton attendees (in this case, John and me) received name tags bearing our black-and-white high school yearbook photos. Significant others, such as Sharon and Tom, got tags with an image of a cougar beside their names. (The cougar is the Affton High School mascot.)

John and I proceeded through the line with our “cougar spouses” toward the courtyard. A photographer snapped photos as couples and singles entered. In that moment, as I turned to see the line queuing behind me, I spotted someone significant I had hoped to see. Not a fellow student, but a teacher I admired from my high school years. It was Judy Rethwisch, my drama teacher.

The high school version of me would have faded and stepped back, reticent to make a scene or a visible statement. But the confident me–the sixty-eight-year-old gay man with his husband by his side–stepped forward to reconnect with Judy.

“I want you to know what a positive difference you have made in my artistic life,” I smiled and reached forward to hug her. “With you at the helm, I found my peeps in the theatre program at Affton,” I went on. In a flash, I recounted roles I played in productions of Fiddler on the Roof and Gypsy under Judy’s dedication and tutelage.

Judy smiled and listened intently as Tom captured a few photos of us locked in conversation. She told me she is still teaching drama. Sixty-one years as an educator. Still vibrant. Still making a difference in the lives of other aspiring actors, musicians, and artists. She asked for my card and told me she is interested in reading one of my books. That was just the beginning of a stream of seminal reunion moments.

I quickly rediscovered a parade of classmates coming and going all around me. Some were fuzzy in my memory. Others, like Jon, more meaningful. He was a good friend in high school, who traveled to Colorado with John and me after our junior year of high school.

Suddenly, I was transported to August 1974. Somehow, the three of us had convinced our parents, that we–one seventeen-year-old and two sixteen-year-old boys–would be safe driving and camping together across country in John’s AMC Javelin, pulling a small trailer.

Yes, we were underage and found someone to buy us lots of Coors beer, which we swilled by the campfire at night. But we survived intact. I recall vividly shoveling down steak and eggs for breakfast in a bar somewhere in Wyoming, while in the corner of the tavern, Richard Nixon, was announcing his resignation on a beat-up black-and-white TV.

Back at the reunion, other male and female classmates trailed by to greet each under the courtyard tent. It featured a beautiful crystal chandelier that hung in the center of the space.

Soon a line formed at a barbeque buffet. We juggled our drinks and grabbed plates, before landing at one end of a long rectangular table Tom and Sharon had secured.

At one point, I turned, and Jeff appeared. He and I were pals, who shared a few classes. We ate together frequently in our high school cafeteria. Honestly, these memories are vague for me. But I remembered his handsome face. It hadn’t changed much, given the fifty-year gap in our connection.

When Jeff introduced his long-time partner Lee to Tom and me, I felt my past and present lives coalesce. Neither Jeff nor I were aware of the other’s sexual orientation in high school. Sadly, that was the norm for 1975 for unrealized, unfulfilled, budding gay adolescents.

But knowing that against the tide of social norms we had each found happiness with our male partners and had independently decided to return to the reunion was physical proof why I had come to the Class of 1975 reunion. I needed to fully reconcile my past closeted self with the authentic gay man I had become.

A little later in the evening, Tom returned to our table and said emphatically: “I can’t tell you why, but you need to go to the dessert table right now.”

Of course, I listened to my husband and followed suit. When I arrived there, I discovered Nancy and Jim (the reunion organizer and her husband) had brought two of my books–From Fertile Ground and Tales of a Rollercoaster Operator–to display there for all to see.

I don’t know that I gasped, but it felt like I did. To be appreciated for my writing that way, left me speechless in the moment. It was a lovely gesture, authored by Nancy and Jim. Another phenomenal moment, which connected one leg of my life with another.

Before the reunion came to a close and we boarded the tram, all of the Class of 1975 Affton High School classmates–about 120 of us in attendance–stood on a wobbly set of risers for a group picture. (Earlier in the evening, a large poster bearing the names and photos of our forty-nine classmates who have passed graced a corner of the same stage.)

Certainly, the wrinkles and gray hair for those of us who have survived into our late sixties were apparent on the evening of Sunday, September 21, 2025. But the smiles and fun-loving community spirit superseded all of that. Our hearts were full.

***

After treating John and Sharon to breakfast Monday morning, Tom and I had a few hours on our own before we needed to make our way to the St. Louis airport for the trip home to Arizona. There were a few loose ends for us to tie together.

First, we drove to Left Bank Books in the central west end of St. Louis to browse the stacks. It’s a renowned, LGBTQ-friendly, independent bookstore we had planned to visit on the morning of our shared sixtieth birthday. But after I suffered a mild heart attack that day–in the city where I was born–our lives took a vastly different path. Fortunately, we survived that experience together.

Appropriately, our final stop in St. Louis was the Gateway Arch. In the late 1970s, during my collegiate years, I was a National Park Service history interpreter there. Giving tours of the Museum of Westward Expansion, welcoming visitors to the top of the Arch, and–from time to time–introducing a fascinating documentary film about the construction of the Arch, called Monument to the Dream.

The film chronicles the beauty and simplicity of Eero Saarinen’s winning design, but also the herculean effort required for a diligent crew to erect the monument through all sorts of weather conditions.

On a warm autumn day when the Arch was completed–October 28, 1965–the crew sprayed a steady stream of water on the south leg, which was expanding in the heat, to allow the capstone–the final piece at the top between the two legs–to be wedged in and joined permanently.

In a symbolic sense, that is what this later-in-life St. Louis reunion with friends and family means to me.

Call it the arc of life or the Arch of life. Either way these sixty-something years began in Missouri, brought me to Chicago for a long career and life as a single father, and carried me to Arizona with my husband. There we have discovered a rewarding artistic life together among new and old friends–our chosen family–even as our freedoms and institutions in the America we still love are threatened by fascism.

Along the way, the highs and lows have transported me to a profound place of greater gratitude and understanding, which I have earned.

It is a welcome destination that once felt out of reach.

On Monday, September 22, 2025, Tom captured this photo of me leaning against the base of the north leg of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri.

The Arc and The Arch: Part Two

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Spotty storm clouds gathered in the distance on the morning of Saturday, September 20. Tom and I drove northwest twenty miles, across the Missouri River.

Our destination was Breeze Park in Weldon Spring, Missouri. My cousin Phyllis–a retired teacher–is convalescing there, hoping to regain her strength after a series of health complications.

Phyllis’ mother Violet and my father Walter were twins born in St. Louis. It was 1913. More than fifty years later, the Gateway Arch would rise and transform the St. Louis riverfront. Teetering warehouses once stood on cobblestone streets there, in this fur-trading town founded just west of the Mississippi River in 1764.

In the arc of life, Phyllis and I (both Baby Boomers) also arrived–she in 1947, I in 1957–before the historic completion of the Arch, our nation’s tallest monument, on October 28, 1965.

But today I reflect on our personal connection. Like me, Phyllis and her husband Tom also raised two sons born in the 1980s. Austin and Bryant are now in their early forties and late thirties respectively. A touch younger than my son Nick; a shade older than my son Kirk.

Now in their late seventies, Tom and Phyllis are meeting the healthcare challenges of life head on. Negotiating the unpleasantness of aging and inherent losses (their lovable golden retriever Truman passed recently). They are doing their best to push ahead. To stay hopeful. Or as my mother–a child of the Depression–would have said “trying to keep a stiff upper lip.”

Given these developments, I wanted to spend time with them while we were in the St. Louis area. Especially because–beyond my sister Diane who now lives in northern Illinois–they are the closest remaining strands of family from my Missouri years: 1957 to 1980 … my Tales of a Rollercoaster Operator years.

On Saturday, when my husband and I arrived just past 9:30, we wound our way down halls, past friendly staff and other visitors, to Phyllis’ room. She was delighted to see us. So was her Tom. He arrived a few minutes later with a big smile and box of gooey pastries for us to share.

The next two hours were a heart-warming oasis of conversation and listening between the four of us. We spent our time commiserating over the latest news, but–more importantly–strengthening our family bond during a challenging period for them personally.

Phyllis is hoping to return to their home soon in nearby St. Charles. As anyone would, she is missing the familiarity and comfort of her life. Longing for peace away from medical equipment and disruptive procedures. Her kind, caregiving husband is also searching for peace.

Before Tom and I left, we hugged and took photos together outside on a beautiful, flower-laden patio at Breeze Park. I kissed Phyllis on the cheek. A few tears materialized for both of us, not knowing what tomorrow will bring.

At the least, we shared those upbeat Saturday moments, built upon our 1960s memories of our once-vital, long-gone boisterous St. Louis relatives gathering around us every Christmas, Easter, and Independence Day.

To our credit, in our later years, long after our sons became adults, we have formed reciprocal connections. Most notably, Phyllis, Tom and their family joined Tom and me for an Italian dinner in St. Louis in route to our new home in Arizona in July 2017.

Now they share stories and photos via text of their four growing grandchildren, and I write stories about my St. Louis origins, which she has encouraged, helped inspire, read, and followed diligently.

All of this, through a period of uncertainty, sustains us in our sixty-and-seventy-something years across the miles.

***

Just after noon Saturday, Tom and I returned to Creve Coeur. We landed in the driveway of our friends John and Sharon.

We were about to share the rest of the weekend with them and their loyal eight-year-old-shepherd-beagle-mix Nickel at their stylish, mid-century home … hike with John through a dense forested area overlooking Creve Coeur Lake, then get caught in the rain in historic downtown St. Charles … drive into St. Louis for a Cardinals/Brewers game at Busch Stadium Saturday night … and still later, on Sunday evening, attend our Class of 1975 Affton High School reunion together at Grant’s Farm.

The clouds cleared Saturday evening and ushered in cooler temperatures. Seated together with close friends at Busch Stadium, three levels up directly behind home plate, it didn’t seem to matter that my beloved Cardinals lost 3-2.

Yes, it was the latest evidence in a disappointing sub-par year. But on the horizon, beyond the stadium’s outfield walls, the twilight of a blue sky and puffy clouds perfectly framed the Gateway Arch at the center.

Architect Eero Saarinen’s monument to a dream is still standing, rising above the cobblestones and the fray, as it approaches its sixtieth birthday.

On a September Sunday Morning in St. Louis

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All of us are required to play roles in society, especially to earn a living. We project a persona that may or may not align with who we are or what we value. We wear masks.

Of course, in a pandemic some us wear them more than others in public situations. But in my post-corporate sixties–even if I’m donning a face covering for physical protection–I prefer to spend time with people who are genuine. I don’t have the patience for games or innuendoes.

My need for authenticity has roots that wind back to my formative years. In the 1970s, as a budding-but-denying gay adolescent who had unnamed feelings for other boys and wasn’t allowed to express them, my personal development was frozen in time.

Imagine closing off one portion of your identity entirely with no light, voice or path encouraging you to explore it. None of the relationship rites of passage for straight kids–flirting, dating, parties, dances–were available to gay and lesbian kids in the 70s.

In my middle school years, I became close with Daniel. There was a lot I liked about him: his intelligence, his quirkiness, his dimples, his love of language and the arts.

On occasion, Daniel came over to my house after school. We played board games or simply talked about school and the teachers we liked. We never acted physically on the bond and attraction we shared.

I remember that Mom and Dad liked Daniel … and Daniel admired some of my parents’ most endearing qualities: my father’s exuberance and sensitivity; my mother’s kindness and sensibility.

In seventh grade, I was the spelling bee champion for Mackenzie Junior High School. I represented our school at the St. Louis-area finals. Each student was allowed to bring one friend in addition to his or her family. My choice was Daniel. I remember him sitting in the audience that day in April 1970. It felt like he belonged there, like he was a part of my family.

Not long after I lost the spelling bee, a few boys at school must have recognized something about the care and closeness Daniel and I demonstrated for each other in the halls and in the classroom. They spewed venom. They bullied us physically and verbally. It hurt me deeply and pushed me further into the darkness.

Daniel and I remained friends in eighth grade and beyond, but we spent less time with each other as a result of that trauma and feelings of vulnerability that surfaced. Our paths crossed only rarely in high school even though we both performed in plays and musicals.

Looking back, it was a survival strategy for me to pull away from Daniel, but I always regretted that we never had a chance to be authentic with one another or to talk about the elephant in the room … the experience of being chastised for being different.

That would change on a September Sunday morning in St. Louis.

***

In August 2021, I contacted Daniel online to tell him that I wanted to reconnect with him while I was in St. Louis for the Six Flags reunion. (We hadn’t seen each other since 1995, and then it was just a brief hello at our twentieth high school reunion.)

Daniel loved the idea. So, on Sunday, September 5, 2021–before Tom and I left Missouri to drive to the Chicago area to see our sisters and my son Kirk–we met him for coffee at a place he recommended. The three of us spent an hour together talking on the patio of a lovely cafe in the Soulard neighborhood of St. Louis.

For the first time, I was able to tell Daniel how awful I felt about the way our friendship was derailed. That led to a deeper discussion about other boys who were tormented to worse outcomes. But that wasn’t the entirety of our conversation. It was just one moment in a warm exchange with each of us … Daniel, Tom and me … sharing stories of our careers, families, and adventures. The bonus for me was watching and listening as my husband and my first boyfriend discussed their favorite films.

Before Tom and I departed, we invited Daniel to come visit us in the Phoenix area. As we left the cafe, I hugged Daniel and said goodbye. I truly believe there will be another chapter to our friendship. Maybe it will happen in Phoenix. Maybe it will happen in St. Louis.

Either way, on my Midwest journey in 2021, I was able to tie together a few more of the disparate ends of my past rollercoaster life to my more fully actualized Arizona existence, and for that I am grateful.

Midwest Reunion: Part One

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It rained most of September 4, 2021, in eastern Missouri. Fortunately, scattered-but-heavy showers didn’t wash away our plans.

At nine a.m., Tom and I drove north thirty minutes from our room at Hampton Inn Valley Park to visit my cousin Phyllis and her family in their St. Charles, Missouri home.

After we exchanged hugs, Phyllis’ husband Tom prepared homemade blueberry-and-apple pancakes. We volleyed catch-up stories between the kitchen and family room, while their golden retriever Truman sidled up to Tom and me on the couch, placed each of his front paws in our laps, and stole our hearts.

For the next two hours eleven of us–spread across three generations–gathered around a rectangular kitchen table framed by angled windows and a lush backyard.

The two Toms, Phyllis and I represented the senior set. Amanda, Austin, Kelsey, and Bryant smiled and shared stories of their thirty-something, heavy-lifting, career-and-child-rearing years. They shepherded and cradled: three-year-old Ava, who danced around the table in her princess gown; adorable one-year-old Violet, who is learning to walk; and baby Brooks born in July with a head of hair.

It was a treat for me to spend time with them all, the entirety of my Johnson family connection that remains in the St. Louis area.

Thankfully, the reunion around Phyllis’ and Tom’s table superseded our previous encounter at an Italian restaurant in St. Louis on July 5, 2017. It was one day before I suffered a mild heart attack as Tom and I walked to Left Bank Books in St. Louis’ central west end to see my book of light-hearted Missouri stories on the shelf.

***

When we left St. Charles just before noon, I pointed our rental car southeast. Tom typed the address for Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery into his smartphone to find the most direct route to my parents’ graves.

Ironically, our most recent visit to the rolling hills of white marble grave markers on the banks of the Mississippi River was four years ago–the same day we last saw Phyllis and Tom. But on this occasion–September 4–we were in town on what would have been Dad’s and Mom’s seventy-third wedding anniversary.

I had hoped to stop somewhere for a small bunch of flowers to leave on their graves. That never happened. Instead, we arrived at the cemetery entrance empty handed, made two right turns and one left, drove past the chapel, traveled up a hill, and parked our rental car under a tree.

About the time we arrived, the rain paused. We walked a hundred steps or so to DD 355, where Dad and Mom are buried near a large oak tree. As Tom and I surveyed the grounds and knelt quietly, he spotted two acorns side-by-side on top of the wet grass on Mom’s side of the marker.

Before we left, I placed the acorns on top of the marker in honor of their wedding anniversary.

I suppose even in the solemn solitude of a cemetery the strength of our family ties endure and life goes on.

My parents, Walter A. Johnson and Helen F. Johnson, are buried at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery south of St. Louis, Missouri. Walter was a sergeant in the Army, who served in World War II. Mom and Dad met on January 4, 1948 and married on September 4, 1948 in St. Louis. Walter died one week shy of his eightieth birthday, on November 26, 1993. Helen passed away on January 26, 2013. She was eighty-nine years old.

Midwest Bound

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Tom and I are flying to St. Louis tomorrow. On Saturday, I will attend an outdoor reunion of Six Flags Over Mid-America’s circa-1970s employees. About 200 of us will gather to mark the 50th anniversary of the amusement park in the rolling hills of Eureka, Missouri thirty miles southwest of the Gateway Arch that towers over the Mississippi River.

Now called Six Flags St. Louis, the theme park is where I landed my first job in 1974. It’s where I learned to “drive” the River King Mine Train, the park’s first rollercoaster. It’s also where I began to navigate life’s ups and downs. Who knew the experience for three summers would become a metaphor and catalyst for a book I would write more than forty years later?

This will be my first trip to St. Louis since July 2017. I’m overdue to write a new and rejuvenating chapter in my original hometown … one that doesn’t include heart trauma and a personal detour that spawned uncertainty on my sixtieth birthday.

I’m excited and a little anxious about this journey, given the relentlessness of our global pandemic. But Tom and I have been fully vaccinated and will mask up for this adventure.

No doubt, the trip will reignite a flame of familiar faces and memories. I expect there will also be a few surprises and a mix of bittersweet feelings and observations seen through blended bifocals and sixty-four-year-old eyes. We’ll see.

After the Missouri reunion–plus a visit to my parents’ graves at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery, a few hours reconnecting with my cousin Phyllis in St. Charles, and coffee with a St. Louis friend I haven’t seen for more than twenty-five years–Tom and I will drive to Chicago to see my son Kirk and our sisters Sharon and Diane.

We haven’t visited the Windy City … a place I called home from 1980 to 2017 … or spent time with our siblings in the suburbs there since June of 2019. Of course, the pandemic is the culprit that accounts for that gap.

I wrote the poem that follows five years ago. In 2017, it first appeared in Tales of a Rollercoaster Operator, my book of reflective, light-hearted, growing-up-in-Missouri stories.

Perhaps these words will resonate with you–wherever you were born, wherever you call home. The poem certainly has special meaning for me as I return to visit my homes in Missouri and Illinois that account for most of the first sixty years of my life, before Tom and I created this warmer, lighter, and simpler life in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert.

***

Coming Home

I saw you there day after day. We were together leaving the station. We made our way around the track. But now I don’t see you anymore. Where have you gone familiar ones? Could it be you left the track and vanished? Am I alone looking down from my perch? Are the markers and signs all that remain? What became of the rises and falls? Have you left me in charge to man the controls? Am I enough to carry this forward? Why have you brought me back here? Oh, that’s right. I remember now. I was on a journey. I was coming home.

I wore this badge for three summers (1974-1976) as a rollercoaster operator at Six Flags Over Mid-America in Eureka, Missouri.