November 10, 1984 (Revisiting the Past)

I'm going back through what comprised my senior year of high school and first semester of college in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Come along for the ride. New posts every day or so mixed in with other things.

November 10, 1984. It was the Saturday after Riverdale's dream of winning the 7-AAA football district title had been thwarted by crosstown rival Oakland, who would use this victory as a springboard to a state title run featuring a backfield filled with some old Mitchell-Neilson Elementary classmates of mine. So, in the end I was happy, but on the November 9, 1984 Friday night I was mad at the outcome. 

There had been a huge pep rally at Riverdale on the morning of the 9th. I had never really had much interest in pep rallies preferring to spend my time under the bleachers talking music with other outcasts, but that senior year I began to take a more active part. I joined my friends in the stands and yelled with the rest. I suppose I was yelling because I knew it would all be ending soon. I didn't care, but I did too. One's senior year of high school is a strange land, a perpetual hokey pokey of one foot out and one foot in. Before the pep rally began one of my friends handed me a trench coat and told me he would signal me at some point and a bunch of us would don the coats and run around the gym. Why we did it is still a huge mystery to me. It was more than a decade before the Columbine massacre so the only things trench coats were associated with (other than keeping the rain off one's self) was spy movies and flashers. It was fun to run around in a big coat for no reason at all. 

The pep rally ended, but we didn't go back to class. My fellow seniors went to the cafeteria where our senior class president Hunter kept up the cheers. It was pandemonium especially when either he or someone else jumped up on to a table and others followed until the table collapsed. No one was injured and the cheering continued. Finally the principal Hulon Watson came and told us that while he admired our spirit, we needed to save some for the game and get back to class. Then we dispersed. It was a borderline riot and is a fond memory. It wasn't enough to inspire a victory though. Here's some newspaper clippings from that week.