A Legacy Project

I got my picture in the yearbook. Of course, if you were there on picture day, your mugshot went in the school yearbook, one of the freshmen, sophomore, junior, senior class photos, in alphabetical order. That photo of me was in there, between Anita Arnold and John Beck. This particular photo was me wearing a football uniform. I wasn’t on the football team, and it wasn’t a Freeland High School uniform. I was dressed up as a Hemlock Huskie football player, Freeland’s opponent in that year’s homecoming game. That year, 1966, I was the inspiration for the FHS freshman class float in the homecoming parade. At the meeting where we brainstormed ideas, Eddie Maurer looked at me and had an idea. Maybe he had just read Moby Dick (not likely) or the book of Jonah (even less likely). “Let’s whale ‘em,” he said. “You know, like crush those guys.” He pointed at me and said, “We’ll dress Bailey up as a Hemlock Huskie and put him in the mouth of a whale.” Everyone liked the idea. They needed someone small, someone whale-bite-size. I was the smallest boy in my class. I said yes. It would be five minutes of fame. 

The float-building group met on school nights at Eddie’s house out on Freeland Road. He had a barn and a farm wagon. Vern Stephen’s dad had tractors. My classmates built a giant whale out of chicken wire and good and crepe paper, with its big mouth wide open. On the side of the float was a sign, “Let’s Whale ‘Em!” When it came time for the parade, early on a Friday night that fall, I climbed into the whale’s mouth wearing the blue and white Huskie jersey and helmet. The parade snaked through town, north on Main Street, then east on Washington, then south Seventh Street to the high school. It was more than five minutes. More like fifteen, and, to be honest, it wasn’t much fun. The mouth was barely big enough, or I was barely small enough, to fit comfortably in a whale’s mouth. And, in a way I couldn’t have put into words then, I felt objectified. I was meat. I sort of knew how the queen and her court must have felt, parading through town in those convertibles Burt Watson Chevrolet and Bill Hacket Ford provided, objects of beauty and grace. But, in a real sense, objects. I had allowed myself to be used as an object of humor. 

Worst of all, when the yearbook came out six months later, the small black and white photo in the homecoming section didn’t do me justice. You could barely make out my face. And there was no caption. Meat.