WE`RE ABOUT TO CONSIDER A 25TH high school class reunion. But there will be no longing passages of nostalgia here, no pseudo-literary reflections on youthful follies and lost innocence.
We start instead with this proposition: The best you can usually take away from a 25th class reunion is a well-earned hangover, a pocketful of business cards and a lot of anecdotal but inconclusive impressions. What you cannot take away, through all the shrieks, kisses and hugs, is a sense of what the whole class is today. And without this, you have nothing against which to measure yourself.
Compare this to the life you left behind 25 years ago. What a tidy affair school was! All manner of mischief and achievement was tracked, evaluated and logged into your ”record.” But none of this stood alone. Every statistic you generated was measured against the group. Out of this came the infamous
”class curve,” the one statistical absolute that told you with severe finality where you stood. Of all the things that bind a bunch of kids into a high school class-age, kicks, music, friendship and time-the most powerful may well be the class curve. It`s the string to the pearls. But graduation snaps this bond. Kids sever high school ties, scatter around the country and find the main themes of their adult lives on their own. Years go by, and no one keeps score. Then one day you open your mail, and there`s the invitation to your 25th high school class reunion. The timing couldn`t be more symmetrical. At 42, more or less, your graduation is about as far in the past as your retirement is in the future. A 25th reunion is more than a party. It`s the midterm exam of your life camouflaged as a sock hop. But there`s one problem with this exam. Where`s the class curve? How do you know where you stand?
I graduated from New Trier High School in 1960, and when my 25th reunion came along five years ago, I grew curious about all this. I wanted to know about the things that most reunions are too polite to ask: money, sex, careers, values. Our lives in high school were well-documented. I wanted to extend that documentation and learn the extremes and norms of our attitudes and accomplishments. And I wanted to know where I stood in this extended class curve. So I made up a list of questions, sent them out to everyone on the class list and considered the results in a Tribune Tempo story of Sept. 21, 1986.
One thing is clear: the Class of 1960 was definitely a product of the placid `50s, not the activist `60s. The `60s came upon us slowly. By the time the decade had acquired its cachet of youthful revolt, we were apparently no longer youthful. Though only 24, give or take a year or two, in 1966, most of us were married and moving along family and career tracks. Our train pulled out of the station just the before the big parade began. By the late `60s we didn`t have the time, the inclination or the particular sort of courage it takes to reject consensus and be agents of social change. My questions about my class were answered.
By contrast, the Class of 1965 left New Trier and walked directly into the big flashpoints of that rocky decade. During its four years at college (86 percent of the class graduated from college), war protest became a mass movement, drugs became penny candy and a counterculture of music, art and ideas reduced traditional American values to kitsch. How did all this touch the kids of `65? Last July 21 that class got together to make a night of it. Did they come to their 25th reunion with a profile of values and lifestyles fundamentally different from those of my class? Though I knew none of them personally, I wondered about the curve of the Class of `65 in 1990. So shortly before the reunion, the questions I had asked of my 1960 peers were sent to 500 of the original 1,160 members of the `65 class. More than a third came back from all over America plus London and Paris, an impressive response by most survey standards, though not as extraordinary as the 58-percent response of the Class of `60.
The New Trier Class of `65 is a random but not scientific sampling of part of America`s first post-World-War-II generation. It is not a
representative model of the whole U.S. population. It does not embrace the poor or the working class or reflect the unique concerns of blacks, Hispanics, gays or other politically active ”minorities,” save for one striking exception-women. But it does represent a cross-section of what might loosely be called the broad ”leadership class” of the country-the educated, the middle and upper-middle classes, the managers, the lawyers, the people who vote in elections, read newspapers and pay off 30-year mortgages. These are the men and women who, more than any other single age group, have shaped American culture, values and lifestyles through the `80s and into the `90s.
Whatever privilege New Trier may have offered them, it did not immunize them against failure or spare them responsibility for what they became. Here are the Young Upward Professionals who are not quite young anymore. They could have come from any good public school system.
If you belong to the Class of `65-any class of `65-you may find something of your own class characteristics in the portrait that the New Trier Class of `65 limned of itself in the following categories.
Money
The estimated total worth of the New Trier Class of `65 is an impressive $650 million, or an average of $666,443 for each of the class members. Considering the top figure of $5 million (17 percent of the class are millionaires) and the bottom figure of $20,000, the mean net-worth amount is $350,000.
To put these figures in perspective, someone in his or her early 40s who has owned a home for 15 years, contributed to IRAs or been vested in a profit- sharing program and owned a few bonds or stocks, may be pleasantly surprised to rank well with this group. ”A worth of $350,000 can be a fairly typical upper-middle-class situation by one`s early 40s,” says Mike Kabarek, a Palatine financial consultant and Money magazine consultant who also happens to be a member of the Mundelein/Carmel Class of `65. ”It`s not rich by any means. Probably $200,000 of it is in a house. But it`s certainly not an unusually high figure.”
What kinds of income produce such assets? The men`s annual income ranges from $10,000 to $750,000; the average is $109,000, and the mean, $70,000. Among the women, 78 percent say they are not full-time homemakers, and more than 42 percent describe themselves as ”professionals” (up from 32 percent in the Class of `60). Yet their average income is a relatively low $38,808, barely more than a third of the corresponding men`s figure. The disparity may be the result of wage discrimination and other factors and could also be taken as an indication that many women work on a part-time basis, mostly to supplement family income.
More than 52 percent of the class are part of two-income households. The combined annual incomes range from $30,000 to $500,000, with the average combined paycheck coming in at more than $118,000 and the median at $90,500. Though the women outearn the men in more than 11 percent of these households and in 6 percent contribute half of the combined incomes, it is far more typical for the women`s share to range from 20 percent to 40 percent of the total income.
In high school the road to college was paved with good grades. But what about grades as a predictor of income after college? For the Class of `65, the ”B” grade seems to be the anointed letter. Grouped in grade categories from ”D” to ”A,” both men and women who were ”B” students show the highest average personal incomes today-about $154,000 for the men and $54,000 for the women. Incomes fall off sharply for those in the ”C” and lower groups and, oddly enough, also among ”A” students, although the samples here are too small to justify any conclusions.
If you think the members of this Class of `65, being from New Trier Township, were simply fed such wealth from the proverbial silver spoon, you`re mistaken. They began their earning years after college humbly, at an average annual income of about $12,500, which was within the range of the average figure of a college graduate around 1970. Seventy percent of both men and women have changed jobs one to five times. Fewer than 10 percent have held the same job, and fewer than a fifth have changed jobs six or more times. The largest job category is ”professional”; the smallest, ”government/
military.” Fourteen percent are independent business people, and 9 percent, all men, have founded companies employing 50 or more people.
Interestingly enough, these New Trier students were as vague in 1965 about their futures as any other bunch of high school kids. Among the men, only 17 percent say they knew then what they wanted to be when they grew up. Fifty-nine percent had no clear career ambitions during their years at New Trier. One person adds this remark, ”I still don`t know.” Although few probably doubted for a moment that they would have the same or a better standard of living as that of their parents, it`s clear that most of them didn`t have the faintest idea how they were going to manage this. Like most kids born into the postwar economic boom, perpetual prosperity was simply an entitlement by birth, like the family car and summer vacation. Women were a little more self-directed, but only slightly more so. Whatever was to lead the Class of `65 to its prosperity, few could say, when they were high school students, how that prosperity was to be achieved.
Moreover, when asked whether their ultimate career choice was
”influenced by family tradition or the opportunity to follow in parents`
footsteps,” 52 percent of the men and 75 percent of the women flatly say
”no.” Among the men, in fact, another 14 percent insist that they
”specifically avoided” the family business. Such independence evidently has paid off. Those who went their own way significantly outearn those who followed Dad. In fact, those men who ”specifically avoided” their parent`s footsteps make an average $144,000 a year, compared to $84,000 for the 17 percent who followed the family tradition. Most say they have a standard of living equal to (44 percent) or better than (38 percent) the one they enjoyed under their parents. Only 17 percent say they live less well, although several say that this is because they have chosen a less materialistic lifestyle and consider their quality of life enhanced, not diminished.
Sex and marriage
Family life for the Class of `65 has been pretty placid, at least compared to that of the population at large. About 82 percent of the class are still married at the time of the survey, whether for the first, second or (for 3 percent of this group) third time. No woman married before the age of 18, and no man before 19. About a third have seen marriage counselors along the way. Although the average woman of both the `60 and `65 classes first married at the average age of 23.6, the typical man in the Class of `65 waited longer. In 1960 he was 24.5 on his wedding day; in 1965 he was well over 26 and presumably wiser for his patience. Perhaps there was less social or sexual pressure to marry young by 1965. Maybe there were more things to do first.
Whatever the reason, it may help explain one surprising development among the men. The divorce rate for the men of the Class of `60 ran 24 percent, which was really not so scandalous. But for the Class of `65, the rate among men sank to an almost Victorian 14 percent. The `65 women`s divorce rate also fell, though in both classes it remained higher than the men`s. Ten percent have never married, compared to 3 percent of their male classmates.
As for children, 2 is the magic number or, more precisely, 2.24. This is consistent with the group`s general sense of moderation on family issues. Barely 2 percent of the women and none of the men admit to parenthood outside of marriage. And most took their time about having kids after getting married. The average woman waited nearly six years, until just past 29; the average man, until past 30. Twenty-nine percent of the women have had abortions, up from only 10 percent in the Class of `60. Unlike their counterparts of 1960, these women graduated from college into a society newly liberated by Roe vs. Wade. Still, among those who have had abortions, 41 percent had them illegally before 1973.
The 1965 women have sampled most of the basic birth-control methods, from the pill (11 percent) to the diaphragm (19 percent). Surprisingly, 33 percent of the `65 women (and 36 percent of the `60 women) have ended their childbearing years through sterilization. This is consistent with national figures, according to Susan Tew of the Guttmacher Institute for Reproductive Research. ”Sterilization is the top method in terms of the number of women relying on it and the percentage of women using any birth control.” (She also notes the rise in male sterilization, and indeed 14 percent of the men of the `65 class have had a vasectomy, compared to 10 percent of the men of `60.)
As for regrets, very few are expressed for having had children. As for the 21 percent of women who for whatever reasons have remained childless, 57 percent of this group say they regret ”not having children.”
