A Disturbing High School Discovery

One of the typ­i­cal con­nec­tions on Face­book, one would think, is to schools you used to attend. For me, I’ve been tracked down by a class­mate or two, but I have to admit that this is not the source of most of my con­tacts. I did not enjoy going to my High School, and didn’t ‘fit in’ with any crowd there to speak of. With the sole excep­tion of my Choral Teacher, Richard Disha­roon, I can’t remem­ber very many teach­ers there who made much of an impres­sion on me. At the first chance I could get to take courses at the local col­lege where my mother taught (Tow­son State Uni­ver­sity), I leapt at the oppor­tu­nity, and was thrilled to drive out of the park­ing lot at mid-day to attend classes, most of them in Music, which would be my major in College.

Now, I’m begin­ning to see even more why I didn’t fit in. Yes­ter­day, at the invi­ta­tion of a for­mer class­mate, I joined the group online that rep­re­sents the grad­u­at­ing year from my High School (Pikesville High School, 1978). Con­nected to that group page was some infor­ma­tion about the school, etc. includ­ing a Wikipedia Entry with the his­tory of the place, and a few notable stu­dents who had attended the school. I saw a list of a few names, including :

• David Felin­ton — Mayor of Hunt­ing­ton, West Vir­ginia (2001 to present).
• Jef­frey Kluger — author of Lost Moon: the Per­ilous Voy­age of Apollo 13, the basis of the movie Apollo 13.
• Mark Platt — pro­ducer of Legally Blonde
• Mike Sager, — best-selling author.
• Bert Vogel­stein, M.D. — oncol­o­gist who has been nom­i­nated for Nobel Prize in medicine.
• Ellis Weiner — author and humorist for National Lam­poon and Spy Mag­a­zine

So far, so good. No ser­ial killers or child moles­ters. Then, one jumped out at me, like a bolt of lightning:

• Ken Mehlman — for­mer chair­man of the Repub­li­can National Com­mit­tee (2005 to 2007).

I didn’t attend Pikesville High School at the same time as Mehlman, but I remem­ber see­ing him on TV as one of the poster boys of the GOP, and he was par­tic­u­larly mem­o­rable as some­one who was clearly a clos­eted gay man with a sig­nif­i­cant degree of self-loathing (how could one not be to be the head of the extremely homo­pho­bic Repub­li­can National Com­mit­tee?) He man­aged the Bush pres­i­den­tial re-election cam­paign in 2004, which was a piv­otal event, at least in my life­time, because the out­come was the ‘straw the broke the camel’s back’ for us, lead­ing to our depar­ture from the US. If Ken Melh­man was a prod­uct of Pikesville High School, then it’s pretty clear to me why I didn’t take to the place. I hope nobody holds my hav­ing attended there against me.