McGinty Party

I didn’t go to a whole lot of parties. First off, I’m a social wallflower. My enjoyment of an event is inversely proportional to the number of people attending. I don’t do small talk well and Shari Stiver can tell you how well I dance from the first and only time we went to a place where dancing was committed.

Wife Lila, who loves to gyrate, doesn’t realize what an act of kindness it is that I don’t get out on the floor with her. I haven’t tried moving to music in years, but I’m fairly sure it would look like a combination of stomping out a campfire and being attacked by ants.

Here are three frames from what was slugged “McGinty Party.” No date, no indication of WHICH McGinty it was or what was being celebrated.

Couple ranked Number One

This photo would lead you to believe that there must have been some kind of dance contest going on and this judge is rating the couple Number One.

The dance participant in the middle is probably STILL going to the chiropractor to recover from the evening’s event.

Special event: it has balloons

I wasn’t going to guess names to protect the guilty, but the guy on the left looks like John “Doc” Carpenter, a Sikeston debater and future Cape Coroner. I published a photo of him doing a swoop and scoop at a wreck on Main Street. The fellow on the right looks a little like my debate partner, John Mueller.

When I look back at these photos, maybe there’s a good reason why I didn’t get many party invites.

20 Replies to “McGinty Party”

  1. Ken,
    I can dance better than that guy!
    We danced hard last Saturday and were up for a bike ride at 6am Sunday. Dirty dancing keeps the chiropractor at bay. Makes for a great night’s sleep at my age too!

  2. Ken, I think most of the people here are from ’67. I recognize Margaret Randol and, I think, Steve Jones displaying half a peace sign in the second shot.

    Just one observation: All I see are ties and jackets on the guys and dresses on the young ladies.

  3. Chuck McGinty’s classmates from 1967.
    John Brandt, R.I.P., Margret Randol and Lynn Nelson. Steve Black is giving the “bird”. I’ll take a wild stab and guess that the couple doing the “dip” is Danny Jacobs and Mary Hirsch. I’ll also make another guess and say, since they are all dressed to the “nines” and it is at such a prestigious venue, it was National Honor Society or something similiar….I would not have been in attendance.

    1. I squeaked into the National Honor Society, but it was more on activity points than grade points.

      Since Doc Carpenter was there, I thought it might have been debate related. I kind of question that it would have been as late as 1967. Mueller was Class of 64, and Doc was either 64 or 65.

      We’d have been pretty old to be trolling around with the high school crowd in 1967.

      I agree with your Margaret Randol ID. I thought the female “dipper” might have been Rosanne Hecht.

  4. Well I do know a all those people in the pictures. It looks like a real nice party, which explains why I was not invited. My guess it debate party or national honor thingie that I only knew of when the upper class slipped and mentioned what was to ALWAYS be kept from “ner do wells” like me…
    My real question is why were YOU there!

    1. Terry, Sir,

      ***My real question is why were YOU there!***

      That is the question I ask myself at ANY social gathering.

      If I don’t ask it of myself, I’m sure the folks who are there who see me ask that question.

      1. Ken, you brought, and still bring a certain je ne sais quoi to social gatherings. I remember several overnight debate trips where your dry (and at times caustic) wit brought a certain sophistication to otherwise high schoolish conversations. Indeed, to this day I am still remembering barbs after 40+ years. Fortunately, being a lowly junior then, most of them went right by me. I suspect, though, that a couple of female seniors were not so lucky.

        1. Bill,

          I had to dip into the dictionary to determine if I had been complimented or insulted.

          From French je ne sais quoi, literally ‘I don’t know what’.

          “{An intangible quality that makes something distinctive or attractive.”

          Even with a definition, I’m STILL not sure.

          If I’ve been insulted, I’m choosing Bill Hopkins as my second when we meet in the field of honor at dawn. If I’m late, start without me. (I told Judge Hopkins to be there 30 minutes BEFORE dawn, so he’ll be avilable.)

  5. It appears the same social divisions occurred in the Cape, as in St. Albans, WV. It would be interesting to learn where the people in the photos are now, and how “really” successful they are. Hmmmm…more like a novel than journalism eh Ken?

    1. Bob,

      What you are proposing smacks of work. I make it clear that I’m a reminiscencer (a word I just coined), not a historian.

      The latter, while sometimes less interesting, is held to a higher standard. I just have to outlive anyone who could contradict me.

      I was telling some friends over dinner that I’m beginning to place less and less faith in history books. In researching some of these stories, I see that all sources seem to steal from the same original source, frequently the local newspaper.

      Since I KNOW how reliable MY reporting and that of my colleagues is / was, I think the whole shebang is built on a house of cards with part of the deck missing.

    1. I remember saying to you one night while we were editing some film of some old geezer, “We have to be the two most nostalgic guys our age in the world.”

      I guess we haven’t changed in our Old Geezerhood.

  6. I do remember that discussion. We both liked old people, not just to photography, but to listen to also. We home base in a 55 plus community and I love hearing the old folks stories. We even spent much of a week in New Caledonia (when we were sailing) looking up a hospital a friend here built in WWII. There are so many stories. And when we get old we’ll have our share to tell too!

    1. Bob,

      The question is, though, who will LISTEN to our stories? When I was a kid, it was a regular thing for us to pile into the car and make the rounds of assorted older friends and relatives of my grandmother.

      We’d sit on the front porch and hear stories of settling Swampeast Missouri when it was nothing but cypress trees and swamp (hence the name “Dark Cypress” for part of it.

      Facebook is great for connecting with some folks, but not those old timers who would rock, spit and whittle.

      Or, are we doing the digital equivalent of rocking, spitting and whittlin’ right here?

      When you don’t think we’re not getting old, look at this photo of the three vets again.

      The last survivors of two those wars have answered the roll call Over There and our generation of Viet Nam vets is about the age if the World War II vet.

      Even if we beat all the odds, we have more years behind us than in front of us.

      The only solace is that we’ve seen a lot in those “behind” years. It’s like the old saw that “some people have 20 years of experience; others have one year of experience 20 times.”

  7. I think the photo was taken around 1965. A lot of the kids, including Margaret were freshmen or sophmores at the time and John Mueller and Doc are still in school. I dated John Carpenter from about 1964 to about 1967 and I was in the debate club and on the debate team. We moved during the summer of 1965 to Carbondale, Illinois, but John graduated from HS in 1965 so the party had to be before the summer of 65.

  8. Hi honey, took me so long to find u;) u still look great dancing , been yrs for me too! Remember those yrs dearingly;) my face bk is Candice Lane, hope u get this as I’d love to see or talk to my best friend ever. I have brown hair, still at same hm . Love u

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