This was a love letter which I penned to my 1956 Ocala High graduating class when I was asked to emcee the 1981 reunion. I had two days to prepare whatever I could glean from the highly sparse information, which included three letters from out-of-town people, I think.

                         

So I sat down at my mother‘s kitchen table in Ocala and wrote this letter, hoping to work it into the context almost semi-anonymously with letters I had planned to read from classmates around the country, even the world.

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I read it aloud that night without telling them at first who wrote it.

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I’ll never forget the “ooohhh!” reaction it elicited while reading my nostalgic remembrances about the Chicken Ranch, Johnson’s Beach and our notorious orange fights. 

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“It might have been the perfect town to grow up in at the perfect time.

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“We were too old for Vietnam and too young for Korea. Our parents had taught us the lessons of the depression, but we never had to endure the hardships. Our lives were unencumbered by the computer age of the eighties, the political scandal of the seventies and the social strife of the sixties.”

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About five years after the end of World War II, there were factions sprinkled about private schools as well as geographically challenged by migration, financial boundaries, agricultural barriers as well as the river and forest. And the linguistics were so different in the fifties. 

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“Drugs were something you bought at the prescription counter of Bennett’s or Bittings, where we also bought our ice cream sodas and sundaes. Getting stoned meant somebody threw rocks at you. Cars were easy to recognize because they had simple names – Ford, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, etc... Not Pintos or Camaros or Fairlanes or Regals or such. We were the silent generation, they said later – silent because we never learned about protest and rebellion until James Dean came along in Rebel Without A Cause. Then we became rebels without causes until Elvis taught us about Rock and Roll.”

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About half of our 225 class members remain, in our mid-80s now. Not bad considering in 2025 the average age is 81.9 for men and 84.0 years for women.

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The population of Florida then was around 4 million, and of Ocala 15,000.

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“We country folk were in awe,” remembered Richard Barber, a world class peanut farmer from Blitchton. “We had to hitch a ride to and from town so it wasn’t easy to participate in events after school. And it seemed like city kids always had money. I was lucky to have 25 cents left after weekly lunch money.”

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There were also strong differences in our vocabulary then and now. My letter recited some of them: 

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“Ocala in the mid-1950’s... the Ike years... black was a color, but not a race ... a joint was somewhere you went to go jukin’, not something you smoked... we wore pony tails and duck tails... white bucks and ballerinas... letter sweaters and crinoline. We put Hollywood glass pack mufflers on our cars and drove them to Woodfields and Silver Springs and The Lime Pit, where we turned our radios to WLAC in Nashville or WCKY in Cincinnati – or perhaps even WWL in New Orleans or WBT in Charlotte.   First, of course, we took the girls to a movie and then for a Cherry Coke at the Big “D” or Chicken Ranch – then we took them out to park in Woodfields or Silver Springs.

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Ed Monarchik of Atlanta came to Ocala as the son of Eastern European immigrants but was quickly accepted at age 15. “Everybody was so friendly,” recalled Monarchik, a longtime Atlanta resident who would become VP of a huge, popular clothing company in New York called Izod. “It was the camaraderie. There wasn’t just one or two people, like Zandy Collins or Loring Lovell or Sid Dosh. Or the girls like Charlotte Ott or Kaki Burgess or Judy Turner or Carol Cole. They were all so nice! We had clicks, but they were not rivals and you could move from one to the other without resentment.”

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Meanwhile our movies and plays were simple. “We had Debbie Reynolds as Tammy, Yul Brenner as The King and Ingrid Bergman, who was trying to prove she was Anastasia.

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In the news of 1956, “the Andrea Doria collided with the Stockholm off Nantucket... they made the first transatlantic telephone call and Nixon was only Vice President.”

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Here was the best part locally: “For a dollar you could buy over three gallons of gas, which could easily get you down to Johnson’s Beach and back on a summer night where you’d jitterbug your cares away or, maybe later, go out in the cars and have orange fights. A dollar, in fact, would get you and your date into the Marion Theatre and a root beer apiece at the Chicken Ranch – it always was cheaper than the Big ‘D’.”

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Kaki hated the way her early classmates were separated. Finally, after transferring from Catholic school and teaming up with her pal Sara Clardy, Kaki was miffed when many of us were transferred to the new school north of town called Wyomina Park — but only for a year.

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“I hated Wyomina (because of the separation), even though it was right down my street. We would come together again at Eighth Street Elementary. And it was magical.

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“It was a simple life, a good life in the mid-1950’s, one many of us have wished our children could have had. But, of course, it cannot be. Some of us who wished we could have stayed around had to go on and some who might have wanted to go on have stayed back – and many of us will always wonder which was right.”

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Kaki, Charlotte Ott, Judy Turner and others were leaders of the popular group. But there were others, says Stafford, because we were into so many things. “For me it was all about the band,” he said, “and I didn’t realize how influential our director (Leland “Pop” Armstrong) was. It was because of him we were chosen by the state of Florida to march in the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C., every year.

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So many wonderful memories, so many unsung heroes. Among them were choir director Louise Thrasher and coach Don Cobb. Ms. Thrasher inspired us with her hard work and conviction about our emerging talent. She would stay after class and coach us in small groups, like our “Kats Korner Sextet.” 

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Coach Cobb came up with a Herculean effort to embrace us both as athletes and bashful, unconfident teens. And he did that by chaperoning special social events like informal, free midweek dances at the municipal auditorium where he brought the school hi-fi, records and, if anything went awry, the bouncer’s muscle. It never did.

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Coach Cobb was much loved, as was evidenced when he left for the University of Miami to coach football after our senior year. With the help of students who appealed to downtown merchants, quite an array of parting gifts were showered on him. Ocala High School was never the same without Don Cobb.

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“So we come here to this juncture, 25 years older than the faces in the yearbook, wiser perhaps, more successful in many ways because we have learned to live with our failures. Some will try to tell us that all high school reunions are the same, but we do not believe. We believe the Class of 1956 was something special and that is why we are able to go out into the world with the confidence that we know from whence we came. We came from a perfect town in a perfect time.”

 

Signed: Buddy Martin

 

Of course there was some excessive frivolity which caused us to tempt fate, like the day Ernie Griggs flipped his Jeep convertible while 4-wheeling in Woodfields. Neither myself, Ernie, Monarchik, Dosh, Lovell nor Mike Meffert received a single scratch. God had smiled on us. 

   

I agree with what Ernie says about why the 1956 class was so special: “Us!”