Back in the fall of 1979, I was in Burlington, Vermont for a family weekend shopping trip, when I picked up in a major bookstore’s bargain section a copy of David Wallechinsky and Michael Medved’s acclaimed 1976 best seller What Really Happened to the Class of ’65?
The book was an oral history of the authors’ graduating class at Pacific Palisades High School in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles. Experiencing their high years during the height of the Cold War, the rock music British Invasion and the Kennedy administration, Wallechinsky and Medved interviewed many of their fellow classmates about life at Pacific Palisades High School and after they graduated, with a turbulent world in front of them as their future. Some became successful business people, fought in Vietnam, lived the hippie lifestyle, or found early success (one of them, Brock Chester, became an actor, and was part of the cast of the NBC drama series Bracken’s World, until his untimely death in 1971).
When I brought the book to my high school (I was in grade 11 at the time) for some lunchtime reading, somehow the book got circulated amongst some of my classmates. I thought some of the chapters of the book reached out to them, as we were about to face graduation ourselves in the spring of 1980. But no, they were more interested in thumbing through the chapter in which some of the interviewees shared their personal –and explicit– first sexual experiences. Nevertheless, somehow that book reached out to them. It was $2.98 USD well spent.
Ken Dryden, the Montreal Canadiens hall of fame goalie and best selling author, echoes the premise of Wallechinsky and Medved’s book for his latest tome The Class. This time, he focussed on his graduating high school class (which was also in 1965) at Etobicoke Collegiate institute (ECI), located in the bustling Toronto suburb of the same name.
This time, he goes beyond the high school yearbook to find out what happened to him and his fellow 34 classmates who earned the right to be part of an elite group of students who were dubbed the “Brain Class”. They grew up at a time when Canada was symbolically severing their ties to the British Empire following World War II and becoming an autonomous, modern and worldly nation on the eve of its centennial.
“I was thinking about writing it for a very long time, but like my classmates, I was too busy because I was at the core of my life,” said Dryden during a recent promotional appearance at the Cote St. Luc Public Library. “I wasn’t ready to write a book that my classmates would be a part of.”
“Almost everyone in my class at ECI was together during those five years. And the question we asked ourselves was ‘how could it happen?’. My life experience was the same like my 34 classmates and we wondered how is it going and how do we deal with all that,” he added.
First of all, Dryden did a smart move by waiting for now to write this book, thereby giving him and his classmates the right amount of time to get their respective life experiences to come to fruition and the chance to reflect on them.
He managed to speak to most of them (six were deceased by the time he started work on the book), and what the reader gets is a cross section of people from different upbringings, circumstances and ambitions who used their five years as part of ECI’s Brain Class as a vital life springboard. Some of them went by the traditional career paths of becoming nurses and teachers, one became a long distance runner (who ran the marathon during the 1976 Montreal Olympics), and one of them became a successful international businessman who became the catalyst to introduce the STEM program to schools in Canada.
And of course, Dryden lends his own story to the narrative. He relates how he managed to maintain a Hall of Fame (and six-time Stanley Cup champion) career as a goalie with the Canadiens from 1971-79 while attending McGill law school, as well as the personal dilemmas he faced after his retirement from the game. This included the quest to find something that would provide the right kind of challenge after nearly a decade from the spotlight. He became a best-selling author, a TV docu-series host, a federal MP and cabinet minister, and a stint as Youth Commissioner for the province of Ontario, when he realized that a presentation that he created and delivered to students across the province became redundant and lost its appeal with its youthful audience
The Class is more than just a “where are they now?” book of fond memories and reminiscences. Ken Dryden writes with a great deal of intelligence, introspection and humanity to discover how a core group of high school students from an elite education program made the human journey from there to here during an exciting, turbulent time in modern Canadian history. Although Etobicoke Collegiate Institute’s class of 1965 provides the foundation of this book, Canadian baby boomers and subsequent generations who went through such a similar experience can find themselves within the pages of The Class. We may not have realized it then, but now we realize that our high school years opened the doors to what the modern world offered us, and how we managed to utilize it to our advantage, whether or not it worked out for us.
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