My 18th Birthday and the Draft and....the Police - 1967

This image is the Huron High School Arena, the gymnasium for the schools and now the conference center. Not my favorite place at all.


May 18, 1967! What a day. Gorgeous spring weather, clear skies with little wind. And I was turning 18! I'm not sure that birthday had a legal significance...still not old enough to vote (back then), still not able to buy a beer (one more year for that), and still a teenager. But the real significance was that I had to register for the draft...and they were drafting thousands of kids a day to go to a war in Vietnam, a place far, far away in so many ways (but that's another post). 

After school, my girlfriend (4 years later my first wife) and I walked the few blocks to the Post Office where every male turning 18 in Huron had to go to register. I had no idea how long I'd be, she told me she was going down to the Ben Franklin store to look around and I should meet her there. Ben Franklin was a five and dime on the corner of 3rd and Dakota, a block north of the Post Office. I went inside, registered, and went back out, little aware of the significance of signing up for the draft, nonetheless, I was done. About 15 minutes total. I walked to the Ben Franklin.

The store wasn't huge, maybe four or five aisles from front to back and forty feet from the display windows in front to the office doors at the back of the store space. I walked them all...twice...no girlfriend. Very unlike her to disappear. I asked the kid working the cash register. He looked down and said, "You might want to go to the office in the back." Puzzled I went through the door at the back of the store, found myself in a short hallway and saw an office door open with girlfriend sitting in a chair crying, crying hard.

White Knight-like I rushed in, I hadn't seen the store manager standing at the side of the office. I asked what was going on and she told me they thought she'd stolen something...bobby pins! Bobby pins!! WHAT?! The store manager said the police had been called and they'd be there soon. WHAT!? The officer came in, girlfriend couldn't stop crying, I made the case over and over again that it was impossible to think about her stealing!! They found another bobby pin set in one of her books. These were bobby pin cards, almost like a match book. I became aggressive...wrong thing to do.

They let me ride in the back of the police car with girlfriend. Probably not a good idea. I could not keep my mouth shut. The police officer finally told me to shut up or face some sort of charges. I shut up. They took girlfriend down a lonely looking hallway and called her parents. Her parents came. I left. 

The store manager could not be dissuaded from pressing charges which would of course had a very negative effect on girlfriend's record and reputation. Girlfriend's parents went down the next day and tried to talk him into letting it go. He would not. Time to get a lawyer.

At the time, because my dad was the manager of the town's largest employer, he had some influence in the community. I sucked it up and went to him sometime over the weekend. He did not want to have anything to do with it.  The following Monday, without telling me, he went down and talked to the manager who dropped all the charges. A close call for girlfriend but it was NEVER mentioned again. Until now.

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