Like many of us, there was a time when I truly didn’t understand it when people older than me talked of how rapidly “time flies by.” Now I understand fully. Forty nine years ago I was a senior at San Marcos High School. Looking back, I am so thankful for the town that God gave me to grow up in and for the parents He gave to me, and for the friends that He surrounded my family with. What I saw in those years was a very definite pride in our community and our school. On Friday nights, when the lights came on, old Evans Field would be packed. There were often more Rattlers at away games than the “home-towners” and, if for some “emergency,” you couldn’t go to the game, the town of San Marcos would seem empty if you drove around. We never really know what others are thinking, feeling, or dealing with, but the sense that I had in San Marcos was that we were proud and thankful to be “Rattlers,” no matter our age, no matter whether we played in games or not, no matter the color of our skin, we were “Rattlers.” We were unified. We shared a vision and goal. As I state this, I pray that my friends, regardless of race or finances or whatever, felt the same. They always seemed to.
I was serving on our Student Council and cannot really remember what initiated it, but we decided to create a patriotic program to present to our school. The program had patriotic singing by some very talented classmates, it had some historic speeches delivered, and a skit that stays in my mind as I look around our country today. We presented the program several times in San Marcos. New Braunfels High School learned of it and invited us to deliver it to them. Even the television network KLRU in Austin had us come and perform it for them to record and present.
The skit had America undergoing a Communist/Socialist takeover. It ended with the American leader (who was our Student Council President) being shot, falling to the ground, and as he was dying, he was reaching up for the American flag. In fact, there is a photograph of him reaching up for those 13 stripes and 50 stars in our old yearbook. As we see it fly today, that flag still represents a country that began in extremely miraculous ways as 13 colonies and, then was blessed to blossom into 50 states.
