If I Leave Here Tomorrow, Would You Still Remember Me?

Yesterday's obituary retrospective led me to another recent obituary of someone whose life would be ordinary if it weren't for a young man he marched to the principal's office because his hair was too long.

During the late '60s and early '70s Lynyrd Skynyrd was making Sweet Home Alabama a multi-Platinum hit. Same with Freebird.  What most of you don't know, though I'm willing to concede that only I wasn't aware, is how the band came by its name.  It's a story that leads us to last September's obituary for a former Jacksonville, Florida school teacher named Leonard Skinner.

Leonard Skinner was a gym teacher and a hard nosed, red neck, passionate enforcer of his Jacksonville, Florida school's long hair ban about the time I was a high school student in Ellisville, Missouri.  He became famous the day he sent Gary Rossington to the principal's office for his hair.  Rossington was a member of a local band that would go on to become Leonard Skinnered, a not so celebratory tribute to Skinner. In 1972 the band would change it's name to Lynyrd Skynyrd.

As I read about Mr. Skinner I was taken back to my years in Lafayette High School, '66-'70. Somewhere in that nearly half a decade, I was the manager of a band called Plush; The Acid Rock Sound of Plush was printed on our business cards. The reason I was manager to a group of my buddies - Bill, Ronnie, Terry and Joe -was my mom's station wagon. No one else had room for the drums.

We did not have a gym teacher named Plush.  Had we named our band after the toughest teacher we knew it  would have been called Harold Lackey or The Green Weenies, his football affectionate title for the freshman players.

Like Gary Rossington and his fellow band members, we were getting walked to the principle's office.  We were a generation searching for an identity; a search running head long into authority.  So we decided the only way to deal with that authority was to disobey it.  Hair was one of the best ways, but there were plenty of others.

Go to class? Nope, skip class.
Don't pull this handle.  Forget it. Pull the handle.
Sit there.  Not on your life. I'm sitting where I want.
Be quiet. Talk.
Get a haircut! Grow the hair. No matter how bad it looks. Throw in a mustache too.

Hard on our ears were Steppenwolf's Magic Carpet Ride and Born to be Wild; The Doors' Touch Me; Richard Harris's McArthur Park and  John Lennon's Hey Jude.  Plush played all of these songs with an awkwardness that likely mirrored our rebellion, purposeful but uncertain, dedicated but easily detoured.  Our rebelliousness grew as we entered our senior year.  Amplifying our particular form of rebellion was a world that felt more uncertain than any since World War II.

Our country seemed to be dissolving into anarchy.   ROTC buildings torched. Marches on Washington, marches on state capitals, marches on everything set in concrete and in place more than one hundred years.  The most visible signal we could send to our own local institutions - parents and high school teachers and principals and police and the managers of the fast food restaurants we all did a stint in - that we were rebelling was to grow our hair, wear jeans with flared bottoms, try to grow mustaches, listen to albums the lyrics of which frightened our parents; lyrics like

Like a true nature's child
We were born to be wild.


Little did we know that we were really born to be sales people, product managers, computer programmers and truck drivers.

Chief of the Lafayette High School hair growers, the Dalai Lama of Long Hair was a young man named Dennis - Denny - Bond aka Hair as he was called in the 1969 year book. He was just about the coolest guy in a school going through a transition not unlike the country we lived in. From rural and red neck to suburban sprawl cool.  Our school was a microcosm of this change, loaded still with rural, red neck tough guys running right up against change and not liking it one bit.

A lot of us spent a disproportionate amount of time finding unique ways to leave the school grounds without passing within a mile of the rural, red neck, tough guys who were determined to prove that suburban sprawl cool was no more than a fad and could be beat back with a few good beatings ...... of guys like me.  Denny Bond was our savior. A great athlete - perhaps the best in a school transitioning into a state athletic power - and tougher than any of us understood until the day when we rounded that symbolic curve in the road and came hard upon - Hair taking on the toughest of all the tough guys.  After school. In front of a crowd that would rival an Ali-Frazier fight.  And winning.  Big.

That day one of our searches ended. We could quit searching for a way to leave the school free from five knuckles in our face.  Though I'm certain before we fell asleep that night we knew we had a lifetime of searches ahead, and our worries were far from over.

No band was named after Denny Bond. Plush had already disbanded, partly a victim of the unrepairable damage I did to my mom's station wagon.

In Jacksonville, Florida Leonard Skinner walked Gary Rossington to the principal's office for having long hair  and became what the NY Times called "arguably the most influential high school gym teacher in American popular culture."  In Ellisville, Missouri Denny Bond walked out of the school,  and fought for long hair and the rebellion it represented then drifted into anonymity.

If I leave here tomorrow
Would you still remember me?
For I must be traveling now,
Cause there's too many places I've got to see.
                     -Freebird, Lynyrd Skynyrd