Reflections On A Blessed and Satisfying Life - No. 20 - High School Sex

Sex in the public arena in the l940's was very different from what is it today. This was 40 years before the pill, 20 years before the work of Masters and Johnson, and 10 years before the first issue of “Playboy” magazine. Condoms were hidden behind counters or in machines in men's rest rooms. Couples known to have sex before marriage were subject to church excommunication processes. Yet none of this really explains my early teen years' ignorance and naiveté about sex.

I still marvel at what a slow learner I was. We raised and bred cattle and hogs. I remember telling my best friend that I found it interesting that roosters played tag with hens. (He laughed a little titter which I did not catch on for another few years!) I am Number 3 of nine children so my mother had had several children after me, yet the word "pregnant" was never mentioned in mixed company. My instruction came in very uninformed conversations with my sister Leona and finally from the book which mom and dad left prominently displayed in the bookshelves, entitled What Every Young Man Should Know.

But when I started living in an all-male dormitory filled with teen-agers, sex and sex talk was not a secret. Some at least played the game of knowing all about it. Others remained quiet. Maturing boys did a lot of comparisons in our public showers. It was my guess that only one of the boys in our entire school was having sex with his girl friend (and this was especially scandalous because he was the son of one of our professors.) The rule was absolute: "No sex before marriage " In spite of all this I know that at least three of my small class "had to get married" within two years of them being my high school classmates. And it was a time in which high school girls loved to wear very tight sweaters (even to church) and we boys were sure to notice and comment.

It is with considerable regret that I recall being completely in the dark about homosexual orientation and all I knew about homosexual activity came from dirty jokes all using the usually pejorative terms of the day.

Nor was there any "sex education" under any pseudonym in the high school curriculum and if it was ever spoken about in class I have no memory of it.

But somehow I guess I learned. My wife and I are the parents of five. And now some 70 years after graduation from high school I have had a very satisfying and blessed sex life and I am not so sure I would change my experience with that of my grandkids now in their teen years.

Reflections on A Blessed and Satisfying Life - No.18 High School Years and Girls

As with all (or at least the vast majority) of high school boys, members of the opposite sex were on the agenda of my classmates and me. Yet it was a far from normal situation. We were in an all- boys school. It was a dormitory school and we were not allowed off campus five days of the week. We were all in a town other than hometown. So we had very little interaction with girls.

The one weekly opportunity came each Sunday when we all went to church. We walked the two miles each way to St. Paul’s Lutheran Church and were required to attend both the morning and the evening services.  There, at least, we were in the company of someone not of the male gender. The good news is that that church had the very unusual architecture, which placed the choir in front of the church behind the altar. Thus our eyes always looked right to the soprano and alto sections. The choir was robed in traditional garb. We could try to make some eye contact and that was about as close as we could get. Even so, we discussed the various girls and tried to figure out who was of an age to attend the Walther League meetings on Sunday afternoon. Those meetings were hardly great social events. I remember us having some appropriate topic to discuss, some project to plan and then a game to be played. We did that and the walked back to our dorms.

Yet some of us ... some made contacts. Rumors on campus floated about which girl had her eyes on which boy-and which boy might daringly ask a girl for a date. Actually “having a date” was rare.

My memory is that in my four years at Austin I had two dates. Each time I met the girl whom I had telephoned and fearfully asked for a date. I made my way to her house via city bus. I got checked out by her parents. We took the bus downtown to a movie. We took the bus back to her home. I walked her to the door. I turned around and took the bus back to the campus. (Except that on my second of those memorable dates my bus got to downtown too late to get the last bus to the college and I had (as I remember) 30 minutes to run the three miles back to campus and be in bed for the10:00 o/clock bed check by Dean Beto.

In my senior year I did a very daring thing. I made a telephone call and asked a non-Lutheran girl to join me at a party. She was one of the twin daughters of the boarding house mother at which my sister Erna lived. I had met her. Moreover she was really beautiful and well known as she was a cheer leader for the Austin High School I finally got the courage to call her, remind her that we had met and asked her to join me for a birthday party of a classmate. She told me she had another activity already scheduled. I believed her. But I never called her again!

I did exchange some letters with “ D”. I had had my eyes on her already in the 7^th and 8^th grade at Zion Elementary School and we did exchange a few letters. Also we went Christmas caroling together and at the end of the caroling she became the first and only girl I ever kissed before college.

One other girl was one from the near-by town of Thorndale. I met at a Walther League event. She was very nice and I liked her a lot. We exchanged a few letters. I remember she came to my high school graduation (presumably driven there by her parents.) There we spoke briefly. But after the ceremony I went out with some of the guys to an amusement park. She was really nice and I always thought fondly of her but neither of us pursued the relationship. Later she did marry a Lutheran schoolteacher who had been with me at Concordia College, River Forest and I am sure they had a good marriage.

As I reflect on all this I do have some regrets. High school years should be a time for good fun with both young guys and girls. It is a good time to explore one’s values and social skills and to have some good clean fun. I regret missing that. And I am most grateful that I did not meet my future wife at that time as that would have prevented me from marrying Jane and nothing coming out of high school or any other relationship could ever be as good and blessed as that.