Our Cretin was an all-boys Catholic, high school with the first Junior Reserve Officer Training Core (ROTC). program in the country, established in 1917. Part of the program was an annual review of the entire student body in uniform at an event called the Twilight Parade. This parade was required to maintain the ROTC program’s accreditation and funding. This end of the year event was a well-established tradition attended by families, alumni, friends and the community of Saint Paul.
The archive of my negatives includes images from the 1970 annual Twilight Parade. However, in reviewing the 1970 yearbook, I noticed that unlike the Cretinites from other years, it included none of the images of this old grand tradition. One of my unpublished images show Vietnam war protesters at the parade. To better understand this, I initially reached out to several classmates that I have kept in touch with over the years. This included John Salmen, Tony Calabrese (student officer of the day (OD) for the 1970 parade), Greg Walker (Band Major), and Joe Lais (Class of 1971). John and Tony helped me write this story. Many of these classmates/friends were officers while I was a sergeant.
We shared memories of the problems with our Twilight Parade; it unexpectedly occurred early in the day, and some students were disciplined for protesting. This led us to assume they were protesting the war in Vietnam. We also had memories of another protest event in the study hall.
There’s an un-captioned (and unexplained) photo in our yearbook of a hand drawn sign that said, “Free the Study Hall six”.
Figure 1 1970 Yearbook pg. 36
We realized that we lacked many details about the Twilight Parade and study hall protest, so we consulted other classmates and former faculty to get more information and other perspectives. We attempted to contact the yearbook editors, the students who were disciplined for the protests in 1970 and other classmates. As we gathered more details, we realized that the protests were not specifically about the Vietnam war, but rather about the military training aspects of our Cretin education that the Viet Nam war intensified for our class and country at large.
The Vietnam War shaped a generation and transformed American society from the late 1960s to the early1970s. For the impressionable adolescent teens of the Class of 1970 at Cretin High School, it was a time of confusion, frustration, anger, and division inside and outside of school. Like many Americans around us, we lost both innocence and respect for the people who led the war, government and military. Unlike previous generations, we as a generation and country became increasingly empowered to speak up and question authority.
This story is an attempt to share my journey of discovery as various details emerged that the classes of 1969 and 1970 experienced a major crossroad in the history of Cretin. This was the beginning of a changing of the guard for Cretin’s ROTC program and its educational milieu. The yearbooks from 1969 and 70 show and acknowledge that hazing/bullying was a common occurrence and that ROTC was a factor in the disenfranchisement of many students.
We wrote this document to share with our classmates and their families. We also offer this to the Cretin--Derham Hall High School archive/library.
The contributors to this document are now a bunch of old men. When we were young, we thought that we could make the world a little bit better, but looking around now, we are not sure that the world is any better because of our efforts. Many, if not most of us believed in education and in the ecumenical call for social justice as students in a school taught by Christian Brothers. There is no question that the world has changed since 1970. Sadly, bullying and hazing continue to be a problem in many schools. We hope, no matter how painful our stories might be, that they will make the prevention of bullying and hazing a continuous ongoing effort.
The world is still dealing with wars and violence with their resultant, physical, emotional, economic, spiritual impact on millions of people. It is important to teach the history of the Vietnam War’s role in creating a deeply divided country that left two sides opposing each other on every issue. The more an issue divides a country, the more conservatives become intrenched with the battle cry of “you don’t give an inch” while progressives become more radical in their demands for reform and change.
“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it” - Edmond Burke
PTSD WARNING NOTE:
Bullying and verbal/physical abuse events are discussed in this document
I ask the readers of this document to avoid using it to vilify Cretin’s past during our time in high school. Care must be taken when using our 21st-century sensibilities about bullying and abuse to judge an era that accepted corporal punishment as a legitimate (figurately, and legally) educational tool.