I attended my high school class's fiftieth reunion last weekend, and while I was in the hometown of Pampa, Texas, I spoke to the Downtown Kiwanis Club on two topics. The first, which follows, was a short memoir of my time as a member and the President of the High School's Key Club. The second part, which I will post soon, was the serious topic of significant election disputes (LBJ v. Coke Stevenson and Bush v. Gore), why resolving them by means of lawyering is unsatisfactory, and the current proposal of the American Law Institute for a much, much better way.
I did not have a lot of time to prepare this presentation, my retrospective appreciation of my time in the Key Club, 1965-1969. So I employed historical technique. I checked the local historical museum's online materials, and unsurprisingly there is no existing first-hand or secondary account. Next, I scraped my brain's memory, then spoke with a few who had been involved with the Club, and also researched newspapers.com for accounts of the Key Club's activities in the pages of the hometown newspaper, the Pampa Daily News, and in the High School's yearbook, *The Harvester.* To me those last sources are primary in nature. (With more time I might have found some archival materials in boxes of my high school memorabilia buried somewhere in the attic!) Here is the presentation, slightly revised:
___________________________________________________________________
I was a Key Clubber at Pampa High School
by
Josiah M. Daniel, III
(revised
from remarks delivered to the Downtown
Kiwanis
Club of Pampa, Texas, June 28, 2019)
I was a Key Clubber at Pampa High School, and I
have excellent memories of eating lunch at Kiwanis Club meetings many times
during those three years, 1966-1969, so I am very happy to be here today, again
lunching with a good group of Kiwanians.
I am going to recount some memories of my time
as the President of the PHS Key Club.
I was not born in Pampa but my family “came
here as soon as they could,” from Midland, before I was a year old, in late
1951. Except for two years in El Campo, I grew up here and graduated from Pampa
High School in 1969.
And that is why I have come to Pampa today.
Members of our Class, from in town and out of town, are gathering for our 50th reunion.
I begin this memoir with an acknowledgment and appreciation
of Mack Hiatt, Jr., who was a longtime Kiwanian, and was
sponsor of Key Club when I became President, in 1968.
Mack and his wife Mary moved to Pampa in 1951. He’d
served in the Navy in World War II, and he commanded the Naval Reserve in Pampa
for some years. He went to work for the Citizens Bank and Trust Co. The family
sojourned out of state for several years of the late fifties and early sixties but
returned in 1964 when Mack rejoined Citizens Bank as Vice President.
Mr. Hiatt was a cheerful, friendly, progressive,
and far-sighted man who, along with his wife Mary, deeply invested himself and
his family in rendering community service through many organizations of Pampa.
For but one example of his many acts of service: he was the President of the
Pampa Chamber of Commerce for 1967-1968.
Mack was the ideal adult advisor for our Key
Club, beginning when I took office as President in
the Spring of 1968. Mack inspired all of us on the Key Club board (including
Haney Robertson as Vice President, Terry Pulse as Secretary, David Irwin as
Treasurer, and Eddie Moultrie as Senior Director) to imagine and to take the
initiative to try out new means of community engagement and service—for instance,
we were exploring ideas of creating new “places to go” and new “things to do”
for teenagers in the Pampa of the late 1960s.
I was fired up about what the Key Club could
accomplish our senior year—when Mr. Hiatt, at age 48, died of a heart attack on
September 4, 1968, at the beginning of the school year.
Mack was important to me as President of the
Key Club, and I wish to celebrate him for his contributions to the Key Club,
the Kiwanis Club, and, along with his wife Mary, to the entire community.
We lost some momentum with Mack’s death. But into
Mack’s shoes stepped another stalwart Kiwanian, Jimmy Massa, who had been the
Key Club advisor for several years before 1968 and knew what to do. He capably
advised the board of the Club for the rest of the school year.
Stepping back, I had heard of the Key Club long
before I arrived at the High School. A radio broadcaster named Melvin Munn started
the Key Club at the High School as a project of the Downtown Kiwanis Club in
1958. Within a year, the Club was sponsoring a
community-wide event called the "Pampa Pilgrimage." I recall my family gathering at one of the
designated points in town with other members of my church and with the members
of other churches. We all then marched to our respective church buildings for
evening services on the Sunday before Christmas.
My greatest memory of Key Club from back in my three
years is the Club’s ongoing project that served the
community and raised a bit of money: the Club would place the American flag in
front of a subscribing business on all holidays. In the Key Club section of the PHS yearbook for
each of our three years, the flag project is prominent. In the yearbook scenes from our junior year, we see flags, flags, flags.
On each holiday, Club
members would rise well before first light and meet up at an old gas station on
South Cuyler that someone let us use as the warehouse for our many, many
American flags. And then we would head out in pickups—John Karr’s father had a
classic Chevy 1951 pickup that served often and well—as we toted and then placed
more than a hundred flags in holders on the sides of commercial buildings or on
the parking meters in front of the businesses. The annual charge for that was
$10! That flag project was a formative experience, in many dimensions, for all
Key Clubbers.
In the Spring of 1968, our Class of 69
classmate David Webster wrote an article for the Pampa Daily News in which he reported the activities of the Key Club.
The Club met each Wednesday at 7:15 a.m. in the High School cafeteria. A number
of Kiwanians always attended—was it because they liked the cafeteria’s coffee?
In addition to flags, projects included
--sponsoring
Career Day at the High School;
--participating
in the March of Dimes;
--staffing
“Back to School Rodeo Days”—Warren Hasse, the owner of local radio station
KPDN, permitted the Club members to sell advertising to local merchants, then
the members read the ads on the air, and the Club received the revenue.
--assisting
the Jaycees in putting up downtown Christmas decorations;
--serving
coffee and sandwiches to at home
football games to all reporters and sports broadcasters; and
--repairing and painting the facilities of a day nursery for struggling parents.
The Key Club was, back then, for boys. Webster
also reported that the Altrusa Club of Pampa had founded the Truteens Service
League, for High School girls, three years earlier.
All of those public service activities
continued throughout our senior year, 1968-1969.
A strong memory of Key Club is the addition of new
members. We chose 25 sophomores in the summer before the start of the school
year. They applied for membership, and the board interviewed each before acting
on the application. I recall that in the interviews we always
asked the question: “Please rank the
importance to you of three things:
“God / Country / Self.” I remember that the first answer of the
boys varied—some would say “God” and others would say “Country”; but invariably
the last answer of each applicant whom we selected was always “Self,”
which I believe was in keeping with the principles of the Key Club and of the Kiwanis
Club.
The last big memory of my Key Club experience
was to attend the annual convention of Key Clubbers from across the USA and
Canada, in Montreal in the summer of 1968, along with Terry Pulse and Tim Doke,
a junior. It was my first trip to Canada, and we traveled to Montreal by taking
a Santa Fe train to Chicago, then by bus visiting the Shedd Aquarium, then
Henry Ford Village, and Niagra Falls, before arriving in Montreal, a delightful
city.
Looking back today, I see clearly that the Key
Club delivered on the three things it recall that it promised back then: opportunities to
serve, to build character, and to develop leadership. Being a member and a
leader of the PHS Key Club, along with Boy Scout Troop 14, my church, and my
friendships in the Class of 1969, were the hometown experiences that well
prepared me for life after PHS, and I am grateful.
