I dress like a homeless bum now as a retired man. Some days I don't shave or shower. Some days I get up in the morning and wonder why my bed and I both stink. Some days I just put on a 30-year-old shirt and a 20-year-old set of dirty drawers and am just happy to be alive.

OK, now here we go - I graduated out of a high school in June of 1965 that sent a fellow to West Point, another to the Air Force Academy, and several others to Ivy League schools. Hempstead High School - the place that now has gangs, murders, and a whole lot of "diversity" now after the white flight in the late 1960s.

My favorite outfit then was a shirt and tie covered by a sweater (I have photos). My teachers wore suits if men and sometimes a sports jacket with dress slacks but always with a shirt and tie. My female teachers wore dresses and never presented themselves as "your buddy" or a recent slut. My male teachers were old WWIers or WWIIers that did school on the G.I. Bill or through hard work or through money from Daddy but they always dressed well. The women teachers nailed you up against a wall if you weren't doing your best in class. If you showed up at school looking like a bad crudball that just got dragged over twenty miles of bad railroad track like you got sent home and your mother got a phone call from the principal.

I'd probably put on a shirt and tie on for one of my teachers now but I figure most of them are dead. Just like the fatherless doomed diversity that has made my old high school a battlefield today.