LAKE HIGHLANDS HIGH SCHOOL

DALLAS, TEXAS 

(David, as always it's great fun to check in your, okay OUR, website.  In response to your call for input, here's something I wrote several years ago for another 'project' but thought you might like to see it.  Publish it if you'd like.

Keith Garrison '64


When we moved to Dallas in January of 1963 I fully expected the next year and a half to be a non-event.  Arriving as a newcomer at LHHS mid-term of my Junior year seemed to me a guarantee that I would be left out of a lot, and that new friends would probably be hard to come by.  I was wrong. 
From my first day when Mr. Anderson welcomed me to the school I felt at home.  Expecting there to be cliques, I found instead openness and new friends almost daily.  I was in the band so it was a natural to make pals there. But I was pleasantly surprised when Roy Gene Evans, whom I hardly knew, invited me to his luau.  Bink Reeves and Garry Freeman, track stars, became lifelong friends, and Pame Bargaimes, that cute cheerleader, actually spoke to me!  Elliot Archilla and I hit the road as cookware salesmen immediately after graduation (which is, as they say, a whole ‘nother story), and 35 years later, we enjoyed having Arch and Judy visit in our home in Little Rock.  Linda Storeim will always be my first girlfriend at my new school.  I could fill a book with great memories like these.
 LHHS was a new beginning for me.  My parents had ended a stormy marriage about a year before we moved to Dallas from Wichita Falls where I grew up.  A year or so after their divorce, Mom married a Dallas man who moved us to Lake Highlands. I don’t think I realized as a 17-year-old the emotional baggage I carried around prior to and even after my parents’ divorce.  The best thing that could have happened for me was to move away from a lot of bad memories and start fresh with a great bunch of kids who made me feel welcome from the start, and to be a part of the great adventure that was the first graduating class of Lake Highlands High School.  I am not overstating it when I say it was one of the great blessings of my life, a fact not fully appreciated until the passage of time afforded the necessary perspective. 
But it didn’t all end with graduation.  With the advent of e-mail it has been possible to reconnect with old pals and to even make some new friends based on the bond we all share as LHHS kids.

Best wishes to all,
Keith Garrison