Our daughter is graduating May 17 and with all the attendant high school senior crap going on, I got to thinking about mine back in 1974 and our speaker. I don't remember her name but she graduated from our high school and became an actress. Her claim to fame at the time was on the show Ironside. She was the one who pushed his wheelchair or something like that. Said the usual pablum. We are the future, blah, blah, blah.
I got some woman who did something terribly important in the field of call-centre technology. Can't remember what exactly.
I do remember that if I'd graduated the very next day I'd have gotten JK Rowling. Not a fan of the whole Harry Potter thing, but I still say she'd have been a far cooler speaker.
EDIT - Oh, I meant graduation from Uni by the way. We had no formal high school graduation to speak of. I'm sure this clarification will allow many of you to sleep soundly tonight.
High School - the principal. It was a very rural Indiana school. My (now) wife gave the Valedictorian address.
College - we didn't have a ceremony at the technical college I went to. The Bible college I graduated from had the publisher of a Magazine called the Christian Standard - his name was Sam Stone. Cool talk there.
We'll be back right after order has been restored here in the Omni Center.
�That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy� - Swift
I think it was three students and a couple of the administrators, if I remember correctly.
I didn't attend my college graduation ceremony, and have no idea who spoke, leading me to believe it wasn't anyone too important. Thinking about it now, just about the only thing that seems realistic that could have made me want to go to my college graduation ceremony was if fellow alum Tony Larussa were speaking.
In high school, graduation speeches were usualy made by the salutatorian, then valedictorian, then class president. I was valedictorian and one of my best friends was salutatorian, and we decided to do our speech together. It was constructed as a conversation where we were working out what should go into a good graduation speech. We said very little that was serious and mostly made fun of the basic, cliched graduation speech. In all modesty, we were getting bits of applause all throughout and at the end everybody loved it. But, then the class president got up to give her speech and it was the exact cookie-cutter cliched speech we had been talking about. Awk~ward!!
I don't remember who spoke at undergrad college graduation (of much of the event at all) because a bunch of us woke up early that day to do shots and I was well hungover by the time the speeches were going on. Whoops
Lloyd: When I met Mary, I got that old fashioned romantic feeling, where I'd do anything to bone her. Harry: That's a special feeling.
HS - just the normal speeches, and I remember one being really quite nice, but I'm not sure if it was at my graduation, or at my friends' graduation the year before me.
College - I honestly don't remember. So it must not have been memorable or inspirational. Especially since it has only been a couple years.
Like others, I didn't get a speaker for HS; the Headmaster spoke and then any graduate who wanted to speak could. One of the graduates sang "Dust In The Wind"; after all these years I can't think of a song that would be less appropriate for a graduation. Even a really angry punk song would work better than a song about the triviality and irrelevance of life.
My college graduation, IIRC, had Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund.
My brother's graduation, however, was amazing. Would getting a former President of the United States seem like a big deal? Well, not at his gratuation--President Jimmy Carter was essentially the *opening act*, the preliminary speaker introducing the main speaker. Mikhail Gorbachev.
You wanted the best, you got... Out of Context Quote of the Week.
"Mangini might not have had balls, but he DID have soft, supple breasts." (SEADAWG)
No one special at high school, just the usual suspects. But I think I recall Tom Wolfe and His White Suit at commencement. Emphasis on "think", as this was after four straight days of drinking and I'd just woken up half an hour before the ceremony started.
Peter Jennings at my undergrad ceremony -- everyone around me thought he was awesome. Quincy Jones spoke at my grad ceremony, and I think there were a few other famous folkss, but I don't remember clearly. I had no ceremony at all for my MLS.
"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"
I graduated from Arizona State in 1987. Our speaker was our illustrious governor at the time, Evan Mecham. When he came up to speak, we booed him. I had to explain to my grandmother after the ceremony why he was booed.
So, my diploma was signed by our wonderful governor, who managed to get impeached before we could recall him!
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I don't play anything very well, but I do collect Depression-era zithers and some of them are fun. (Here's a Flickr gallery -- the Marxophone is the best.) I also play a little autoharp, flute, marimba, stuff like that. --K
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