Spring 1972. WHS graduation. As we collectively set forth from the folding chairs on the WHS sports field, we faced a new and confusing time; jumping onto an already moving train. Whatever train we decided to catch, we were all leaving a middle-class suburban world that our parents had struggled to create as a safe alternative to the horrors of their WWII youth. Within the rapid sprouting of the suburbs, with identical ranch and split-level homes, the parks and playgrounds with the fledging trees and shrubs, the Windsor Shopping Center when it was still a field of wild grass, before Grants and Sage Allen's, the softly blowing wind of our childhood and the endless wave of the silently growing, newly green trees, we grew. Our world of boy and girl scouts, competitive sports, music lessons, theater, teachers who would be available to listen to us, and parents with mutually held values.

    But by the time we graduated, our upbringing had not prepared us for the ambiguity of the larger world, beginning with the political deception, a falling out of trust between youth and elders, a generational shift made sharper by the years of drafting eighteen-year-old males to fight and die in a third world country. Those were our older brothers coming home wounded or dead.

     The yearning to protect, to create an environment of safety, had right intentions but in many cases failed to prepare us for the lack of justice so often present in business, social and political exchanges. How we were to handle the transition from youth to adulthood from 1972 forward was as varied as each of us who had now become independent individuals with assessment abilities of our own.