I’m still not sure why I ever got my high school diploma. But I think it had a lot to do with Kevin Kever, not Larry Harwood.
The story begins innocently enough. A bunch of my friends at Hazen High School were suffering some serious seniorititis. We were literally counting the days until graduation and back then, there wasn’t exactly a lot to do in a day except pass your yearbooks around in class so everyone could sign them.
Our senior year had been easy for all of us, largely because we had figured out the system – how being a teacher’s pet was a real advantage, not only because the one teacher liked you, but because they told other teachers how wonderful you were. It had a wonderful spillover effect.
We really weren’t such a delight. We were downright mischievous, right to the point of doing some things that today would be considered illegal. Back then, of course, forging transcripts and school records seemed like a lot of fun, not something that was really wrong. After all, Nixon had done it. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I’m not really sure how Larry Harwood came to be. I do know that Kevin and I had decided we should liven up the school elections by having a made up person run for SBA Historian, a seemingly insignificant office that begged for some humor.
Part of the advantage of going to a larger school is that the administration can’t really keep track of every single student. So creating one out of thin air wasn’t as difficult as it seems. I was Larry’s campaign manager, creating all the whacky campaign signs, such as “Communist China supports Larry Harwood and 830 million Chinese can’t be wrong.”
I know, kind of infantile by today’s standards. But it was supposed to be a lampoon of the election signs being hung up around the school. Every day we had new posters that were more outrageous than the ones before the day before and Larry was beginning to become a popular choice among students.
This did not sit well with the others, the “real” people, running for SBA Historian. I guess they took the position more seriously than we did, perhaps too seriously. I mean, how hard can it be to keep a scrapbook for a year of the school’s activities?
It didn’t take too long for one of the candidates to start snooping around. We figured out that the first place she would probably check was the enrollment records and the class schedule.
We needed help. Fortunately, Mr. Brannian came to our aid. He was our counselor and purloined a couple of blank forms. For my part, I’ve always had some talent for forgery so making the records look legitimate wasn’t hard. A little cut and paste on the school newspaper light table, some carefully managed runs through the Xerox machine and voila! – School records. Once they were done, Mr Brannian put them in their proper place in the office files.
Sure enough, a day later along comes our little candidate to check on this Larry guy. She asked to see proof that Larry was indeed a student and the admission clerk dutifully produced the documents. Strike One.
Now most people would have given up at this point, but not Cindi. She was losing an election to an upstart, worse a non-existent upstart. She was positive there was no Larry Harwood. She even went so far as to stop by the classes Larry was supposed to be in. Of course, we enlisted the help of all of our favorite teachers who told her what a great student Larry was, what a pleasure he was to have in class. Strike Two.
Still she went to bat. It was a full count and the bases were loaded against her. She had just one more chance to derail our well planned campaign, which was now beginning to have all the intrigue and complexities of Watergate.
Kevin and I had carried the joke so far that we had seemingly committed fraud, forgery and even a little perjury. We were in pretty deep and there was no easy way out.
Finally, she found her holy grail. It seems that we had forgotten about one document – the one that showed Larry had actually enrolled in the first place as a transfer student. We eavesdropped on the conversation she was having. The admissions clerk said this was no problem and was probably just an oversight. All Larry had to do was come in and fill out the paperwork.
Come in. That was a problem, since Larry didn’t really exist. What were we going to do now? Fortunately, Kevin had a plan. He knew a guy who knew a guy who went to neighboring Lindbergh High School. He could pose as Larry.
Yeah, I know. Now we’re in really deep. But it seemed like a good idea at the time. We schooled the guy on Larry’s schedule, the main players he should know at Hazen (like the name of the principal) and his activities at school. We had only forgotten one key detail: A valid address that was actually in the boundaries of our school. Under questioning, “Larry” began to sweat. Then he tripped up, using his own address that put him at Lindbergh, not Hazen.
Damn! The rouse was over. Larry had been found out and they knew exactly who had tried to pull this stunt because we were sitting right with Larry as he tried to lie his way into school.
We ran out of the admissions office. In class all the next week, we waited for Mr. Donnelly to call us out of class. We were sure we were going to be suspended.
But there wasn’t a peep. We never got called to the principal’s office or even Mr. Donnelly’s. The whole incident was simply swept under the rug.
The reason was quite simple. I had chosen my cohort in crime well. Kevin was going to be the first student in the school’s history to finish with a cumulative GPA of 4.0. They were planning to make a big deal about it at graduation. While they would love to have suspended us on the eve our graduation, they couldn’t. They would have lost their golden chance to showcase superior academic achievement at Hazen High School.
After graduation I still held my breath. We only got the covers of our diploma at graduation. The real diploma arrived a few weeks later. I finally breathed a sigh of relief when it showed up in the mail.
As for Larry? He went on to run for office at Green River Community College. The college newspaper even endorsed him and his platform, which serves as the title of today’s column. I wonder how that ever happened?
Out on the Treasure Coast, wondering if Larry should make a run for the White House in 2012,
– Robb