Bloomington Indiana. What a wonderful town. It was just the right spot for us to be after the wild and crazy free love environment of San Francisco and the laid back Happy Camp. When we hit Bloomington High School, we were too cool for words. We LOVED going onto IU’s campus where we could find more of our kind of “crowd”..a little older, a little more “hip”.

The kids at Bloomington High School (now Bloomington South) were a good mix of kids..farm kids, townies, stoners, jocks. There was a second high school in Bloomington, University High School...which was just off campus and the kids there were a little edgier. Their parents were professors, grad students or international guests and instructors. We liked University High School but attended Bloomington, which was on the outskirts of the southern edge of Bloomington. Still located there today, its no longer in a country setting. University High School does not exist and was transitioned into Bloomington North. It does still have more students that have campus affiliations but doesn’t have that same “mini IU” that University did when we were there.

My sister and I were considered “hippies” then. I guess we were. I wore long, flowered “granny” dresses and had a pair of lace up suede boots that I loved. I also wore shawls, no coat. We were clean, however, so I’m not sure we qualified as true hippies. Kevin was in junior high..at Central which was right at the intersection of 2nd Street and College and is now a park area just on the edge of Kroger parking lot. He became a pretty good athlete.

As a side note, at some point in time during the mid to late 60s my dad turned down two assignments. The first was to Portugal. He and my mom decided they did not want to do an international assignment. The second was a long term assignment in Orlando, Florida. You guessed it. Disney World. Much construction. But, my mom’s dad had passed away, and she did not want to be that far from my grandmother in southern Illinois long term. So, Dad turned that down as well and requested to be assigned to midwest projects from here on out.

We had moved in to a new mobile home in Bloomington. It was awesome, spacious and modern. Still in a nice mobile home park, close to the high school. Micki was dating, I was flirting and secretly “dating”. Maybe it would be called hanging out these days, but, it was fun. I had a nice boyfriend named Parker.

As stated in an earlier post, my dad was working on Assembly Hall which wasn’t a very long assignment for just the steel work. We weren’t in Bloomington long but like all visitors to Bloomington, we loved it and hated to leave. But, soon we were being transported to a small town in northern Indiana. Chesterton, which would end up being the longest we had ever lived anywhere. I started my junior year in Bloomington, and we got to Chesterton in about October of 1970. Micki was a senior and by December, she had dropped out of school, left home and headed back to Bloomington, having not fit in to Chesterton. She would be turning 18 in January so my parents did not try to get her to come back. I can’t say that I missed her but worried about her. There had been so much turmoil and trouble between her and my parents that I welcomed the quiet.