Mount de Sales High School - Salesian Yearbook (Macon, GA)

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1983-84 It was a year like many others. It was full of changes; some of them gentle and expected, others rude and harsh. In each of them we saw America and we saw the world, and underneath it all, we saw ourselves When we entered our senior year at Mt. de Sales, the campus had been | transformed, there were more computers everywhere, and there were two new Sisters of Mercy to teach us. We celebrated our senior year to the music of Michael Jackson's Thriller and Synchronicity, by the Police. In the movie theaters we watched Jennifer Beals blaze her way through Flashdance; the movie inspired a new craze (break dancing) and a new fashion style (the torn-sweatshirt look). Return of the Jedi gave us a marvelous new villian, Jabba the Hutt, and Terms of | Endearment left us with a new appreciation of love. During the summer of 'g3 we re-lived the adventures of the early astronauts, and agreed that they ‘had The Right Stuff. On the small screen, we joined 100 million of our fellow citizens to witness the destruction of nuclear war, and the horror that followed on The Day After. PBS gave us our f irst comprehensive look at events that happened in our childhood in Vietnam: A Television History. We shared the bittersweet emotion of The Thorn Birds, and every Thursday night we said Cheers and then got | Hill Street Blues. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan entered the final year of his first term in office with the economy booming, and American troops, for the first time in a decade, on foreign soil. We grieved at the Marine massacre in Beirut, and ‘cheered our country when the Rangers rescued American medical students on the island of Grenada. The stain of Marxism spread further into our » hemisphere, as the U. S. kept up the pressure on El Salvador and Nicaragua. We were shocked at the sheer brutality of the Soviet Union when they shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007. It reminded us that ‘the world was still an uncertain place, full of violent changes, too. As always, there were new personalities that burst into our lives: Mr. T., Vanessa Williams (the first black Miss America); Sally Ride (the first woman astronaut), Reverend Jesse Jackson, and the Cabbage Patch Dolls. There were those who faded from the scene, too. Menachem Begin retired as Prime Minister of Israel. Yasser Arafat's iron-clad control of the PLO was finally broken. We said goodbye to Tennessee Williams, Karen Carpenter, and James Watt, who shot himself in the foot once too often. Herschel Walker left the University of Georgia for the New Jersey Meadowlands and a million dollar deal. Nobody called him a carpetbagger. It was a year in which we commemorated the sublime (the 20th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy), and the joyful (the 20th anniversary of the Beatles’ first appearance on American television). It was a year like many others, and unlike any other; it was uniquely ours, and we won't soon forget it.