CHEYENNE -- Planning a New Year’s Eve party was a very big deal for me and my friends when we were in our late teens and early 20’s.
That was a long time ago in the middle of the last century; We were either in college or planning to be in college while others —guys—were skipping college for a job in town while they waited to get drafted to serve in the Korean War.
We decided the party would be held at the house where I lived with my father (my mother died a couple of years earlier and I had no siblings.)
Three or more friends always met there every Tuesday night to play cards and snack because there were no little brothers or sisters to pester us as there were at their homes.
At the time, i was working sometimes at two jobs to save enough money to go to college but I had Tuesdays off.
Anyway my dad always welcomed my friends or most of them.
So the informal casual invitations for a New Year’s eve party went out, not too many. It was a small house.
We had beer—we could only get 3.2 beer at the time—and variety of snacks.
It became a night to remember.
Kind of like a Marx’s brothers’ movie. If you don’t know who the zany Marx brothers were, don’t worry about it.
A number of people about our age and who had not been invited crashed the party. Some of them had been drinking more than 3.2 beer obviously.
As I mentioned before, this was a small house
People eventually were conversing with one another earnestly everywhere, in the kitchen, living room, bedrooms and even the bathroom.
One of the uninvited gusts was a former classmate who had way too much to drink.
He was older having returned to finish high school after a stint in the navy.
He got overly amorous and ended up falling in the bathtub. I maintained that I did not push him; he wasn’t hurt and behaved himself thereafter.
It was about that time that my dad arrived in a taxi cab after hoisting a few drinks with his buddies downtown. Being in a good mood, he invited the taxi driver and two or more their passengers to come in to welcome the new year.
And they joined the other revelers.
As the night wore on the party goers wore out. Some left while others could be found at dawn draped over chairs, stretched out on the sofa in pairs or curled up on the floor.
Some of us, including me and the navy vet from the bathtub, went to 6 a.m. mass which was required in those days.
The next day dad and I cleaned up everything. We agreed it was fun but we would not do it again. And we did not. Because dad sold the house and moved into an apartment.
The next year there was a party but it was at someone else’s house and was well controlled.
Later on marriage and motherhood dampened my enthusiasm for a rousing New Year’s Eve party waiting tor the ball to fall.
We attended a couple of parties that were offered as packages at Kozy Inn, a favorite watering hole for our groups of graduates from two Catholic high schools in the city.
The package included drinks and fried chicken at midnight.
We finally found it boring. We wanted to go to bed before midnight so we could enjoy New Year’s Day with a ham dinner and football.
Having a hangover wasn’t a joke any more.
We had become grown-ups.
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Contact Joan Barron at 307-632-2534 or jmbarron@bresnan.net
