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A Season of Change
Chapter Two: Lynden, 1976 At a glance, it looked like the upheavals of the past decade had bypassed Lynden altogether. The war in Vietnam, fought in overseas jungles and fought against on American soil ... the sexual revolution ... the Woodstock generation ... civil rights demonstrations ... campus riots ... drugs. Of course, first glances are deceiving. This was still 1976, and Lynden was part of it. Hair was long -- although, in Lynden, perhaps more prudently combed. Casual drug use was in evidence even there -- hiding in a baggie wedged into the sock of a student in the next aisle, growing in a field just down the street. Come fall, just 10 miles down the road in the hamlet of Laurel, the football team at Meridian High would practice on a field adjacent to a cow pasture where dozens of teens and twentysomethings -- sometimes outnumbering the football players -- would be down on their hands and knees picking hallucinogenic "magic" mushrooms. Some of those "shroomer" pickers would doubtless be from Lynden. Certainly, they would have been loathe to do such a thing before the prying, pious eyes within their own town, where, so it was said, there were more churches per capita -- about 25 churches then, nearly one for every 100 folks -- than anywhere else in the country. It was only fitting that, of the two high schools in town, one was a private Christian school. In 1976, there was no cable TV. No video games. No video rental stores and, for that matter, no VCRs. For kids on the rural fringes of Whatcom County, there wasn't even a movie theater to go to, unless you were willing to drive the 30 or 40 minutes into Bellingham. Entertainment choices were slim. But there was always sports. High school sports -- especially basketball -- captured the public fancy of rural Whatcom County like nothing else. Basketball games in the small-school Whatcom County League were invariably played before packed houses, and when teams qualified for the state tournament, they brought seemingly their entire communities with them. In the 1970s, the first week of March meant that a banner would hang once more over the Guide Meridian, the road leading south out of Lynden. The message on the banner was always essentially the same: Last one on the way to State turns out the lights. It was nearly literal. The town all but closed for the four days of "State." Usually, that banner was trimmed in green and gold, colors of town's public school, Lynden High. The Lynden Lions were a perennial powerhouse in sports, routinely dominating the Whatcom County League -- no small feat in itself, considering that WCL teams were invariably among the strongest in the state's Class A ranks. In 1974, WCL teams had placed 1-2-3 at the state tournament in Tacoma. In the 15 years leading up to 1976, WCL teams won five titles. Three were won by Lynden. It was largely perceived around the county that the Lions and their supporters evinced a certain arrogance -- a sense of entitlement. In many ways, they had earned one.
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