I’ve spent three days in a kind of crash course on American High School reunions. On Friday I went to an informal get-together of Jim Osterberg’s high school chums at the Colonial Lanes bowling alley in Ann Arbor. On the Saturday there was a formal dinner. I only got the nod that I could attend the diner on the Friday night - fortunately Banana Republic, in the inevitable Mall opposite the Sheraton Inn where we’re all staying, does a nice line in sober suits.

 

This was exhausting, exhilirating, surreal and nerve-wracking but ultimately everything I hoped for. I’ve spoken to perhaps 50 or 60 of Jim’s high school chums, a piece of good ol’ fashioned reporting with notebook in hand; I don’t think I could ask for anything more to give me a feel for the guy’s environment. I’ve also been to Tappan School, his Junior High, and got to tour the High School itself on the Saturday. What a creepy feeling, though, touring the site of your hosts’ youth.

 

A snippet, to be going on with, of an interviewette with Michael Bartus. He knew Jim’s dad from the Varsity Day Camp, a summer camp run by Irvin ‘Wiz’ Wisniewski on Cordley Lake, where James Osterberg Senior was a counsellor.

 

“He was very different than almost any of the, for want of a better term, faculty, if you will. I grew up [among] upper middle class, business people. Academics, whatever, and I’d never met anyone quite like him. This real sharp-edged, crew-cut, chisel-faced, not an ounce of fat on him. Very much like a military man. That was my first exposure to anyone like that. And what began to go through my mind later, when I began to go through high school, ‘cos I remember this man, and by now, Jim is into his band venture, and I’m thinking, This is amazing this guy came out of a family with a father like that. And it was very much law and order, by the rules. Versus the very different kind of ambience from everybody else that was at camp.

 

“(Jim Sr was) Very quiet. But underneath all that - you know when someone can convey, better do what I say, without being abrasive in that regard?  Or at least that’s the perception I took.

 

Yeah. I wanted to go back to my dad at the end of the day. I do remember distinctly the thought went through my mind, I’m certainly glad that’s not my dad! As opposed to Wiz, who was like the quintessential kind of good dad, embracing, I don’t mean necessarily physically, but welcoming. That was generally the tone, and that’s probably why [Jim Senior] stood out differently. And then of course because he was affiliated with the camp, his son can go to it. And I remember hearing a couple of years later from somebody I had met, from someone who had known [Jim Jr] growing up, that he had to be home, in his bedroom, at an absurdly early hour. They were definitely dad rules [that Jim had to follow].