Some of the more memorable dates involved going to the movies - the drive-in movies! Timonium still had the Timonium Drive-In in those days, up off Timonium Road, and while they generally played family friendly fare, by the second showing, the kids were asleep and people were getting frisky in the back seats. A couple of times I saw a few babies snoozing while their youngish parents got it on in the front seat. It all reminded me of the time I took Marilyn to the Malta Drive-In in upstate New York, a venue which actually showed X rated movies. She was wearing a sundress, fishnets, and high heels, and not much else! I forget what the movie was, but it didn't have a candle to what we were up to or what was going on around us!
My senior year I took a second semester of calculus, a second semester of physics, and a first semester of chemistry. I figured that by the end of my senior year I should be able to finish off RPI's science and big chunk of the liberal arts requirements, along with most of the calculus I would need through sophomore year. I was toying with the idea of very aggressively burning through some credits, more than I had considered before. Originally I had been thinking about 35-40 credits, but with the addition of the liberal arts during summer school, there was no reason I couldn't bring that total up to 50-60, the equivalent of two years of college. RPI's policy was to accept grades that were B or better, and so far I was working at an A level.
That would leave all the advanced math and computer courses to be done at RPI. That was a lot more important in those days than in the future. At the time, computer programming courses had to be very cognizant of the computer they would be run on. In the future, personal computers would run C++ or Java or other more advanced programming with no differences based on the computer. Not so in the early days. My first programming course at RPI was Fortran 4, with a Watfor compiler specifically for an IBM 360 mainframe running batch processing using punch cards. Just a few years later I was programming in Basic for a terminal version of an IBM 370 at Fairleigh Dickinson, using a teletype machine while working on my MBA. Meanwhile, at work I was programming with a different flavor of Basic on a PDP-11 minicomputer with a keyboard and monitor. Better to learn the language while using the computer I would be working with.
My time back at the Buckman house was very limited. I was invited on the family vacation to Rehoboth Beach, but since they would be staying at a Bed and Breakfast and I would have to share a room with Hamilton, I turned it down. For once my parents didn't push it. I did visit for Suzie's birthday party, although I watched Hamilton like a hawk to make sure he didn't destroy my present to her. Otherwise I stayed away. Sunday had been my 17th birthday, so I went over for dinner and presents, which was quite strained. There was even a present from Ham, but it was obvious Mom had bought it, and she damn near had a leash on him all through dinner and the party afterwards. I thanked him and it was all he could do to keep from spitting at me.
I spent as much time as possible with Jeana. There was a part of me that got very depressed when I looked at Jeana and thought of the future. In a year's time we would be splitting apart. I was going to college 350 miles away, and she would be staying back home, a heartbreakingly beautiful girl in her senior year. No way was she going to wait for me, and it wouldn't be fair to ask her to. I had no idea how that was going to go. Would she break up with me? Would I have to break it off with her? Our feelings for each other now were far deeper than they had been before.
Many years before, on my first shot, we had broken up at the end of that first year. Later, in college, I had called her out of the blue, and we had gone out to dinner, to see if there was anything still there. There wasn't. We had changed, me as much as her. She was far more worldly and sophisticated, no longer a little high school kid, and to be fair, my life had moved on as well. Thomas Wolfe was right, you can't go home again.
Right now, however, I was still dating the prettiest girl in town. I still couldn't figure out what she saw in me, but I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. (Hell of an analogy, Jeana didn't look at all like a horse!)
As I told Jeana, we wouldn't have to break up when she went to Loch Raven High. What with my schedule for classes over at Towson State, it was actually fairly easy for me, at least half the time, to drive over and pick her up. She rode home with me instead of on the school bus, and if we just managed to make a stop along the way at my apartment, nobody seemed to notice. I actually felt relatively comfortable hanging around with her and her friends over there, since it was a new school primarily made up of transfers from Towson High. On my first go-around, I dated a girl my senior year who attended Dulaney Valley, our archrival to the north, and I always felt very uncomfortable there.
Now, not only could I take Jeana to school dances or plays at Towson, she could invite me over to Loch Raven for their events. Every girl likes to be taken to events, and Jeana was no different. The interesting thing to me was school plays and band concerts. After Marilyn and I started working for her father in the mid-Eighties, we built a house in a small town outside of Cooperstown, with a central school K-12 of barely 800 kids. School plays and concerts were awful, because the tryouts consisted of making sure everybody had a pulse. At Towson High, with three grades consisting of almost 2,000 students, we had enough people that they actually had tryouts and the kids had to learn their lines and compete for parts. Our senior year musical was The Music Man, and the male lead ended up going to Hollywood and becoming a real actor, though in character roles and bit parts. Still, there was an obvious depth of talent available.
The last few weeks of April through the last few weeks of May are prom season. This year I could take Jeana to three formal dances, and she went nuts figuring out dresses and outfits. We had the Senior Prom at Towson, and Junior-Senior Proms at both Towson and Loch Raven. I would only need to rent a tux for my senior prom; for the other two, a dark suit and new shirt would be sufficient. This was all in the day before people started getting crazy, with renting limos and party rooms at hotels and such. The most elaborate thing any of us did was when Tusker, one of the more flamboyant bikers and Vo-Tech students, and possessed of shoulder length red hair and a magnificent mustache, went all out on an all white tuxedo, top hat, and walking stick. He looked spectacular!
Tusker was a good friend of mine, and he was a real character. He had flunked his sophomore year and been held back. He had actually run for class president in our senior year, on the platform that he had an extra year of experience! Made sense to me! He lost, but still managed to beat out some of the other senior suckups.
Jeana wore a couple of cocktail dresses to the junior-senior proms, but did the evening gown routine again for our senior prom. Mrs. Colosimo insisted I come early each night, so she could get pictures of us, and my mother made me bring Jeana over the night of our senior prom, so she could get pictures. Jeana hinted to me that she was wearing something similar to last year for each prom, which I took to mean stockings and not pantyhose. This made me really look forward to finding out, and more than a little surprised that she would consider this while wearing above-the-knee cocktail dresses. She did, however, so I decided to surprise her as well.
At the end of the last break during the Towson High junior-senior dance, the first of the two junior-senior dances, I pulled her around the corner in the gym, into a very dark spot, and before she could stop me, I reached under her dress and pulled her lace panties off. I tucked those in my pocket and led her back out to the dance floor. Jeana was very nervous about this, as stockings themselves were extremely daring for the time, and she stayed on my arm the rest of the evening like glue. She did whisper in my ear, however, that she was incredibly turned on, and wanted to leave almost as soon as I did this, and not out of embarrassment. We never even made it back to my apartment before she was crawling across the bench seat of the Galaxie and pleading for me to stop and screw her right there in the car. I just smiled and drove to the apartment, where I took care of her in a more comfortable setting.