Friendship is measured in music

How do you measure friendships?

The years? The laughter? The shared disappointments and disasters?

Ask anyone who has attended his or her 50th high school reunion and you’ll get a dozen different answers.

Last month, I took the 50th reunion photo for the Class of 1967 of Dunkirk High School. It was a strong, cohesive group. My friend Jim Weiseman was part of the class. So was Monty Missicano, who attended Portland schools until about junior high when his parents moved to Dunkirk.

Two weekends ago marked the 50th reunion for the Class of 1967 of Portland High School. Connie and I played host for my old childhood buddy Jim Klopfenstein, who graduated a year behind me.

Klop and I have been friends for as long as I remember. Somewhere there are snapshots of the two of us playing on the floor of the Klopfenstein house on Pleasant Street when we were about 4.

I say “about,” because I think we’re less than a year apart in age.

We could have ended up in the same graduating class but for the fact that I enjoyed kindergarten and — with a November birthday — was enrolled in first grade a year before Jim.

But the grade separation in school never interfered with our friendship. In fact, it might have helped.

When Klop was somewhere about 8 or 9, his parents moved from Pleasant Street to a larger house on Race Street, essentially right next door to my house.

That pretty much guaranteed that we would be hanging out together nearly daily for a good part of our young lives, shooting baskets, building clubhouses, riding bikes and all the rest.

When the teenage years hit, Klop and some of his buddies decided to form a rock band.

Because I was musically impaired, I became the “manager.” There wasn’t much required in the job description: I moved amplifiers, held onto the checkbook and borrowed my parents’ station wagon as necessary.

The group was pretty good, though it could have benefited from better management.

Two images remain from that era.

The first: A summer afternoon when the band had been practicing at Klop’s house on Race Street and decided to climb out onto the roof with their guitars to serenade the neighborhood.

The second: A winter day when schools were closed. My parents and sister were out at the farm in Jackson Township and I was home alone when band members suggested the Ronald place as a rehearsal venue. The foundation shook that day, and I had a lot of explaining to do.

As garage bands do, that one sort of melted away. But the lure of rock and roll did not.

In the summer of 1967, when I had been working as a trainee teller at Peoples Bank and Klop had been painting LP gas tanks for Klopfenstein Blue Flame, the two of us took off on a Friday afternoon for the Indiana State Fair. The Who was headlining.

Klop had an old Rambler, so the front seats allowed us to sleep in the car parked in the infield of the track. We chased girls on the midway all evening, then woke up for toasted cheese sandwiches at the dairy bar in the morning. Then we hit the concert.

A year later we re-convened at Butler University where — marvel to behold — the great British rock band Cream was making its first American tour. A week later we gathered again in Muncie for Jimi Hendrix. Yes, Jimi Hendrix played Muncie.

There’s a pattern here, of course. Music always seems to be involved.

In my sophomore year in college, I hooked up Klop with some other musicians at Earlham. The group — which had the pathetic name “Quiet Tomorrow” for which I am entirely responsible — may have been one of the best regional bands of the era, mixing folk and rock with terrific harmonies.

More recently, the three of us have connected at LotusFest, the world music festival that energizes downtown Bloomington, every few years.

So how do you measure friendships?

My guess is that every friendship has a different yardstick.

In our case, we measured them by the songs we sang — and keep singing — together.

How do you measure yours?