Someone I used to know.

Karen


One of the better known TV actors of the 1970s was Gabe Kaplan. He played the title character of “Welcome Back Kotter,” a sitcom about a teacher in Brooklyn. I remember as a child enjoying the antics of Mr. Kotter and his goofy, trouble-prone students, the “Sweathogs”. For years our family had a beach towel with the Sweathogs’ likenesses on it.

Gabe Kaplan also appeared in a public service announcement that we saw on TV a lot. It featured him walking along with a young girl who coughed and said something to the effect that people looked at her funny because she coughed a lot. She coughed because she had cystic fibrosis. The ad was intended to raise public awareness for that. It ended with Gabe Kaplan saying darkly that if we knew about cystic fibrosis what he and the little girl knew, we’d want to do something about it.

He was right. Cystic fibrosis is an inherited disease of the lungs and digestive system. It develops in children at an early age. And it gets worse from there. With today’s treatments it is not unusual for sufferers to live well into adulthood. In the 1970s it was a different matter.

I didn’t know any of this back when I was in grade school and saw “Mr. Kotter” on TV with the girl who coughed a lot. But I did know that one of my classmates also had cystic fibrosis. Her name was Karen.

Karen was a carrot-top, with short-cut hair that could almost make her pass for a boy. She was one of the smallest and skinniest kids in class. That was no doubt due to her illness; children with cystic fibrosis have trouble putting on weight even when they eat well. I don’t remember her coughing a lot, but I do recall her having a rough, raspy voice. That must have been a symptom as well.

I wish I could say I had a lot of nice memories about Karen. But we weren’t close friends. To me she was just another kid in class, one that we knew had problems. One of the best memories I have of her was hearing her sing “Superstar” from “Jesus Christ Superstar”. That song was all over the place back then. She seemed to like it.

We were both in Mrs. Blanton’s Fourth Grade class. For part of that year we had a practice teacher from the teachers’ college in the county seat named Mr. Riggs in our class. Mr. Riggs had a mustache and a quiet voice and manner. He got everybody’s attention that year when he had the class do its own version of “The Gong Show”. For those fortunate enough never to have seen it, this was a “talent” show in which people embarrassed themselves performing silly or inept acts while a studio audience and a panel of judges watched. Especially bad acts were “gonged” off the stage. It wasn’t a kids’ show, but kids loved it because it was pretty much on their level of sophistication.

Some students agreed to serve as the judges’ panel, complete with a trash can lid or something for a gong. Others prepared acts. I’m not sure what possessed a shy child like me to perform, but I did. I was one of only three acts that did not get “gonged”. In the final judging I came in second. The kid who came in first definitely deserved it more.

Mr. Riggs videotaped the whole thing on what was probably the first video camera most of us rural kids had ever seen. We watched the “show” we had made replayed on a VCR. It was a lot cooler than the slide shows and film strips that had made up our audiovisuals in class up to then. Mrs. Blanton’s class certainly had reason to remember Mr. Riggs and his “Gong Show”.

One other memorable thing happened that year. We came to class one day and were told that Karen had just died. Mr. Riggs suggested that everybody bow their heads and get quiet for a moment and say a silent prayer for Karen. We all did. It was one of the quietest times we ever had in class.

Karen was the first person our own age any of us knew who died. For some she was the first loss any of us had had of any age. I don’t recall the school having any kind of memorial for Karen. The teachers didn’t have everybody take time out to talk about their feelings about Karen or about death. From what I recall nobody in class talked about Karen much after that. We were children, living in the present and moving on quickly to the next thing in our own lives.

Most of us in that class are still alive now in our forties. Most got married and had children at some point. We’ve all done many things and had many experiences that Karen never had. She’ll always be the child she was in our memory. But she does have people who remember her—family, her friends, and her classmates. And now she has you too.

Nice. Makes me think of the kids from my time who never had the chance to live. Thanks.