Reading of "The Outsiders" supplemented by the real thing
By: Emily Craighead
John Wydra could almost be a character in S.E. Hinton’s "The Outsiders."
Growing up in a working-class family in Buffalo, N.Y., during the 1950s and 1960s, he carried a switchblade in school and showed up at rumbles, which usually ended in shouting matches rather than physical violence, he said.
He was a self-professed "greaser."
"I floated between gangs, because I was a pretty big guy," he said. "I could defend myself."
Speaking to Cindy Tantum’s eighth-grade English classes Wednesday at Grover Middle School, Mr. Wydra described his experiences in the context of social unrest during the 1960s, as the nation faced the Cold War, the Vietnam War and race riots.
The class has been reading "The Outsiders," a coming-of-age novel set in the 1960s about a lower-class group of Oklahoma teenagers greasers whose lives are torn apart by violence.
"The 1960s were a curious, in some weird way, wonderful time, and I had a ringside seat," said Mr. Wydra, a recently retired broadcast journalist who spent much of his career working for CBS.
A malaise had set into all corners of society, but its effects were felt most acutely by young people, he said.
"There was a lot of macho carrying-on to get rid of a lot of anger and frustration," Mr. Wydra said.
In his own school there were slashings, and one of his friends died after being stabbed in the back at school.
After he graduated, Mr. Wydra came face-to-face with violent manifestations of people’s frustration on a national level. When racial tensions boiled over, leading to rioting in cities across the country, he reported on riots in Detroit.
Through it all, as a journalist charged with reporting only the facts, he kept his cool even as he found himself the target of threats and violence.
He didn’t panic when a sniper shot at him on the streets of Beirut in 1975, a toughness he attributes to his rough high school days.
"In a situation like that, especially as a reporter, the worst thing you can do is lose your cool," he said.
Mr. Wydra also had a few words of advice for Ms. Tantum’s students, who will be writing newspaper-style articles about episodes from "The Outsiders."
"A reporter is supposed to take a middle road," he said.
Until he took one year off to run for Congress as a Democrat, Mr. Wydra said he kept his political views hidden from the public.
With the experiences of a journalist who covered the 1960s on which to refer, the students may be able to add a bit of realism to their articles.
Of those chaotic days, Mr. Wydra said, "It was a thrilling time for those of us who survived."

