Foreign Friday

Major Don Deaton, Nancy Stearns, JoAnn Deaton

Robert D. Edgren High School

Junior - Senior Prom chaperones
Club Mutsu (Officer's Club)
Misawa AFB, Misawa, Japan
Spring 1980

One of the duties of a high school teacher is to chaperone student dances, and the largest event every year is the Junior-Senior Prom. I have attended over 35 proms in my life: two of which were in Japan. (Four of the proms were ones that I attended as a student. I attended a small high school and freshmen and sophomores could also attend prom. Years later, serving as a chaperone myself, I came to appreciate my own teachers more.)

The two years I was in Misawa, the dance and after-prom activities on base were held in the Officer's Club (Mutsu). Very little decorating was done for the dance.

After-prom activities included movies, games, lots of food, and more music until the wee hours of the morning. For the chaperones it included lots and lots of coffee and a great deal of patience. The Razorback hat I'm wearing in the photo above belonged to Roy Sargent (another teacher) who was from Fayetteville, AR and an ardent Razorback fan.

The Club Mutsu had a nice restaurant upstairs, a large ballroom with a stage (In 1979, I helped stage MASH with an adult cast. I met some wonderful people and had a blast) and a large bar which I only saw in use once at the wedding of one of my bowling teammates. Davy Jones' Locker, the base bar for officers, was located in the basement of the Club Mutsu. It had a shuffle board game in one corner as well as a dart board.

Back home in 1980, Shogun was a popular TV mini-series, and every week, a grainy tape of the prior week's broadcast was shown at Davy Jones' Locker. I think some of the pilots arranged for its transport to Japan. Another popular event was gathering to watch weekly tapes of Dallas that also found their way to Misawa.