What still lay ahead of us when this picture was taken?
It was 1962/63 and this is part of the long school picture taken at the Grammar School on Grange Road, Rhyl, North Wales.
This is the red brick old building before the barbarians managed to raze it to the ground.
I know the year because I am in it in the second row and I know the boys in the front row were a year below me.
What surprises me is that very few of the boys pictured here can be found on Facebook. Many of the girls are there and I can still remember names.
Over the past two or three years I have tried to find these RGS Old Boys but with little success.
I stepped up that search just over two years ago and managed to track my oldest friend, Roger Steele, and, although he was not part of the social media scene, I found his niece Tilly Steele who told me she would be seeing him a few days later and might even get a message from him.
Before she visited he died suddenly of a heart attack. I had left it too late.
I had found two other old school friends from the intake of 61. David Prandle was, and still is, in Spain but we keep in touch.
Then there was David Christley, affectionately known as Binns, who I swapped jokes with for 12 months until late last year when his daughters announced the sad news that he had also died quite suddenly.
Other than that I have had little success with finding others online, except for Don Gatehouse who I discovered earlier this year had been living a scant mile or so from me when I was living in the Midlands.
So where have all the young men gone?
They were of an era to have still been in their 20s when the computer age really began. They should have been all over social media. The girls we were at school with are there, why not the boys?
I still remember many of their names: Gwynne (Hughes or Edwards I think), Tony Custy, David Mallin, Dennis Randle, Jimmy Parker, Peter Lessiter, Phil Chester, David Edwards, John Jones, John Cliff, Colin Taylor . . . .
I can see their faces but they are still schoolboys. By now they must be men aged 70, with families, retired and relaxing in their gardens.
Where have all the young men gone?
Robin's Nest 
An interesting read, Robin. My own schooldays were mostly post-corporal punishment but some of the older teachers were still relics of that era and would chuck a board rubber occasionally. Bullies and friends are universals of school life, though, I think I may have met fewer of the latter and more of the former in my school career.
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I was fortunate I made many more friends than I did enemies. Mind you the enemies I made were often in authoritative positions.
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