If you make your living in a profession that requires you to attend far more meetings, socials, political rallies, sports events, criminal trials, trophy presentations and disasters both manmade and natural than most people ever see in a lifetime, it won’t be long before you know pretty much what to expect.

Let’s take high school graduations, for instance, an appropriate choice given we just made it through – I mean, enjoyed and celebrated – yet another graduation season.

While my colleagues and I recover from – I mean, look back upon the happy shrieks and words of inspiration that flowed from the hearts and minds of selected speakers – I happened to stumble across a rather smallish story that appeared, coincidentally enough, in our predecessor-in-name Nashua Telegraph 50 years ago last week.

In the middle of the front page, sandwiched between stories on a major fire on Fourth Street and the Board of Aldermen’s battle with Mayor Dennis Sullivan over whether to purchase the Neverett property to expand City Hall toward Elm Street, is an unbylined, shortish piece in which Superintendent of Schools Edmund Keefe announced the school district “will not condone the future ‘scaling’ of Nashua High graduates’ caps into an audience.”

So, we learn, the tradition of cap-tossing, which if it happens usually follows the symbolic moving of the tassle that officially turns a senior into a graduate, came under unfavorable scruitny long before well-meaning, but sometimes over-the-top, safety-obsessed parents began fitting their children, figuratively of course, with protective bubbles once they promoted themselves from toddling to walking and running.

And here we (well, at least I) thought the attempts by some, perhaps many, schools around here to ban, or at least strongly discourage, celebratory cap-scaling was a new tool in the fight to neutralize every potential danger, real or imagined.

But after I read the rest of the story I thought, “well, maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to scoff at the suggestion a flying, spinning graduation cap-turned-Frisbee-with-sharp-corners can become a dangerous weapon.

It turns out the late lifelong educator and centenarian Mr. Keefe’s anti-scaling directive was prompted by not one, but two, flying cap-related injuries sustained by people the Telegraph described as “two spectators, including a woman teacher.”

I’m not sure why the writer felt it necessary to note the gender of the injured teacher, but apparently neither she nor the other “spectator” was seriously injured.

According to Keefe as quoted in the story, “a majority of the 529 young men and women graduates skimmed head apparel ‘as high and as far as they could.'”

The caps have “stiff edging,” Keefe noted, that “can cause serious injury.”

One envisions the oft-invoked motherly advice, “you’ll shoot your eye out,” a warning that seems to have evolved from horseplay with toy guns and slingshots to cover pretty much any kid activity that threatens injury to a limb or an organ.

In an era when community leaders tended to be a tad more forthcoming – a brief chat in person or on the phone more than sufficed, no waiting for formal written statements needed – Keefe also advised Nashuans an investigation was underway regarding what the Telegraph called “a disorder” outside Nashua High School (what’s now Elm Street Middle School) while the seniors were at Holman Stadium for graduation rehearsal.

The student “was dismissed for the day because he was ‘fresh’ to a teacher,” Keefe told the Telegraph. You don’t hear “fresh” in the context of behavior much anymore, but I can certainly attest to hearing “don’t you be fresh with me young man” more than a few times back in the day.

Anyway, the student left but later returned “with a group of supporters” who weren’t NHS students, Keefe reported. They “yelled and created a nuisance,” he said, but police promptly dispersed what the participants, in true 1969-speak, may have called a “yell in,” or perhaps a “nuisance in,” unless the majority sat down, which would then be called a “sit in.”

Ah, the 60s. Fun stuff, fond memories.

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears Sundays in The Telegraph. He may be reached at 594-1256, dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com or@Telegraph_DeanS.