Behind the Victory Flagpole — the Ko-kertes of Henry High
By: guest writer Gladys Vinje Wells 10/01/2012
In the summer of the early 1940s I, Eileen Kane, Shirley Budd and Carol Boyson met at Johnson’s Drug Store in Camden Center to have a Coke and listen to juke box music. It became a regular habit of ours and from those meetings we formed a girl’s club and named it “The Ko-kertes,” taken from our love of Coca-Cola.
We were all best friends, having started Henry at the same time in our freshman year. And the fact that we lived fairly close to each other made the friendship a lot easier. I lived on Knox, near Victory Drive. Eileen lived on Colfax, Shirley on Dupont and Carol on Bryant Ave. N.
During our junior and senior years at Patrick Henry a lot more girls wanted to jump on the band wagon, so the original number of four girls would grow to 12 Ko-kettes. Even though this was not an official school club, we wanted to have similar jackets to show we were a club. We bought jackets in the school’s colors, which were crimson and pearl gray--we just called it red and gray—and had the name of our club printed on the back. We wore the jackets to the basketball and football games and cheered for our boys! We had a lot of fun going to the games and always had a lot to talk about after the games at Johnson’s Drug Store, which was our favorite meeting place. Throughout the years we all meet at the reunions and keep in touch with each other. Our big claim to fame is that we were the first girls’ club in Minneapolis to attend sporting events in name jackets. Strangely enough, none of us can now locate those jackets!
Note about our guest writer: After graduating from Henry High, Gladys worked in Minneapolis for Northwestern Bell Telephone Company. She married Gordon Wells from the Edison area in 1949. They moved to California where she worked for Pacific Bell, which later became AT&T, and lived in Long Beach. In 1960 they moved to Santa Clara, California. She said they chose that particular place because it reminded them of the Camden area, in that it looked like a good place to raise children. They had three children. Now the area is known as Silicon Valley, with Intel, Google, Facebook and Apple. The weather is milder than Minneapolis and a great place to live--almost as good as Camden!
Barbara Meyer Bistodeau
