Dolly Parton’s High School Senior Trip Hinted at Her Bright Future
Dolly Parton was ecstatic for her senior year of high school. She hated school and couldn’t wait to graduate so she could move on with her life and start chasing her dream of becoming a star. In addition to graduating, Parton’s final year of high school also included a senior trip she was looking forward to. She and her classmates boarded a bus headed for New York. The city dazzled the “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” singer and welcomed her with a premonition.
Dolly Parton graduated in 1964
1964 was a good year for Parton. It was the year she graduated high school. She was excited the moment the clock struck midnight on January 1.
“I remember New Year’s Eve 1964,” Parton wrote in her 1994 memoir, Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “I was so excited that I waited up to welcome not only the New Year but the sunrise as well. This was the year I was to graduate high school, the year I would finally be free to pursue my dream full-time.”
It was also the year Parton would get to go on her class’ senior trip. The “Jolene” singer was fascinated by the world outside of East Tennessee. This trip would be one of her first tastes of what else was out there.
“It has long been a custom for graduating classes to go on a senior trip,” she wrote. “Mine was no exception. To pay for the trip, we sold Krispy Kreme donuts, all kinds of candy, Burpee seeds, and whatever else a group of kids could sell (usually to their parents). Nineteen sixty four was also the year of the New York World’s Fair, and that was to be our adventure, with Washington, D.C., thrown in for good measure.”
The class trip
“Try to imagine several busloads of backwoods kids riding all the way to New York, the twangy cries of ‘Are we there yet?’, the numerous stops to pee, the questions about everything and every place we passed on the way,” wrote Parton. “The bus drivers and I will never forget the moment we finally rolled through the Lincoln Tunnel into New York.”
To Parton’s surprise, the city seemed to specifically greet her.
“Everywhere you looked, on buses, on billboards, on the tops of taxis were the words ‘Hello, Dolly!’ Naturally I made jokes,” she wrote. “‘I don’t know how they knew I was coming’ and ‘I didn’t know they’d make such a fuss’ were the sorts of things my classmates had to put up with all day long. Of course, we found out that ‘Hello, Dolly!’ was a new Broadway show. But to me, it was still a great welcome to the world outside the mountains, the one I had always lived for, the one where I would be a star.”
It was foreshadowing of what was to come of the “Down From Dover” singer.
Dolly Parton received the key to the city in 1978
Just as she knew she would, when Parton returned to New York City in the future, she was, indeed, greeted as a star. She even received the key to the city in 1978, 14 years after her senior trip.
“Years later I was in fact welcomed to New York in almost as grand a style and given the key to the city by then-mayor Ed Koch,” she wrote. “I have always felt welcome in New York City and still get a feeling of exhilaration every time I see the skyline loom up in the distance.”
