Dick Carlsen

The Lost Boys of Happy Valley College Dick Carlsen

As a Peter Pan fan, imagine yourself flying in your dreams, without Tink's fairy dust. While flying, you "see" other kids your age also flying. The story employs that fantasy. Eight young boys meet in their Peter Pan-induced flying dreams in the 1950's. Destiny brings them all together in 1964 at Happy Valley College, a Disneyesque Fantasyland and Adventureland campus in northern California, where they form a bond, a tight brotherhood through athletics and their share of mischief-making, so much like Peter's "Lost Boys" on Neverland. After one such incident they are brought before the Dean of Men, also a Peter Pan fan, who judges them of 19th century English public school "good character", and symbolically labels the group his "Lost Boys". The Lost Boys graduate, deal with the ever-present military draft and Vietnam War, and go their eight separate ways to pursue careers and live their lives. Their remarkable careers would make the dean proud. One quasi-Lost Boy, Tim, suffers demonstrably from Peter Pan Syndrome. In 2016, almost fifty years since the Lost Boys were all together at a San Francisco Forty Niners football game in 1969, they have a "seventy-year-olds" reunion at their campus, filled with adventures, mishaps, and renewed camaraderie. The week-long reunion concludes, and heartfelt farewells dominate. Does Tim beat the Syndrome? Will there be another reunion with all eight of the Lost Boys?