Winter Sports a la Silverlake

Growing up in Silverlake, within view of the Hollywood sign, did not offer a lot of winter sport experience.  I think the coldest it ever got was around 40 degrees and the big thrill was being able to see your breath….but not smell it.

There WAS the one time that it hailed and I ran down to the garage to find a pair of wooden skis that my father must have used in Alaska before he met my mother.  By the time I ran back up to the ice covered lawn and put on the ill-fitting skis, my “powder snow” looked like a melting lemonade slushy.  So it was on Saturday afternoons spent watching ABC’s WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS that I became an aficionado of ski racing. 

At that time in the sport, the French were dominant.  This coincided with my French 3 class taught by a very cranky Czech with a thick accent that resembled nothing one would hear in Paris.  He kept a stack of Paris Match magazines on a table conveniently located behind my desk.  Mr. L. was obviously bored stiff and teaching until his Social Security would kick in.  Kids cheated like mad, passed notes and had appalling pronunciations. He didn’t seem to care.  I spent the time in class “reading” Match.  I was proficient enough to get the gist of the captions.

The oversized magazines were filled with stories and large glossy pictures of Jean Claude Killy, who was movie star handsome.  And with whom I was madly in love.  There were also articles about sister racers Marielle and Christine Goitschel. Between WIDE WORLD OF SPORTSS and the Match magazines, I became quite the expert on the French ski team.  I could pronounce their names with nasal accuracy, knew who was fastest, and learned about ski wax.  Of course, some of this valuable knowledge was gained while ignoring the drone of Mr. L’s Czech accent trying to get verb conjugations into our adolescent brains. I paid the price. 

I don’t want to sound like a goody goody, but I was one of the few who didn’t cheat in the class.  Trust me, Mr. L was either ignorant or apathetic to notes written on hands, papers and desks.  Cheating wasn’t a challenge and it just wasn’t for me.  I preferred my covert sessions with the Match magazines.  That Mr. L even noticed that I reading these rather than listening to his diabolically boring lessons on how to say what we had eaten for breakfast, is something I greatly doubt.  He didn’t want to be in the class any more than any of us did.

In later years, when I had a slightly wider view of the world, I thought of Mr. L and wondered if he had fled the Nazis or survived war horrors that were beyond our 9^th grade ken. He may have experienced a hell that none of us baby boomers would ever be able to comprehend. For this, his reward was teaching a bunch of kids who thought he was a boring old fool. 

I got a D in French 3, had to go to summer school, but still remember with fondness those wonderful foreign magazines that took me to a different place.

The last time I was in Paris, on three different occasions, I was stopped by a French person asking me for directions.  I was able to help---in hopefully non Czech-accented French.

Field Trip to the Tuna Factory

Field trips were a big deal that spanned several weeks.  Not the actual field trip, but the preparation.  First, there was anticipation of a day out in the real world.  Then came the parent permission form to be taken home, signed and the date added to the family calendar.  Then my mother would buy special blue lunch bags—not the regular brown ones, but a cool blue-green color that matched the bottom of most of the swimming pools I’d seen.

On the appointed day of the educational experience that was to rouse us from the comfort of Ivanhoe Elementary School, my mother would pack a special lunch for me.  It would contain a love note wishing me well.  The outside of the bag would be decorated with her simple drawings of sailboats or something related to the trip.  This trip was to the tuna factory in Long Beach.

I boarded the big yellow bus with my classmates and we each clutched our brown bag lunches—though, of course, mine was in an ocean blue bag.  We were driven through and over the freeways of Los Angeles that still amaze me, and down the coast.  At a large park we exited the bus and ate on dirty public picnic tables.  Soon after we re-boarded the bus and headed for the tuna factory.

I don’t remember what the special lunch was, nor the love note.  I only remember throwing up on the bus and suddenly becoming a pariah. My classmates screamed with revulsion.  I was immediately given a seat up in the front with the teachers.  And was told that I was “bus sick” and needed, from there and then on, to sit at the front of the bus.  If only Rosa Parks had had such a teacher.

The field trip was ruined for me.  I was humiliated, ashamed and embarrassed. Frankly, I did not care about the cans of tuna I saw going down steaming conveyor lines.  Now, in retrospect, I wonder what the heck Mrs. Berkheiser was thinking.  How was this to enlighten the children of Silverlake.  Maybe, forty years later, they would choose a healthy brand of dolphin free tuna.  But back in those days the only dolphin we knew of was Flipper—and the ones we saw at Sea World.  Tuna was a mayonnaisey staple that turned my stomach more than once. Had I even known about the dolphin connection, things would have been much different.

School buses became synonymous with barf and field trips lost their appeal.  To this day I wonder why school buses are the only form of public transport that don’t require seatbelts.  Now, as a teacher, I avoid field trips like the plague.