Thomas Starr King Junior High Here I Come

When it came time to “graduate” from Ivanhoe Elementary School, things quickly began to change.  The assembly celebrating our passing was made up of our class singing the Doris Day hit “High Hopes.”  I guess I should have taken that as a harbinger of things to come.

Thomas Starr King Junior High pulled from a much wider and diverse catchment area than Ivanhoe. Frankly, I was nervous to be starting this new adventure and very jealous of my friends who were twins who could face the new challenges together, and my friends who had older brothers and sisters who had gone before.  I felt a bit like an explorer without an expeditionary force.

I think it’s ironic that I spent three years at a school named for someone I had never heard of and never was educated about. 

At King, life changed.  No longer was it important to kick a home run at recess or beat someone at handball.  Calluses earned from doing turns on the rings counted for naught. New words quickly joined my vocabulary:  Vato, Saint Christopher medal, Pendleton shirts, rat comb and scrub. It was now important how you held your blue notebook binder.  Girls to their chests and boys down at their side.  If this was not done correctly, one’s sexuality might be in question.

Wearing socks with your shoes made you a dork, hair spray was a must and suddenly deodorant became important.  The smell of Rite Guard Spray permeated the girl’s locker room as if it were the finest French perfume.

A year earlier, I had made a plea to the gods of bodily functions to PLEASE DON’T LET ME GET MY PERIOD IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL.  This prayer was answered, but the onset was made no easier by the horrible contraptions designed to deal with our “curse” and the hall monitors who patrolled the bathrooms during break and lunch.  “Recess” was a long gone bittersweet memory.

I think one of the things that junior high, and the entire educational system, teaches is that LIFE lets you get to the top--just every now and then (6th grade, 12^th grade for instance) and puts a most addicting and tiny taste of omnipotence onto your tongue. Then it pulls out the rug with a twisted twinkle of the eye and makes you start climbing the ladder all over again.

At King, we had to start at the bottom, and not with just our “Leave it To Beaver” Silverlakers.

 

When I first started to ask for a St. Christopher medal my very Protestant mother was a bit at a loss.  She was not to know that a shiny blue medal hanging from your neck made you a “Surfer” and not a “Vato.”  The Vatos were a group whose females wore their hair in huge beehives that had enough hairspray to support a skyscraper.  It was rumored that inside of those intricately backcombed styles were razor blades and cigarettes.

On my family summer travels we had passed through Pendleton, Oregon and I was well aware of the fame of its woolen blankets and shirts. At King, I was to learn that a Pendleton was also a badge that said you were a “surfer.”  Those pseudo tartans were worn by boys who cultivated long, blond—often bleached-- bangs hanging just over their eyes. A Pendleton and a St. Christopher medal was all it took to be a “surfer.”  Think Beachboys.

Surfers

One summer when I was about 14, my uncle and aunt went off on a freighter to parts unremembered by me.  They offered their new beach house to my mother who scooped up the offer of a free vacation locale with relish. 

My family moved in for a week, maybe three, watching the waves and the surfers of Manhattan Beach.  I spent the time riding the waves on an inflatable canvas raft and reading SURFER magazine.  The raft had a blue side and a red side and I always rode it red side up so sharks wouldn’t think it was blood. I envied the wet suited boys with sun-bleached hair who walked passed our house to the beach carrying their boards and their egos with confidence.

In those days women didn’t surf…. especially if they were a 14 year old from Silverlake who only had the Pendleton and the St. Christopher medal to prove her worth.

In a moment of great patience, my mother drove me to a surf shop in town to look at the goods.  I coveted the Gordon Smith and Dewey Weber boards and wished more than anything that I could own one.  I think a came away with a decal.

When I wasn’t fishing off the pier or riding the raft, I wiled away those days reading SURFER magazine. I taught myself about the sport.  I learned about far off places called Sunset Beach, Makaha and Pipeline.  I knew what “ hanging ten” was and became familiar with the names of great surfers and their feats.

Little did I know that one-day, by the oddest of confluences I would live in Hawaii and see these places. And odder still, I would end up teaching school with the daughter of one of the most famous surfers I had read about many years earlier. 

My husband wore my Pendleton until it got holes in the elbows. And as for the St. Christopher medal, who is to know what long ago drawer it got lost in. But, to this day, I’ve never been on a surfboard.

Thomas Starr King Jr. High: Bad Teachers Part One

I have had some memorable, fantastic, caring and inspiring teachers.  And then there was Mr. N. 

Mr. N was very short and his lack of height was exacerbated by the size of his head.  He looked like a bobble doll that rode on a dashboard of a GTO. He lacked any teaching skills whatsoever.

I had the unfortunate luck to have Mr. N for both an English and a history class in two different semesters.  He made no bones about the fact he just didn’t like us.  He was humorless, uninspired, and uninspiring.  And he wasn’t even retirement age.

It was in his class that I perfected my “married woman” signatures; writing “Mrs. Steve Stone”, “Mrs. Kristie Stone” over and over.  It was also in his class that I selected my children’s names: twin boys would be named Kirk and Kyle….or maybe Keir.  Keir Dullea had just made “David and Lisa” and seemed very exotic.  Oddly, I never selected a daughter’s name. Prophetic perhaps.  And thirty years later I named our son Keir.

In his English class Mr. N would write a weekly list of vocabulary words on the side blackboard.  The only one that I remember was “buxom.”  He droned on about Greek gods and goddesses while I stared out at the gym field wishing I could be out in the smog playing softball. 

Once, our 8^th grade class got together and agreed that everyone would shove their books off their desks at an appointed hour.  Deliciously anticipating this prank, we pretended to be interested in whatever it was Mr. N was saying.  When the time came, we slammed our books to the linoleum in unison.  He was not amused.   He just stood there rubbing his giant forehead.  The only words I can ever remember him saying—while he rubbed the dolphin-esque brow were “Take your seat.”

In his history class, from which I remember absolutely nothing except my grade, things were no better.  I missed two weeks of it because of very bad case of poison oak and got a D.  Yep, a D in 8^th grade social studies.  And now I teach it. Granted, I got the grade up to a B by the end of the semester, but it was my first experience of having a grade on the “dark side.”

I hope Mr. N left teaching and got into something he liked. He did go on a bit about martial arts. Maybe he found solace somewhere in that field.