I remember far more from elementary school than I do from high school. Perhaps it’s because at Ivanhoe we were with the teachers all day long. Perhaps it was the hormonal shifts that would later change my body. Or perhaps it was because Ivanhoe only had about a dozen teachers. John Marshall High School was much different.
First of all, Marshall was one of the most beautiful public high schools in the city. It still is. Its twin, L.A. High, had the architecture, but not the setting. Marshall could have been the campus of a private and posh East coast college or prep school. But, it was in Silverlake. It is such a good looking school that I see it frequently in car ads and remember the pride I felt when it was used in television’s “Mr. Novak” with James Franciscus and the movie “Grease.”
I think that at Ivanhoe I felt everyone was pretty much equal. Except, that is, for Jesus who didn’t speak English and Keith Shepherd from England who had un-manly rosy cheeks, wore his pants too high and fainted in the sun.
By high school, this notion of egalitarianism was long gone. Everything mattered in one way or another. Your hairstyle—and how you parted your hair, your clothes, your car—if you had one, your skin, the way you carried your books, the music you liked; all defined you. And that was just the beginning. There were cliques and elite social clubs who would commandeer select parts of the campus at lunch. There were kids who had “gone all the way” and others who hadn’t. Confident, fast track students used words like “liaise” and wore ties to school and joined student government. Judge Lance Ito was one of them…though I never heard him utter “liaise.”
Then there were the budding hippies, the cheerleaders who ended up pregnant or gay, and the jock guys (but not girls—this was WAY before Title IX). Other sub-cultures consisted of the Jewish American Princesses who always had the latest clothes from trendy stores at Century City or the WASPs who read Glamour, Mademoiselle and Seventeen for every possible fashion and beauty tip. One group was into souped up Camaros, Cougars and Corvettes and raced on Riverside Drive on Saturday nights. Another did the school plays or played in bands. There were the druggies, the Nisei perfectionist kids who never talked and got straight A’s, the Hispanics and the Lebanese, Doves and Hawks and boys with pimples who ran the AV equipment. I didn’t fit into any of these groups. And I didn’t stand out in class either.
Sometimes I liked to hang out in the library during lunch. It was cool, as in temperature, and the librarian was a nice lady who the mother of my sister’s best friend. I remember Mrs. Fitzpatrick being impressed when I checked out a book about Indira Gandhi.
At one point, I decided that I would befriend the blind girl who ate lunch just outside the main hallway. I will never forget my utter embarrassment when I concluded one of our conversations with the words: “See you later.”
The school’s administration was made up of a trio of oddballs. The principal wore his hair in the shortest of short buzz cuts in an era when everyone else was growing hair on head and face—and sometimes legs. He was a humorless man who today would probably be a neo-Nazi. He was totally unprepared for the generation that would neither respect him nor listen to him. He saw the peace sign as a personal threat. Mr. R could have been a poster child for the term “Generation Gap.”
The “Girl’s Vice Principal” was someone who, even I, at the age of 15, could tell lacked “life experience.” She was staid, double-chinned, single and out of touch with her charges. I have no memories of the “Boy’s Vice Principal,” other than his Italian name and bad suits.
Geriatric women who wore eyeglasses on chains and beaded cardigan sweaters staffed the main office. Off the main office were smaller cubicles for the counselors. My college counselor had a large wart protruding through his thinning hair and counseled not. It would have been nice to know that one could practice for the SAT or take it multiple times.
As a teacher, I am well aware graduating seniors depart taking mostly memories of their recent teachers. Their elementary and middle school teachers are long gone relics of a past they pretend no longer matters. So it seems that the higher the grade level taught by a teacher, the more they are remembered.
Ah…but this is not the case for me. I can remember only two or three teachers—okay, maybe four—from my three years at John Marshall High. Actually, I just remembered a few more. But not clearly, and not in a way that implies they made any impact on my life or education.
As for John Marshall teachers, they were an odd lot. They ran the gamut of age, style and popularity.
There were the de rigueur lesbian P.E. teachers, one who informed us that she always bought her socks at Sears because if they wore out, Sears would replace them free. Another wore green contact lenses. A third taught health as well as PE, showed us “Reefer Madness” and advised lemon juice as a salad dressing. And a fourth was supposed to have been in the Marines.
The math department was completely forgettable. My only memory is a sad joke about a polygon being a dead parrot and a teacher who wore the same suit everyday for a semester and then switched to a second suit that he wore everyday from then on. He always reminded me of Barney Fife.
There was a teacher who called me “Kathy Simpson” instead of Kristie Smithson and gave a test to determine the careers to which we would be best suited. Because I was naïve in the ways tests can be skewed, I answered that I wouldn’t mind working outdoors. The test concluded that I was aptly qualified to pursue work as a deckhand on a ship. A life as a longshoreman was something I had not contemplated. That teacher’s daughter went to the school and I instinctively felt sorry for her.
The teachers were part-time actors, a former professional football player, a Czech, a German, a Brit and a music teacher who was rumored to keep a bottle of Scotch in her desk. There was a nameless/faceless science teacher that made us de-frost fetal pigs in the girl’s bathroom before we could dissect them. My run of French teachers was made up of a grouchy old man with a thick Eastern European accent and a demeanor that made no attempt to hide his boredom, an interesting Eurpopean woman that made me wonder why she was there, and finally, a young woman with ties to Greece who spent a lot of time in French class informing us about the overthrow of King Constantine and the new socialist government. At least she prepared me well for seeing the movie “Z’ with my aunt and uncle at a Westwood theater.
In my 12th grade physiology class, a personal favorite, we were allowed the unusual privilege to do “take home” tests. It was in this class that I learned, prompted by A.S.’s question, the meaning of the word “sodomy.” Clearly A.S. was the teacher’s favorite, so much so that she would lend him her Volvo to drive two blocks to the Duncan Do-Nut store and bring back supplies. Mrs. Sesma came to our 20th reunion.
But I think the teacher that made the most impact on me was a young English teacher. That’s another story.
