Middle School ups and downs

Middle School was a quantum leap into another world for which I was totally unprepared.  We attended Garner Middle School where Harry Wurzbach highway meets Loop 410.  The middle school, or junior high as we called it, years could be ones of great cruelty if you were not one of the accepted or lucky ones, or strange.  We were no longer always in the same classrooms under the watchful eyes of one teacher, and with a familiar group of peers, most of whom we could trust.   During class changes, and during locker visits, you were lucky if you were an outsider and just got ignored.  There was a lot of bullying and name calling (spas which was short for spastic, retard), and you could get kicked if you had a lower locker and the student with the locker above you did not care for you, or your awkward looks.  In the milling halls, students who chose to be mean could easily get away with things such as socking you in the stomach and melting into the crowds.  If a young girl had just gotten her braces and glasses, she was a skag.

Sometimes it was best to just be invisible.

It was also a time of newly emerging acne, and new thick glasses for some.  Wes had a giant pimple burst on his forehead while changing classes and had to report on to class with the mess still on his forehead.

Wes did not care at all for middle school.  At the age of 14 he had acquired some wheels in the form of a snazzy little Vespa scooter and had complete independence in coming and going from Garner.  Being the rebel he was, he started abusing that independence by driving aimlessly around on the Vespa till around lunchtime before reporting to school with a forged note about a dental appointment.  After about ten days of dental appointments, the Garner registrar finally got suspicious and called our parents.  It was not a good scene that evening in the household.

We witnessed our first fights, even girls fighting it out in the halls before the staff could make their way through the circling crowd and break it up.  These were fist fights, too, not slapping and hair pulling.  

Garner was not within walking distance of our home, so I had to endure the trauma of riding the huge, overcrowded yellow school bus which was trauma indeed.   We had to share the bus with often hostile high school students and I had to wait each morning at a bus stop with a set of gross high school boys who were experts at belching, spitting and farting.  I looked forward to the bus arrival so they would stop.  Our driver was Coach Bobo (to go through life with a name like that ...) and he sat us three to a seat, boys on one side, girls on the other.  No hanky panky on that bus!  If your random seat mates were polite, they would scrunch over and try to give you some room on the outside.  If they were snotty, they left you about three inches to sit on, which was challenging, especially when we went around that curve in the back parking lot of Garner.  The drivers had to whip the bus 180 degrees around in a small space and if you were on the aisle seat, it took all your strength not to fall on the floor.  We were also horribly overcrowded.  Some of us often had to stand in the aisle even when there were three students in each seat.  Standing and balancing with an armload of books, while bumping down Harry Wurzbach Hwy on a school bus with bad shocks was no small feat.  One of our drivers would get tired of opening and closing the bus door and would just leave it flapping open from stop to stop, even out on Loop 410.  He got pulled over by the San Antonio PD and chewed out.  We were so afraid of him we didn't even snicker when he got back on the bus and blithely took us on to school.  At least he closed the bus door from that point on.

 After the middle school kids crawled over everyone on their way off the bus, off it went, belching exhaust, to the high school while we ran for the doors to escape the fumes.  If you were on a first run bus, you had to wait about 30 minutes in the cold and rain for the door to be unlocked while the bus returned to the neighborhoods for another load of middle schoolers.  As the bus made its way on, the high schoolers breathed a huge sigh of relief.  Now everyone could sit down and be bounced up and down as their journey continued.

The district could not be bothered to buy enough buses to haul all students on a single run, so we were divided into halves, one group waiting while the first group was picked up and delivered to campuses.

I was extremely immature on entering Garner.  I still thought we would have recess.  There were grassy courtyards between the wings, and I expected to be out there playing horses and other elementary games.  Was I in for surprises!  Girls at Garner now wore hose with garters, make-up, expensive clothes and had obviously had their hair cut and styled at the beauty parlor.  They stood around in small groups, talking about boys and doing their best to look sophisticated.  Many trips were made to the girls’ restroom to touch up their makeup and hair, which was already perfect.  At Wilshire we only went to the bathroom to relieve ourselves. 

I had my first "cut and style" at the local Perkins Beauty Salon during those years.  A Saturday appointment was set and I was dropped off by my mother.  We always asked for either Mrs. Perkins, or her daughter Bobbi.  When your name was called you were shown to the back to the shampoo girl and then reported to your stylist for a consult on how your hair would be cut that day.  We often clipped pictures out of the Sears catalog and whipped them out to show Bobbi.  She would study the picture intently before her scissors flew all over your head and half your hair fell to the ground.  On went the hard plastic rollers, about 30 to 40 of them, and then under the commercial bonnet hair dryer to bake.  Back to Bobbi for the brush out and teasing.  Skillfully, she sculpted the hair into a basic bubble with a few curls and waves thrown in for effect.  About half a can of hairspray followed and you were out the door.

So proud we were of our styles that we went up to a week without brushing out or washing our hair.

There were parties when it was no one’s birthday, and a new trend:  slumber parties.  Boys and girls “went steady.”  The boy gave his girl a silver ID bracelet and she wore it proudly to class.  At lunch time, they hung around together and made cow eyes at each other.  At Wilshire, if you made good grades and ran fast, you had status.  At Garner, to be popular, you had to have the “look” and the right background.  The “look” was clothes from the correct store, and a stylish pixie or bubble haircut.  It also helped if you knew how to talk to people.  Northwood and the “little Oak Grove nut” cliques were already well established.  We poor little Wilshire kids never had cliques and we had no idea how to form them.  We had all played together freely at recess and excluded no one, even the weird ones.

I was totally amazed and out of place.  For the first day of middle school, I had carefully perused the Sears and Roebuck catalog and my mother had ordered me a two piece dress of blue gingham with white lace trim.  I was proud of it, until I saw what everyone else was wearing.  It was a pretty dress, but it was not Garner wear.  I felt like Elly Mae Clampitt who had fallen off the turnip truck.  To make matters worse, I had on white anklet socks and black slippers.  My legs were unshaved.   Everyone else had shopped at Wolff & Marx, Carl’s or Joske’s.  Their clothes were to die for.  My mother simply could not afford to buy my things there.  We made do with JC Penney, Montgomery Ward, and Sears.  I also had a “fresh” and kinky Toni home permanent which certainly did not help matters.  In my 7th grade school picture, my bangs looked like worms hanging down my forehead.

In “home room”, I knew only one girl who had long ago been in my third grade class at Wilshire, but who had moved on to a more classy school.  We had enjoyed playing with each other on the playground at Wilshire.   I tried to catch her eye and wave, but she would not even look at me.  I sat by myself and no one talked to me.  Nor did I try to talk to anyone else, except for once or twice when I was shunned and accused of butting into conversations. 

Middle School was not going well.  The few of us, about twenty, who had come over from Wilshire (most of our classmates were on the Krueger and Roosevelt feeding pattern) had few classes together and were pathetically happy to even meet each other in the hall while changing classes.  We didn’t even get to eat lunch with each other.  I ate lunch every day seated with kids I did not know and who did not talk to me.  We were not allowed to enter the cafeteria and mingle to find our friends.  You entered, took a place in line, and sat down next to the person you stood in line with, all under the watchful eye of cafeteria monitoring teachers.

My Wilshire friend Debby was as miserable as I, and would indulge herself in daydreams to get through her school day.  Her favorite was visualizing The Man from Uncle’s Napoleon Solo and Ilya Kuryakin landing in a helicopter outside of her classroom and whisking her away.  We had no classes together and saw little of each other.

One of the most searing experiences was seventh grade math.  This wasn’t arithmetic anymore, where I had excelled at Wilshire.  Our teacher was Miss Miller, a brisk little former Edison High School cheerleader.  She knew her math and taught it at warp speed.  If we didn’t understand something, we were supposed to speak up immediately.  Was she kidding?  What seventh grader has the confidence to stop a teacher in the middle of her mathematical tirade and announce they did not understand a thing?  Our helpless silence was interpreted as “getting it.” She clicked around the classroom in her stiletto heels and Texas big hair.  Miss Miller was extremely short, probably less than five feet tall without those heels.

 

 We started with set theory and base 10 numbers.  I thought I was in Greek class.  None of it made any sense.  Why couldn’t we just do long division?  I was good at that.  I quickly fell behind and flunked the first couple of tests.  To rub salt into our wounds, insensitive Miss Miller passed out graded tests in descending order, with the worst grades at the last.  I was usually near the bottom, if not at it.   She sent students to the board to work out answers to problems.  Mine was usually blank when I was called up.  At Wilshire, I had made top grades and was considered a “brain.”  Here I was struggling, and strange looking to boot.  I found myself  hunched over and crying silently at my desk when I got back one of her first tests.  I had made a “30.”  My brains had taken a leave of absence, along with my confidence.

In Wilshire P.E., we had streamed out the doors several times a week to meet Coach Dvorzak, who put us through our exercise paces and then an organized game.  To my horror, at Garner we had to change into a gym suit with green shorts which looked like training pants and snap front white shirts.  Furthermore, we were expected to dress all in front of each other.  Being modest as well as shy, this was traumatic.  While I changed out of my white anklets, I observed the other girls peeling off their pretty girdles and stockings.  Their underwear was matched, and expensive.  My underwear came from Winn's.  At least I had started wearing a bra and was not naked from the waist.  We were also supposed to shower after class.  I did the first day, but I was the only one and quickly dropped that.  

At Wilshire, I had been fairly coordinated and athletic.  Track and running were my strong points.  But sometime during the summer, my body had grown and changed and all athletic ability flew out the window.  This is a phenomenon that happens to many young girls as their pelvises widen and they lose their ability to perform athletically.  When I tried to run, I spent more time untangling my uncooperative limbs than running.  It was pretty hopeless.  But we often did a game called bombardment where everyone could manage to participate successfully.  The coach lined us up, sending half of us to one side of the gym, and the other half to the other side.  She then loosed about 30 volleyballs which we hurled at each other until everyone had gotten tagged by a direct hit.  The last girl left standing won the tournament for her team.  

We also learned some basic gymnastics.  Debby and I once had to grapple each other into a human wheel and roll across the gym mats for our P.E. grade.

It was in seventh grade when I also discovered that I needed glasses.  What timing ….  I was so backwards that I did not even realize what was going on.  The bulletin boards were blurry, but it did not occur to me for a long time that the problem could be corrected with a simple pair of eyeglasses.  A kindly girl named Marilyn sat in front of me in science class where the teacher wrote pages and pages of questions for us to copy, take home and answer almost on a daily basis.  After she finished copying all the questions, she handed her notebook to me and I copied my work out of her notebook.  Sometimes she even let me take it with me when I could not finish in time, and I passed it off to her later before we caught our busses.  About mid-year, it finally dawned on me that I might need glasses.  My mother took me to the local optometrist and I was fitted up with a ravishing pair of cat-eyes.  I only wore them when absolutely necessary, sneaking them up my side and onto my face and not leaving them on a second longer than absolutely necessary.    Years later, I even drove without them if there was a cute boy riding in the car.

It was fortunate that I had loner tendencies even then.  How I would have welcomed friends and people to talk to and accept me, but I was willing to wait it out until changes came.  My home was comfortable and stable and my mother repeatedly assured me that my day would come.   It was a haven I could return to and fortify myself for the next day.  Another haven was Terrell Hills Baptist Church which we attended every Sunday.  My Wilshire friend Cindy still took Sunday School classes with me.  Between Bible passage drills and parables, it made my week feel more complete.  Baptists know how to keep the kids entertained.  While my classmates were partying at each others’ houses on Friday nights, our kind Sunday School teacher would take us all out to Wyatt’s Cafeteria and then on to the local rest home where we would sing religious songs to the old folks and recite bible passages while they gathered eagerly around in their wheel chairs.  What a way to spend a Friday evening, but we enjoyed it!

 My mother always did her best to help me in whatever way she could, be it talking about my frustrations or combing the stores for nicer clothes and shoes that she could afford.   I needed more and better looking clothes and she did her best to accommodate me.  After a couple of months of walking around Garner with furry legs, I asked her to show me how to shave them.  Out came the bar of soap and my father's razor which could open a vein if not handled carefully.  When you nicked yourself with that thing, you bled freely for several minutes. Sometimes I wore stockings with the hair all matted up beneath them.  We still hadn’t made it to Joske’s, but we were getting better at picking out the higher end stuff at Penney’s.  

It was during those Garner years that I discovered that my mother was a skilled and master seamstress.  The woman could sew clothes that were magnificent.  I quickly tapped into that talent with lots of trips to the fabric store to buy Vogue patterns and lovely fabrics to make up into dresses.  This we could afford, even the Vogue patterns.   She made me some beautiful things that I wore as proudly as if they had come from Wolff & Marx.  The first middle school dress she made me was of linen in a small flowered pattern, with a blouson waist.  It was beautiful and I got compliments on it.   I bought my first garter belt and pair of hose to slip onto my now freshly shaved legs.  I was looking a little bit better.

I had also discovered another haven:  the school library, a place where you could go and sit alone and not look peculiar.  Everyone was quiet there, and reading.  You can't talk and read at the same time.  The social mecca remained outside the door where you stuck out like a sore thumb if you were standing around alone.  I fit into the library just fine.  The school library had a great collection of high interest fiction for middle schoolers.  I rapidly ingested the entire collection of Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series and nosed around until I discovered the historical fiction.  My favorite was a novel about Mary Queen of Scots.  What a rounder she was!! Queen of France at 16, a widow and queen of Scotland at 18.  She married twice more (badly) and was deposed by her countrymen.  Fleeing into England, she cast herself at the feet of her cousin Queen Elizabeth the first and was promptly imprisoned for the possible murder of her second husband.  Her own life ended about ten years later when she was convicted of plotting against the English queen herself.  Truly a rash and impetuous woman, but with a highly entertaining life story.  I next discovered the Jane Eyre style novels, the ones with the proud but impoverished young orphaned heroine who becomes a governess or nurse to the children of a brooding handsome master and winds up saving and marrying him.  There were a number of popular authors who repeated the theme endlessly, but we faithfully read each and every offering with basically the same characters, just different names and settings.  

Eighth grade was somewhat better.  Wilshire kids had managed to form a small social group and we had some classes together and even met socially sometimes after school.  We were still definitely not in the same social set as the Northwood and Oak Grove kids, but it was getting better.  Especially enjoyable was Home Economics.  Our teacher was the wife of one of the Wilshire 6^th grade teachers, and she welcomed us and made us feel special.  One of her lessons was to have us sit in a circle and tell what we thought was our best feature so we could feel a little better about our sometimes awkward appearance.  She let us join her one afternoon watching her small children appear with Captain Gus.  She taught us to sew our first little sack dresses, and cook a few simple recipes such as orange gelatin salad, frito pie and biscuits.  She made us cut our biscuits open and search for tunnels which were sometimes big enough to drive a truck through.  Tunnels were bad, as if termites had invaded during the cooking process.  Then we had to eat what we made, and of course clean up the mess. 

It was around this time that the TV program Star Trek made its debut.  A small group of us were totally enamored of the show and met each Friday morning in the science teacher’s classroom to discuss and rehash Thursday night’s episode.  He would bustle around his classroom watching us curiously, probably tuning in to our conversations.  We didn’t even know we were nerds.  It would become far more obvious in the following years.

Garner offered free choice electives and I was able to sign up for choir.  At Wilshire, you had to try out for the choir, which was elite and if you did not have the voice, you didn’t get in.  Everyone got in at Garner.  I was fortunate in that I had taken piano lessons and could actually read meter and notes.  I sang for the teacher on the first day and was classed as an alto.  We dutifully learned our parts to classics such as The Sound of music and beautiful old church hymns.  We gave concerts in the school auditorium, and on the winding staircase in front of the Frost Brothers store at the North Star Mall.  We wore homemade outfits:  A-line blue poplin skirts with suspenders and white oxford shirts.  We thought we looked sharp.

Art was another elective that made our school day more enjoyable.  I continued to be pretty good at art and had regularly done up my teachers’ bulletin boards at Wilshire.  My 6^th grade teacher would give me a picture which I would freehand and color in.  At Garner, we expanded out into many different mediums including clay, decoupage, fashion design, and sculpture.  I was comfortable with them all and was able to churn out pretty decent work for which the teacher often singled me out.  By far, the most gifted among us was Theresa.  We often clustered around her to watch her create beautiful abstracts, and even a portrait of her friend Beverly.

It was in middle school that I started developing the first inklings of my non-conformist, independent tendencies.  I had far too little confidence in myself at the time to fully bloom into what I would become later, but traces of a stubborn and independent streak were starting to manifest.  It first appeared in my 8^th grade history class.  We had all been assigned a project to complete and present to the class.  I hated school projects with a passion.  Wasn't daily homework enough???  I had just completed a science fair project and was sick of the process and weekend after weekend of work.  The history teacher announced that it would count as 20% of our grade.  I quickly ticked up my grades for that six weeks and concluded that if I did not do the project and took a zero, I would still come out with a C average, which could easily be brought back up by the end of the year.  With that thought, I forgot all about the project until the Monday morning it was due.

I was second in line when Mrs. Brown, our rather eccentric teacher, called on me to present my project.  (Mrs. Brown had been known to hide in her classroom closet and jump out and laugh when she scared the students.   She also sometimes told students that there were Indians hiding in the trees by the bus drive, just outside our classroom windows.  Didn’t we see them peeking at us?)

“Shirley, are you ready?”

“No, Mrs. Brown, I didn’t do a project.”

Now, in no way was I insolent or impolite.  I was just stating the facts.  Mrs. Brown was only momentarily taken aback.

“Are you planning to turn it in late?”

“No, Mrs. Brown, I didn’t do a project and I don’t intend to.”

Now Mrs. Brown was aghast and speechless and the whole class was staring in disbelief.   I was a dream student, never mouthy, always doing my work and making  As.  She finally recovered herself and continued in a faint voice.

“Can you tell me why?"

I calmly explained about the science fair project and I just didn’t feel up to tackling another project and was prepared to deal with the consequences.  I had even planned ahead and averaged out my potential grade for the six weeks and knew what was coming.  I was prepared to take the zero. 

As you can imagine, every student in the student in the class was gaping .   SHE had just sat there and told the teacher SHE refused to do a project.  The next student got up and presented their history project.  The bell rang and we left.

The next day, Mrs. Brown announced to the entire class that the history project would be optional and extra credit.  I felt both happy and sad.  I am sure a lot of my classmates were cursing me under their breath because I had gotten away with not doing the project. One boy even spoke up, complaining that THEY had all done THEIR projects, and SHE hadn’t.  But Mrs. Brown stuck to her guns.  She just could not bear to write a zero by my name in the grade book.   In a way, I wish that she had.  I was fully prepared for it and it would have been the only zero that I ever got.  They say it’s good sometimes to fail.  It teaches you how to get back up, dust yourself off, and carry on.

By the end of 8^th grade, I was actually feeling somewhat like a normal human being.  I was far from popular, but had a small circle of friends whom I trusted and had things in common (pre-nerds).  We were growing up and getting ready for high school.