The days at MacArthur High ....

I had anticipated MacArthur High School (which we affectionately called Mac) long before I arrived there.  I had spent years poring over my older brother’s annuals about the people and activities I could expect: pep rallies, dances, clubs, football games, band and drill squad performances.   I was also desperate to escape Garner.   I had decided that I absolutely must be in the drill squad: the Lassies.  The uniforms were just too snazzy.

Mac had produced an extraordinary football team around 1967 that everyone talked about.  They were first in district and even went on to try for the state championship though they were defeated by Houston’s Spring Branch High School.  My father, brother and his friends talked about them constantly.

I drooled over the pictures of the Homecoming dances, the sweethearts, the courts, the duchesses of this and that, the fabulous Brahmadora dance team, Mr. and Miss MacArthur and everything else that fabulous tome had to offer.  Such a book!  And full of nothing but students and their accomplishments.

If Garner had seemed sophisticated to me, Mac was even more so, but then by that time I had my fashion act together.  I had given up the Toni home permanents and was growing my hair stylishly long.  My dresses now were either made from Vogue patterns or came from higher end stores.  I actually got compliments on my new look and sense of style.

How excited I was to start high school at Mac!

There were still distinct social stratas to be navigated, but nothing to compare with middle school.  Most of us had found our bearings by 9^th grade.  We were what we were and fairly accepting about it.  Garner had only one social strata:  the elite, and if you were not one of them, you were finished.  At Mac, there were many new groups to choose from, such as the surfers and the kickers.  The surfers emulated the beach boys with their hair grown long and over their foreheads.  They did their best to acquire suntans.  It was cool to be a surfer.

The kickers were completely at the opposite end and embraced the country rural way of life.  They were not cool like the surfers, but had their distinct identity.  Many tended to look down on them, but the kickers really didn’t care.  Kicker boys drove to school in their pick ups, wore western shirts and cowboy boots and hung out exclusively with each other.  They had plenty of kicker girls to keep them company.  Some of them actually rode horses in their spare time and practiced roping.  We made fun of them behind their backs, calling them Rexall Rangers.  The Rexall drug stores sold a lot of western wear.  We called them "kickers" because they were supposed to be kicking cow shit with their boots.

If many surfers never had surfed in their lives, many Rexall Rangers could not tell the front end of a horse from the back.  It really didn’t matter much as long as you had someone to identify with.

There were also the dorks and the “in” crowd.  The in crowd consisted of the football players and the cute, petite well dressed girls.  I was a dork.  Intelligence was respected but not necessary to be “in.”  We dorks were skilled at finding one another and forming our own quirky little groups, such as bridge, chess and science clubs.  We were finding new confidence in our capable brains.  We would produce the National Merit Finalists.  We didn’t even know we were dorks, just that we were of a different mold.  Our freshman science teacher, Preston Kuykendall was our science club sponsor and  took us on a trip to see the dinosaur tracks in the river near Leander.  Debby fell in one of them and got soaking wet.  Mr. K got a speeding ticket on the way back, which only endeared him to us the more.  Dorks got speeding tickets too.

Clothes were still extremely important to me.  What I wore was still a huge part of my identity.  I had not yet developed many social skills or confidence, so I made what little statement I could with appearance.  I still remember the bright orange Jackie Kennedy style dress made from a vogue pattern that I wore on my first freshman day. My non-stretch garter-held hose were pulled up SO TIGHT that the knees split open after lunch. I had planned my wardrobe and hair many days in advance. At least my legs were shaved, unlike my arrival at Garner in 6^th grade.

A new phenomenon for many students was the arrival of contact lenses.  If the parents could afford it, many students were ditching their middle school coke bottle glasses for new contacts.  They were not cheap, costing several hundred dollars for many families, the equivalent of a monthly mortgage.  They were also very imperfect: made of hard plastic that did not always fit well on the eyeball.  It was not uncommon for a lens to fly unexpectedly out of someone's eye in the middle of class and onto the floor.  All activity would have to cease as the owner crawled around on their hands and knees, desperately searching for the missing and expensive lens.  Friends often had to drop to the floor to help.

Even during a basketball game, a player's contact lens went flying and the game had to be stopped while half the team crawled about on the floor of Virgil T. Blossom Athletic Center.

I did not have to ride the wretched cattle transport, oops, I mean school bus, that first day.  Vicki B.’s mother drove around the neighborhood and picked up a small group of us and chauffeured us that first morning.  After all, it was our first day of high school.

At first period P.E., we encountered the infamous Miss Tankersley who promptly scared the wits out of all of us, and did so every day for the rest of the year.  We didn’t dress out in our charming green and white diaper pants gym suits that first day (yes, the same ones from Garner …), but we did learn that if that gym suit was not starched and pressed every Monday morning, would we catch it.  Years later, I am still wondering what difference did a starched and pressed gym suit make?  All we did was run around and sweat in the things and they looked like hell by the end of class on Monday.

At one point, Melanie C.’s house burned down over the weekend, and her gym suit burned up with it.  We were all dressed out for roll call, in line in the girls’ gym, except for poor Melanie, who sat awkwardly on the floor in her street clothes.  Miss T immediately zeroed in on her, salivating over the scolding she would soon have the opportunity to deliver on the hapless girl who had forgotten her gym suit!  As she coldly went down the line taking roll and got to Melanie, she laid into her, “Where’s your gym suit, young lady?” barked Miss T.

Not only did Melanie not have her gym suit, but wherever it was it was probably not pressed either. But Melanie was cool, and ready for her.

“It burned up.”

Miss T was taken aback, and speechless, but only for a moment.

“How did that happen?”

“Well, when my house burned down this weekend, my gym suit got burnt up with it.”

Miss T had nothing more to say, but quickly went on down the line taking roll.  No “I’m sorry about that,” or anything of the kind.  She was just sorry she had missed the opportunity to chew someone out about her gym suit.  We were proud of Melanie and her calm explanation.

There was no coddling at Mac, but we did get to experience some new activities:  dancing the polka and waltz with other girls, archery and soccer.  In the waltz, Patrice D. was the best partner.  She swung you around the floor like a scene from “The King and I.”  Archery was fun and different.  NOT fun was trying to learn and play soccer.  We kept fouling about every 60 seconds, stopped to be chewed out and refreshed on the incomprehensible rules which we simply could not remember.  Then after about another minute of play, we fouled again.  The coaches gave up on us after about one or two sessions of that. 

Occasionally, we didn’t dress out in her gym suits and just sat on the gym floor visiting for the whole period.  Perhaps Miss T had cramps or PMS and didn’t want to be bothered with us.  On one of those boring days, some other girls decided I was in desperate need of some sprucing up and did a make over job on me, complete with golden glitter eye shadow, heavy liner and curled eyelashes.  They would have put falsies on me, but no one had any eyelash glue.  I was so proud.  In 7^th period English, I silenced the room when I walked in and for the wrong reason.  I looked like a whore, but didn’t realize it until I got home and my brother took one look and told me so.

Second period was geometry with Mr. K.  I was amazed to see that we were sharing that class with sophomores.  Some explanation is needed here.  There was a group of us who were placed one year ahead of everyone else in math and science.  I was so backwards that I did not even realized this until  7^th grade when I peeled back the book cover on my math book and saw Grade 8 printed plainly on the cover.  Now what was that doing there?  I was a 7^th grader.  Fortunately I had gotten the lay of the land by freshman year, but it sure would have been nice if my 6^th grade teacher at Wilshire had at least told me they were going to bump me ahead like that.  We had gotten Algebra 1 (a true trauma) out of the way at Garner and entered Mac taking sophomore geometry.  The other sophomores were NOT amused by having to share their class with freshmen.  But they quickly accepted us, especially since most of us were better at math than they were and could help them with their homework.  But on that first day we stared at each other.

 

It was the same story in sophomore biology with Mr. Kuykendall, our science club sponsor.  I was amazed when a sophomore boy, Tommy, turned around in his desk in front of me and started a conversation.  We had a lot of conversations that year and I always remembered his kindness, especially since I was still painfully shy.  I was a rapt audience and Tommy saw his chance to talk nonstop about his passion:  football.  He patiently explained to me the difference between the AFL and the NFL and how it resulted in the Super Bowl.  I knew nothing about football, but still hung on his every word.

Mr. K’s class was right after lunch and on test days, we spent our lunchtime cramming and reviewing each other.  There was no time to go through the lunch line, so we bought big reds and cheetoes from the vending machines, wolfed it down and went into the test tanked up on sugar, processed fat and preservatives.

When earthworm dissection day arrived, Mr. K made sure to remind us to refrain from chewing our fingernails in the middle of the dissection.  On the day the microscopes came out, we were told to examine hairs.  Everyone wanted a sample from Simone, with her naturally curly hair.  She was not amused.

As with Garner, there were two bus runs after school and half of us had to wait on campus until around 4:00 p.m. before the buses returned for our run.  We hung around in the library, or loitered outside waiting.  If we had money we headed down to the street to a convenience store at the corner of Bitters Road and Nacogdoches.  The store owner was wily and not about to allow his store to be overrun with hungry high schoolers, so he posted an employee by the door to let us in and out like cattle going through a gate.  If two students emerged, two more were allowed in.  In the meantime, we lined up and waited our turn.  It was always a good opportunity for "couples" to get in a little physical affection while they snuggled up to each other while waiting in line.  Once we got into the store, we bought our usual Big Reds and walked back to campus to continue waiting.  

Being accelerated as we were in math and science was both good and bad.  I was part of a group of incredibly intelligent freshmen.  We produced nearly 20 National merit finalists by our senior year.  Their accomplishments pushed the rest of us to excel along with them.  I must be honest and admit that my intelligence was in the lower end of that group and I was no national merit finalist, therefore I was often behind everyone else and had to struggle.  I pulled a lot of D’s and one F in Algebra 2 under Mr. King.  But I kept on plugging away anyhow.  We even got hold of our official IQs.  Carla T. worked in the front office and came across that information and shared it with us.  There were several of our classmates who were profoundly gifted.  These people are rare, and I was certainly not one of them.  I was lucky to share classes with them.  Their intellect and talents were intense, but there was no snobbery or sense of entitlement at all.

As to be expected, we had some interesting personalities.  Mark B. learned Pi out to one hundred places and would recite it to us on demand.  Keith V. taught himself the alphabet in American sign language and taught it to the rest of us the next day.  We then spent time signing to each other until we grew bored.  We didn’t know there were signs for entire words and it took too long to spell everything out.  Douglas A ran around the halls with a slide rule holder attached to his belt.  Perhaps he became a NASA nerd.

The first foreign language I ever took was French with Mrs. M.  She hit the ground running with us on the first day.  We learned to say good day, how are you, and I am fine.  She went down the rows making everyone speak and practice.  As soon as I opened my mouth, Mrs. M asked me if I spoke Italian.  For some unknown reason, I speak all foreign languages with a pronounced Italian accent.

The freshman year also brought the first huge high school football games, the first I had ever attended.  My brother Wes would haul a couple of my friends and me along in his car to Virgil T. Blossom stadium and ditch us at the entry gate.  We were instructed not to embarrass him by following him around and trying to sit with him or his cool friends.  I had constant crushes which roved from boy to boy among all his friends and would have LOVED to sit with them.  He did not know us until the end of the game, at which time he would allow us to ride home with him.  We had to report promptly to his car in the parking lot or he would have been more than happy to leave us in his dust.  Wes did sit me down and explain the basic rules of football so that I would have some comprehension of what a first down was and how the team advanced down the field.

In our senior year, a huge bonfire was built in anticipation of the big game with Lee High School, our arch rival.  Playing Lee was a huge thing.  Our band would make sure to play a sloppy, out of tune version of the Lee fight song, while we wailed a tacky version of the words.  But Lee got us back.  They set fire to our pile of wood during the night before the bonfire was rescheduled.  Working feverishly, a small group of students skipped school that day and rebuilt the wood pile and we all enjoyed it that evening, including smoking pot in the shadows.

Football at Mac was not for the wimpy.  There were many excellent coaches who were mentors and positive influences for the young men.  But there was also another coach who was destined to become infamous.  During his years at Mac, he was absolutely vicious to team members, grabbing them by their face masks and shaking them like rag dolls and putting them through drills that were torturous and dangerous, including dehydration.  The boys sometimes found themselves tempted to drink from mud puddles.  He should have been reported for abuse and stopped in his tracks, but it was a code among the players that they did not complain, especially since the football team did quite well under his leadership.  Several Mac football players later confessed that they considered murdering him.  And this coach did wind up on death row some years later, accused of murdering the wealthy parents of his girlfriend.  We still shudder that so many students were in close contact with him for so long.

The dresses we wore to school were not clothes that we carelessly threw on every morning to go off to school. They were carefully selected and coordinated outfits that we spent obscene amounts of time shopping for, selecting  and purchasing. My mother and I shopped all over the North Star Mall almost every Saturday like a pair of bottom feeders, ferreting out only the very best deals hidden in the racks and racks of sale clothes.  We were usually waiting in the car outside the Joske’s entrance when they unlocked the doors at 9:00 a.m..  Our first stop was the shoe department, then up the escalators to comb through the dress racks.  I usually tried on at least 5-6 dresses.  Before we bought any of them, certain conditions had to be met.  They HAD to be a reasonable price, preferably on sale and the fit and the look had to be just right.  I didn’t want to attend high school wearing just anything.  Usually, we bought nothing at all because nothing measured up to the requirements, both financial and esthetic.  On down the mall we went to the Frost Brothers store to repeat the process, except that we usually lingered much longer at Frost Brothers because of the divine dressing rooms with service to match.  Each had a comfortable sofa for my mother and a three way mirror.  The sales ladies were incredibly attentive, ushering us into the dressing rooms and checking in periodically to see if we needed another size.   The lingerie department at Frost Brothers was the best.  All of the departments in the store were “alcove” style and you had plenty of privacy to select the underwear you wanted to try on and then off to another swanky dressing room.  Frost Brothers also had a marvelous fabric department.  My mother could afford to buy fabric there for a dress, though usually she could not afford a dress itself.  It was a special Saturday morning indeed when she announced to me that we would go to Frost Brothers and she had the money to purchase a dress at last.  My days of just trying on and drooling over their gorgeous selections had ended.   I chose a black and white checkered creation with a blouson top and a big round stand up collar lined in HOT pink.  It was worthy of Jackie Kennedy.  It cost my mother $28 plus tax, an enormous sum for the time but I was beyond proud.  I was able to walk through the rest of the mall with that coveted Frost Brothers cardboard box covered in bluebonnets and equipped with a little handle.  The saleslady had wrapped my black and white dream in tissue paper of course.  It was such a classy store.  I felt like I was walking two feet off the ground.  We decided that I simply must have a pair of hot pink hose to go along with the dress, which we purchased up at the Wolff & Marx.  Jackie Kennedy would never have worn hot pink hose, but I did.  A few weeks later, I proudly had my school picture taken in the dress.  When I entered biology class on that Monday, my friend Tommy took one look at me and shrieked:

“Check those legs!”

Our next stop after Frost Brothers was the Guarantee Shoe Company and usually the Pet Pantry.  We often ate lunch at the Luby’s cafeteria with the outside veranda. 

My Saturday was then complete.

 Dresses were absolutely required for girls until our senior year when we were allowed to wear pants, but only with a long concealing tunic style top so we would not enflame the boys with our feminine charms. Most dresses were tailored, with collars, sewn in waists, belts and the works. All we lacked were hats and gloves. Your shoes had to coordinate with the dress, and your purse had to coordinate with your shoes.   I changed my purse almost on a daily basis. I had my standards. Our shoes were “pumps” and had nothing to do with comfort, only appearance.  Under those dresses were long line panty girdles (quite a workout to get that thing on every morning), garters and stockings, and a long line bra if you needed it.  All of this was worn in a non-air conditioned school.

One of the goals was not to wear the same thing for more than two weeks, preferably more. Quantity was as important as quality. If your parents could afford it, you bought your clothes at Joske’s, Frost Bros., Wolff & Marx or Carl’s. JC Penney, Sears and Lerner’s were out, though I did sneak in a few outfits from those second class stores.

In the late 60s and early 70s, society was on the verge of loose, natural and comfortable clothes and hair for women but we had not quite made it yet. This much more sane way of dressing fully bloomed in the mid 70s. Some high school girls at Mac were already forging ahead and embracing the more “natural” look, but too many of us were stuck in that rut trying to come to school every day dressed and made up like a Carnaby Street model.

Make-up was a daily operation. Very few high school girls left home without their faces on.  First came base topped with blush, and patted down with face powder.  On went the eyeshadow, often blue or green and several coats of mascara followed by the eyelash curler, which resembled a medieval torture instrument.  I had never seen such a contraption until high school, where the girls would whip them out of their purses between classes and curl their eyelashes back.  The look was completed with several coats of lipstick, usually pale white or pink with gloss slathered on top.  We were going for the Twiggy look. If you were adventurous, you might put on the false eyelashes, but those were truly a pain to get on right and took a lot of time.  With all the black around their eyes, many girls looked like they had rolled in a bar fight.  Between almost every class, we stampeded to the nearest girls’ restroom to check our make-up and blacken our eyes more if necessary.

 

The hair: This was the most torturous thing we put ourselves through. We did not just “fix” our hair. We sculpted it.  We gooped on the dippity do and rolled it on hard plastic rollers, the bigger the better.  Then we slept in them.  Come the morning, you brushed it out, ratted it up and glued it down with hairspray that could withstand an F-5 tornado. If your hair was curly, you straightened it. Some girls ironed their hair on the ironing board like my friend Carla.  She scorched her face several times in the process.  In our sophomore year some girls started wearing “falls”:  fake long hair fastened on with a large, sewn in comb. You either pulled your hair back and fastened the fall on top of it, or brushed the front sections up over the top of the fall and secured it with a huge clip.  Done correctly, falls were pretty natural looking and gave you an instant long mane.  It was an event when a young girl arrived on campus with a surprise six to eight inches of extra length on their hair.

We had a lot of great teachers in high school.  We often postpone saying positive things about people, especially about our teachers.  In high school, our teachers could be the height of “uncool,”  especially the ladies wearing long skirts and men wearing white socks and flood pants!   They hadn’t changed their hairstyles in 10-20 years, and they had standards we scoffed at.  But what probably most of us did not realize at the time was the level of excellence in teaching they were handing out to us.  Were many of them tough and demanding?   Absolutely.  Did we work our behinds off?  Absolutely.  Did we sometimes cry over math problems we could not work, and research papers we wondered how on earth we would ever complete?  I did.

The payoff to all that hard work we were put through was not apparent for many years.  I breezed through my first year at the University of Texas at Austin.  It was a long time before I realized why.  My high school years were so rigorous that college was no different and sometimes easier.  I was programmed to work and study and that is exactly what I did.  A lot of other UT freshman flunked out.

Coach Moseley taught us world history as freshmen.  We started at the cradle of written history between the Tigris and Euphrates River.  We covered Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Rome, the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, Charlamagne, Henry the Eighth and the splintering of the Roman Catholic Church, Martin Luther, Napoleon.  I knew next to nothing about any of that until Coach sat in front of class and read to us out of this little paperback history book.  It must have been a great little book, because that’s all he ever used.  We pretty much ignored the textbook, if we even had one.  Hearing about all of these characters was a new dawn to me.  They still and always will fascinate me.

Mrs. Peak taught us to WRITE.  No list of great Mac teachers is complete without this lady at or near the top.  She was relentless in hammering those skills into us.  Papers were returned bloody with her red editing marks.  We had to correct everything to her standards, twice if the first rewrite was not good enough.  And then there were the “common errors”, the misuse of there, their, and they’re and the difference between well and good, for example.  Mrs. P was one of the driest characters in the school.  We were never sure if she even liked us, but she probably did.  She would call us barbarians and she had the thankless job of raising us up to a higher standard.

Miss Ryan was also an excellent writing teacher, but her true calling was bringing literature to life.  Most high schoolers  compare studying Shakespeare to pulling teeth without anesthetics, or reading a foreign language.  There were puns and “asides” that were supposed to be so funny.  Most of us sat there with our mouths hanging open trying to figure out the humor.  This is what happens when Shakespeare is merely read.  Miss R changed all of that for us.  We were studying Julius Caesar I believe when we walked into her class and saw a record player on her desk.  Instead of assigning bored students to read the parts in a laborious monotone, she produced a recording of Julius Caesar dramatized with Richard Burton as one of the leads!  What a difference to sit there and listen to the drama as performed by professional actors!  Was this really Shakespeare?  A door had been opened.  Shakespeare was meant to be performed, not read!  Later in the year when we were studying Hamlet, Miss R announced that PBS was broadcasting the play that evening with Richard Chamberlain as Hamlet and she wanted us to watch it.  Like most high school students, I though Hamlet was bloody boring until I watched that program.  I came close to bursting into tears at the end.  Poor Miss R really was passionate about her literature and had a temper on her on the rare occasion someone was disrespectful.  We were studying Milton (the blind guy who wrote Paradise Lost), and one of the class smart alecks raised his hand and asked Miss R how did Milton manage to write poetry if he was blind?  Did he use Braille?  She flew into a rage, threw her book across her desk, sat down and pouted for about five minutes before she could gather herself back up and continue the lesson as if nothing had happened.  We carefully kept our mouths shut after that.

Mrs. Moynihan and Miss Griffis grounded me in the French language.  Because of Senorita Barrera, I was still snobbish about not learning Spanish, and my mother’s family was of French descent, so I welcomed the opportunity to study that language.  We really didn’t know how good we were, even when we took “Sweepstakes” or first prize for total number of points earned at these huge Symposiums of French language students held city wide every year.  I entered UT with all of my language requirements completed by advanced placement and took a junior level French literature class where our professor lectured only in French, we read all of our Voltaire in French, discussed it in class and wrote papers in French.

Those two also led a group of students all over Europe every summer for six weeks.  My parents did not have the money  (only $1000 for six weeks in Europe!) for me to go during high school, but I pledged to get there as soon as I could and I finally made it in 1978.

The art of the research paper, complete with footnotes and bibliography, was taught to us as sophomores by Mrs. Tyson.  This was truly the most difficult class I ever went through and the most singularly demanding teacher I ever had.  She was actually teaching us on the “gifted” level but we didn’t even know what that was.  Her class was just HARD.  But as we learned one day, she also had respect for us and was willing to listen.  Around mid-year, the class was totally numb with the amount of work we had been assigned and the timeline:  a ten-page TYPED research paper (could any of us even type??) complete with footnotes and a bibliography due in one month, with a first draft to be prepared within two weeks.  Becky was a brave little soul.  At the beginning of class, her hand went up and she respectfully but honestly expressed all of our frustration to Mrs. T at the workload she had assigned.  All of us stopped breathing.  We expected Becky to go flying out the door and into the hall with Mrs. T’s footprint in her behind.  But instead, she listened thoughtfully.  Then she opened her teacher’s calendar and quietly studied it for a few minutes.  The result was she then totally rearranged the assignment and cut it in half.  Some of us felt like crying with relief.  We could have kissed Becky’s feet, but we were also stunned that a teacher had listened to us and shown respect for our wants and needs.

Mr. King’s algebra 2 class nearly broke me, but sometimes when you break, you can come back stronger than before.  Math was never my best subject, but I can limp along in it better than most people.   Algebra was especially difficult for me.  My grades in his class started at a C, then dropped to a D, and then my Christmas present was an F for that six weeks.  I was devastated.  Mr. K bravely tutored me.  I would go to his office for help, and I would understand for just a glimmer, but as soon as I walked out the door, all knowledge departed.  I just could not get it.  My crowd was abandoning his class by the droves and transferring into another much easier class: related math (which we called “retarded math” in private).  What was I waiting for?  I asked my mother to write the request and presented it to the counselor.  I started attending the new “joke” class, watched the other students sleep, and the teacher nearly hacking and coughing himself to death every day.  The poor man.  A lot of students were convinced he was going to pass away in the middle of class, and what would they do?  After about two days I had had enough.  I asked my mother for a note putting me back in Mr. K’s class and presented it to the counselor.  She looked at me like I was crazy.  When I returned to Mr. K, he never said a word and certainly didn’t lower his standards of teaching for me.  I dragged my grade back up to a C for the next six weeks, then a B and finally an A!!  My year average was probably a C, but I could have cared less.  I had passed.  To this day, I am not sure why I returned to his class.  It was probably one of those passages we go all through where we emerge on a slightly higher plane. 

Our head principal, Mr. George Vakey, was a reasonable man and a good leader who was involved with students.  Discipline was left to the assistant principals and it could be meted out with a heavy hand.  A lot of the guys got "licks" when their hormones kicked in and they got challenging.  Licks were not pleasant and tended to be a one-time experience.  I of course never saw one administered but heard that the victim had to bend over and be hit with a wooden paddle with a hole in the center.  That made the blow faster and more painful!  Physics in action.  

Wes never got any licks, but he probably should have.  He was much too intelligent to push the envelope that far.  He did get called in and chewed out one day.  It was in the office of one of the infamous assistant principals who was steamed.  Wes had neglected to bring back a very important form.  All children of active military and civil service received a form to be sent home, filled out and signed.  If schools educated a military or civil service kid, the district apparently got some extra funds from the feds.  Since schools struggled constantly with scraping up money, any extra income was seriously sought out.  In his usual lackadaisical manner, Wes had forgotten and forgotten to return his form.  He was reminded numerous times and still neglected it.  Enough was enough.  He was summoned to the AP's office to atone. The AP chewed Wes up for about ten minutes, and then announced that he was going to call up our mother at work to rat out her errant son!

Poor mom was more than aware of Wes's deficiencies.  She had been struggling with him over his grades and poor attitude since junior high.  A student with an IQ of over 150, Wes was consistently failing his courses simply because he was bored and did not care.  High school was nothing more than a joke to him, seven hours to be wasted on a daily basis until he could get away and have his fun.  But the hapless administrator made a serious mistake when he called my mother at work.  Already upset and angry, he started the conversation with both guns blazing.  He was accustomed to pushing around young people.  Our mother was never a person to be pushed around.  Normally, she was a most reasonable and intelligent woman, but she had lines that you do not cross, and he crossed them that day, and quickly.

Mom was responsible for preparing all of the check-out bills at Brooke General Hospital on base at Fort Sam Houston.  Finding herself interrupted at work by a rude school administrator who immediately began berating her for not seeing to having a form returned (which she had not even seen), she immediately cut him short and exploded in his ear.  She had a problem with the form anyway.  She did not consider us a military family and disagreed with having to fill it out.  

To Wes's amazement, the AP suddenly became very silent as she dressed him down for several minutes.  Yes, ma'am.  Yes, ma'am.  I didn't realize that, ma'am, etc.  After the scolding and when both had calmed down, my mother agreed to see to the form and have it returned the next day.  Smirking, Wes left his office and immediately shared the tale with all of his friends.  The infamous AP had trodden on the wrong toes that day!  Good old mom.  Wes of course got a chewing out himself that evening, but let's keep it in the family after all.

 In the summer and fall of 1968, part of our high school was gutted and remodeled.  MacArthur, was built in the 1950s and a few various wings were added on through the years, but she was a pretty tired and run down old lady when we arrived in 1967.  There was not even air conditioning.  No school was air conditioned before that time.  But we had those huge windows that could be cranked out and good ventilation, plus pedestal fans.  But I don’t recall ever being uncomfortable.  Those windows were not even screened.  Anything could fly in and around the classroom, including birds.  We were also lucky we did not get ARMADAS of mosquitoes, but San Antonio was a little too dry for that.

Before the remodel, the offices and clinic were located up by the Boys’ gym, and the library was a dark, dreary afterthought in the very back parking lot in the north corner of the property.  No one went to the library and no one wanted too.  Our freshman English teacher, took us once by necessity and we gazed on the hideous steel shelving that looked like it might cave in on us any minute.  We never returned.  That must have been one boring job for the librarians.  Maybe they slept through the day.  They certainly could have gotten away with it.

Construction began that summer after our freshman year and continued until the following December.  Today, it would be unheard of to send students back into a school with active construction, but come we did.  Why should that stop us?  One wing was still partially draped in plastic.  Drywall plaster dust floated in the air and hard hat construction crews were still milling all over.  I think they were still using heavy machinery too.  The classes at the other end of the wing were still useable, though, and they sent us on in.  We did our learning listening to the pounding of the machinery, along with jets in the descent path of the San Antonio Airport just above our heads. 

  

I felt very sorry for the displaced science teachers who had to be set up in little pods in the auditorium.  They did without classrooms from September to December.  There were about five or six pods arranged around the auditorium.  They rolled in a blackboard for them, and a periodic table of the elements and that is how we learned chemistry:  sitting on top of each other in those hard old auditorium seats trying to balance our books and papers on our knees or that ridiculously teeny little fold up and down desk thing.  These were open classrooms at their worst.  But the teachers and the students bravely carried on and even managed to learn.  It was almost as bad as one year at Garner when a group of us were pulled out of our Language Arts classes and told to report daily to the teachers’ lounge off the cafeteria.  We were piled in that tiny space, smelling of cigarette smoke, for six weeks learning all the names of the states, and their capital cities.  It felt like six weeks learning in a broom closet.

While we picked our way around campus, trying not to fall into holes or wet cement, the new school began to take shape.  As the new school emerged, we saw a beautiful new plaza in front of the auditorium (the home of all pep rallies the rest of our stay), the new main office and the new carpeted library where we actually WANTED to go and enjoy the ambiance.

But the crowning glory was a glorious new two-story science building!  I will never forget entering it for the first time that December when it was finally finished.  No more pods!!!  We walked in like a bunch of bumpkin tourists, craning our necks so we could look all over the place.  We could hardly believe it.  Was this REALLY for US?  We located our new chemistry classroom, which was far more than a classroom.  It was spacious.  There was room for everyone!  And there was a fabulous lab in the back (where we were soon to be lighting up bunsen burners and creating noxious gases in glass bottles that we stuck lit matches into).  Our teachers wore white lab coats.

I am sure there were more improvements to the old girl through the years after we left (like carpet, that breeder of head lice, allergies, and asthma …), but that construction was a major one and we were the ones who got to go through it.

In those days, boys got to play football and become school demi-gods who were fawned over and worshiped in weekly pep rallies.  All the girls wanted to date a football player.  They had a booster club behind them made up of football-mad fathers and even mothers.  Most Fridays before a football game, the pep rally was held first thing in the morning.  The team came marching into the school gym like triumphant gladiators between a line of high kicking cheerleaders.  Group hysteria was pretty real with everyone screaming madly and the band playing at full volume.

There wasn’t much to do for the girls except support the boys’ athletic program.  The only athletic program open to girls was tennis and swimming.  Our class included some physically gifted girls like Jenice who could outrun many boys on the track team, but they were never allowed to compete.  To support our football heroes, we joined the Bairns and the Lassies.  The Lassies were a specialized drill squad that trained and marched on the field with the Band.   To get into the Lassies, you had to join and last a year with the Bairns (Scottish for little ones), the pep squad. 

Being a Bairn was purgatory before Lassie heaven.  They took everyone into the group.  Our job was to show up, be bused to all football games where we would sit in ranks, and yell and scream.  If our team was 50 points behind, the cheerleaders still started the following yell:

“Is Lee going to win this game tonight?"

 

HELL, NO!!! we shrieked. 

Who is, then?  Yell it, spell it!”

Well, hell yes they’re going to win, but sharing that would have lost me my bairn status.

When a touchdown was scored by our team, we indulged in mass hysteria: screaming, jumping up and down and hugging everyone in sight.

We couldn’t even sit down while we yelled.  We had to scream standing up for the entire game.  It was exhausting.  We had limited training on how to do flashcards and would spell out giant letters and show our school colors.  Uniforms were pretty dismal, just a blue poplin skirt and matching jacket in the school colors, white Keds, white socks and white gloves.  We were forced to sell Nestle’s candy bars as a fund raiser.  But in the spring of our bairn year, we at last had the opportunity to try out for the Lassies drill squad.

We had to march to try out for Lassies, and spent a week after school on the practice field, learning how to march in line, make a turn, and cover ten yards in eight steps, all while in straight ranks.  It was tacky and unacceptable to turn your head to make sure you were in line … you had to use peripheral vision.  On the fateful day of try outs, we all gathered nervously after school and were assigned numbers.  In order, we were called up in groups of ten and marched our hearts out for the Lassie Sponsor, Miss Tankersley, who was back like a bad meal.   Miss T stood by grimly on the sidelines with a clipboard, watching us like a hawk when she was not making ominous notes on the clipboard.  

Miss T was retired women’s army corps and quite frankly scared everyone in the school, including the boys.  She probably scared the teachers too.  Behind her back we called her the Tank.    She ruled the Lassies with an iron fist.  We had been avoiding her at all costs since we were freshmen.  But if you wanted to be a Lassie, you had to deal with Miss T.

The day after, we all gathered at the back of the girls’ gymnasium for the announcement of who had made it in, and who had not.  It was devastating for the girls who didn’t make the cut.  They walked away like zombies while the lucky selectees jumped up and down, screaming and hugging like another touchdown had been scored.

We relaxed during the summer, but not for long.  We were called back for practice in mid-August in the summer heat.  We had been chewed up and warned in May that if any of us beefed up during the summer, our days as a Lassie would come to a bitter end before it even began.  Sloppy looking girls would not be allowed to perform.  

No one had gained a pound.

Our uniforms were fairly ornate and were recycled from graduating Lassie to new Lassie.  I bought mine from a senior who was at least six inches shorter than me.  The sleeves were too short and the skirt was WAY too short (just how I liked it …).  My mother took one of my white long sleeved oxford shirts and added rows of white lace on the cuffs and down the front.  Our wool jackets were tailored and royal blue with a plaid shawl and plaid skirt.  Gone were the bairn keds.  We wore polished white loafers with knee socks and plaid tassles.  Little tams perched on our heads at a rakish angle.   Completing the outfit was dark modesty underwear.  Our skirts were pretty short after all, and we were expected to high step it while marching down the football field.

Now all we had to do was learn to perform on the field.  What made it worse was that we had to perform alongside the MacArthur band, one of the best in the city.  Our band was sooo good and we were sooo bad.  But what could we expect?  Most of the band had been performing together since they were freshmen, and they had it nailed.  The junior Lassies had barely a month of training and no experience before we hit the football field for our first half-time show.  At my first half-time show, I reversed ten yards early and had to run like a rabbit to catch up with my rank!   The band director, Mr. Pearson, considered us nothing more than a cross he had to bear, and grudgingly.  For early morning practice, he ambled over to the practice field with his megaphone at his side, climbed a tower (Pearson's perch) about ten feet tall (the better to see everything) and shrieked at everyone for the next hour or so of practice.  The band members had it down.  They corrected their own errors before Mr. P could even spot them.  But we Lassies were hopeless, running around the field like fowls released from the hen house.

Our fabulous band came with only one hitch.  They made the drum corps wear Scottish kilts.  To make matters worse, they had to wear knee socks.  These were all guys, but they gamely donned their skirts and knee highs for every football game.  Did they catch it from other high school bands?  You bet, complete with wolf whistles and cat calls.  Their early male identity was certainly threatened.  But they took it in stride, returning the other side’s insults with obscene gestures made with their drumsticks.

Morning practice went from around 7:00 am or earlier to about ten minutes before the first period bell.  When we were finally released, we stampeded towards the nearest restroom to mop off the sweat and do what we could with our wilting hair.  Some girls showed up at early morning practice with hair curlers which had to be removed quickly. Cans of Johnson's baby powder were whipped out and shaken down the front and back of our dresses in attempt to soak up the sweat.  A quick and flying trip was made to our lockers and we showed up at first period, stale, powdered, tired and flat-haired, but ready to start the day.  

Around the middle of the football season, we had to learn and perform the highland fling, and a disaster it was.  It was a hard dance to learn and hard to perform and we looked just awful.  We had no dance training or skills and could still barely march down the field in formation.  Mr. P was especially vicious during those sessions, comparing us to a herd of cattle.   

The only reason I joined the Lassies was to wear that snazzy little uniform, and it was cute.  I left after one year.  That was quite enough.  We later heard that Mr. P had once become so frustrated with later Lassies that he fell off the perch after a particularly frightful rage!  If that was true, it must have been quite a sight.

Driver's education was a rite of passage for many, especially if your parents could provide you with a car to escape the wretched school bus.  At one point, a fourteen year old could get a driver’s license in San Antonio as long as they had taken driver’s ed.  Pretty frightening to imagine, but there were plenty of these hazards driving around, including Wes.  As expected, driver’s ed classes were packed with fledgling and enthusiastic driving students. 

In the summer of my 15th year, I was already an experienced driver.  By the age of 12, I was taller than many adults, so Wes decided it was appropriate to take me to the Fort Sam Village shopping center parking lot on a Sunday afternoon and teach me to drive.  The parents were cool with it.  One less thing for them fiddle with.  They had more confidence in us than they probably should have.  I learned to drive in a standard VW beetle and drove standards for the next 20 years.  When time for the real driver's ed rolled around, I took the required classroom phase at Roosevelt High School.  We learned about the internal workings of a car's engine, and watched that time worn video about the two poor fools who were either too lazy or too inept to get their leaky muffler replaced, asphyxiated themselves on the highway and had a crash.  The rumor was it was actual footage of bodies being removed out of the car.  Did it scare us?  Not really.  Most of us drove under the influence of controlled substances at one point or another anyway in the next years.

(We once drove all the way to Austin for a football game while finishing off a fifth of Ron Bacardi on the way.  We were so inebriated on arrival at the stadium that we accidentally sat with the opposing side.  When we realized our error, we jumped the fence and ran across the end zone to the other side in the middle of the game.  We had no fear.)

Football coaches were our driving teachers.  There were four of us every afternoon driving endlessly around Loop 1604 in the hot July sun.  I spent a lot of time in the back seat sandwiched between two enormous football players who sat with their enormous football legs splayed apart.  They engulfed me.  I was still pretty much non-verbal, so those were long and silent rides.  The first student driver to get behind the wheel of our car was one of those football players.  He was an enormous guy, nearly six feet tall and close to 200 pounds.  He climbed behind the wheel in the parking lot and was terrified as a kitten.  For the first 100 yards or so, he drove no faster than about five miles an hour.  We took our first drive around the back parking lot of the school.  Finally, he loosened up and took it up to about ten miles an hour.  This was going to be a long afternoon.

 My hour came when it was time for me to get behind the wheel.  The first time I drove, I floored it confidently around the parking lot and onto Bitters Road.   It was painfully obvious that I had done this before, and frequently, but Coach was too polite to say anything.  Apparently Coach mentioned my higher level skills to some of his other driving students, including my neighbor, Louis, who just had to share that yes indeed, he saw me illegally driving up and down Olney Drive all the time!  Fortunately, the other students quickly shut him up.

We at least had an automatic transmission.  Some students learned in standards, with our future death row coach having them park on hillsides and get out of it on a standard transmission, shrieking clutch! Clutch! 

The final step was the driving test at DPS off Perrin Beitel Road.  I took the test in my mother's land barge Buick.  I was completely comfortable with standard transmissions, but not for my driving test.  My eyes were wide when that state trooper climbed into the seat beside me.  He was big, wore reflective aviator sunglasses and was cold as a glacier.  Most likely he thoroughly enjoyed horrifying inexperienced female teen drivers.  For my part, I was on the verge of a panic attack and stiff as a surfboard.  But I actually made it through the test.  When the ice man announced that I had passed, I was amazed.

The following school year, I proudly drove a 1969 8 cylinder 327 Camaro, silver with black interior.  It was a little beauty: a real muscle car.  Those cylinders were totally wasted on me as all I ever did was toodle back and forth to school and the mall, but I was still proud of the ridiculous power of that engine.  When Wes got behind the wheel he was adept at laying strips and outrunning the San Antonio police.

Driving a camaro to high school was a real status.  One of our cheerleaders drove a gold camaro, and another lucky girl got a Mercury cougar out of her parents. 

It didn’t really matter what you drove, as long as you had SOMETHING to drive.  Many drove to school in cars that made them cringe, but they were driving.

Alcohol was always an underground problem.  We were not of course supposed to be drinking, but we did.  We had to sneak it and were pretty good at it.  Wes could often enter a liquor store and manage to buy a bottle of Ron Bacardi rum, the liquor of choice.  He would put on a pair of glasses and a man’s overcoat, stride into the store with confidence and manage to make the purchase.  He was rarely carded or questioned.  Boys will be boys after all.  He was glad to share and “help out” his friends.

One of my friend’s fathers was a jovial gent who really enjoyed his evening drinks.   We raided his impressive stocks.  A group of girls would arrive on a Friday night at her house and find her dad in the sunroom.  He was usually pretty tight by then and delighted that some cute teen girls had joined him.  Obviously, he still "had it".   While he basked in the attention,  his daughter went to work in the kitchen with the rum, lemonade mix, ice and blender, mixing up pitcher after pitcher of daquiris.

Dad would rise to the surface every so often and call out to his daughter:

“What are you doing in there?”

“Making lemonade, Dad!”

The girls sitting with him would talk faster.  When she had finished, we were out the door with our treasures and headed for the Alamo drive-in to take in some useless movie such as Weekend with the babysitter.  Actually, we didn’t watch it at all.  We were too busy getting stinking drunk and stumbling back and forth to the restrooms.

Smoking pot was also prevalent, but more new and forbidden.  There were notorious parties on the Austin Highway every Friday night, and you had to not only know someone to find them, but you had to buy a ticket.  The San Pedro Drive-in usually had a cloud of marijuana smoke rising over the cars.  Pot and procreation ...

What would later become Spring Break was rumbling too in those years.  We had no Spring Break (what did we need that for?), but we did have Easter weekend and got Friday and Monday off.  It was better than nothing.  Many high schoolers took off  in caravans for Padre and Mustang Island, totally unsupervised.  They left on Thursday, as soon as school let out and camped on the beach or slept in their cars.  They were joined by hundreds of other high schoolers within driving distance of the coast, all intent on one of several goals:  drinking themselves into oblivion, losing their virginity and getting the tan of their lives.  For four days they frolicked on the beach and with each other, dragging back into town late on the Monday evening like tom cats.  More cases of virginity were lost on the islands than the infamous graduation night at the Hilton Palacio Del Rio.

If parents were along, many groups stayed at the Island House or Million Dollar Inn on Mustang Island, both right on the beach and within 50 yards of the surf.  It was certainly more comfortable with a clean place to sleep and regular meals, but more restricted.

Since the dawn of civilization, unplanned pregnancies have been part of the human existence.  We were no exception, but it was still a source of shame and hushed silence, and typically kept well hidden.  Procreation went on in the back seat of automobiles much the same as it always did.  We always knew who was pregnant.  The rumor mill took care of that.  For the most part, the girls dropped out of sight and had their babies in private, either not finishing high school, or getting their GED.  Abortions were highly illegal at the time, but there were obstetricians in the city who would perform them privately.  There were botch jobs, which made the newspaper, and sent obstetricians to prison and cost them their licenses.  Old Doc Tritt was one the most infamous.  I would meet his granddaughter in my first year at UT.  We swapped horror stories (probably untrue) about desperate girls who tried to self-abort.

Teen pregnancy was a dead end road that was typically to result in a life of desperation and dependence on welfare and food stamps.  It was not paraded around as a blessed event.  A huge exception at Mac was one couple who got pregnant in 1969.  They were well brought up middle class kids.  He was a football player.  Both were excellent students who got carried away and made a mistake.  They chose not to slink away.  They openly married.  Normal school district rules forbade married and/or pregnant students to attend the same school, but an exception was made for this couple.  They were allowed to finish and graduate, but life was not made easy for them with school administrators watching their every move and a simmering, resentful father-in-law.  They were stripped of all extracurricular activities, which included football and class offices.

It is to their credit that they made it through everything and are still married today.  Sadly though, they are an exception.

Smoking was allowed for the high school boys, but not the girls.  This was both discriminatory and stupid.  It should not have been allowed at all.  With their parents' written permission, boys would slink to the trash bins outside the cafeteria and puff away during their lunch break.  It was considered glamorous and rebellious.  Wow.  Look at them.  They KNOW it's bad for them but they're doing it anyway.

It was a different and more unfair story with the girls.  Plenty of them sneaked their cigs onto campus in their purses, and lit up in the stalls in the girls' restroom.  We would walk into one to touch up our hair, and the smoke would obliterate the mirrors.  You didn't want to stay long because of a potential raid.  Miss Tankersley took it upon herself to try to eradicate the problem.  She would slam into a restroom, shrieking at the smokers to come out of those stalls NOW!   Toilets would flush like mad as they ditched the evidence.   Then she would sniff at them to catch the cigarette odor so she could run them off to the office.  Then on to the next restroom to nab more of the hapless smokers. 

Early in our senior year, college was on the horizon and many of us began thinking of where we would attend.  SAC, or San Antonio College, was a great starting point for many.  Students could ground themselves and attend two years getting their basics, plus decide what they wanted as their major.  But many looked down their noses at SAC, calling it San Pedro High School.  There were many private colleges to choose from:  Incarnate Word, Our Lady of the Lake, and St. Mary's University, but no huge low cost state schools.  Up IH35, however there was a great one:  the University of Texas at Austin and only about an hour away.  It was an obvious choice for many.  It was a great school, close to home, and reasonable in cost.  I didn't give college much thought until January of my senior year.  I thought about it for all of ten minutes and then decided that UT it would be.  As long as you scored 1000 on the SAT, you were in.  I applied and was accepted around April.  We made a day trip to Austin to look at the dorms.  Jester Center was on the south side of campus and was the first we encountered.  We parked and walked in.  Fine.  This will do and I applied for a room and put down a deposit.

Girls who didn't have much luck with the boys in high school made it their goal to attend Texas A&M in College Station or Texas A&I  in Kingsville.  The ratio of boys to girls was around 10 to 1.  If you couldn't get a date in high school, you couldn't NOT get a date at A&M or A&I.  Supposedly all you had to do was walk through campus and you would be booked up for the week with all the cute guys you wanted.  It was heady to think about.

Many other students put far more thought and effort into their college application process.  Keith gained admission to the prestigious University of Southern California.  Louis went to Tulane University and became a physician.  Carol applied to Cornell and was accepted.  It was most impressive to hear those universities announced as we all walked across the stage at graduation.  The star of the show, however, was Sanda, who had taken four years of French in high school and applied to the Sorbonne in Paris.  She was accepted.  The entire Blossom Athletic Center was silenced when she went across the graduation stage.  It was impressive. 

High school was at or near the center of the lives for most of us, but other things were going on as well.