The other day I came across a book of school and sport photos that my mom had given me over the winter, and since I'd not seen any of these photos in what has been well over a decade or two, I sat down and perused them.
My first two years of school were at the local public school, because the Catholic school only went from 2nd through 8th Grade, but despite the latter's uniform requirements our formal photos looked a lot like those found in the public school. So... the same loud clothing.
In perusing the autographs, I don't think I had an "bad" autographs, but that kind of went without saying. After all, you're not likely to ask someone you didn't like to sign your yearbook. Still, I can tell the years I felt more isolated than others by the (lack of) autographs in my yearbook.
That was probably not the smartest decision I've ever made. Why, you may ask?
I wasn't prepared for the emotions that they stirred within me.
It's not as if I've never seen pictures of myself as a kid before. On the contrary, my mom has plenty of them around and every so often she likes to pull them out to show "younger me" off to the mini-Reds. When they were younger, that was cute, but now that they're grown, it's kind of awkward.
But still, those photos are of us on vacation, at home, things like that.
These were the formal class photos and sports team photos that I had as part of the baseball and basketball teams I played on. All my elementary school photos were there, up through middle school. No high school pics here at all.
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| The guilty party. |
When I sat down to peruse the photos, I was struck by the changes from black and white to color photos. My Kindergarten and First Grade photos were in color, but when I changed schools to my Catholic grade school for Second Grade up through Eighth Grade, we reverted to black and white. It was only in Fourth Grade that the class photo returned to color, as if the school couldn't afford color until then.*
The second thing were the outfits.
Oh Lord, the outfits.
My elementary school years stretched from the Fall of 1974 to Spring of 1983, and that wide swath of the 70s was reflected in the loud outfits of the day, such as corduroy jackets and pants.
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| Yikes. And they come in "Husky Sizes" too! From the 1975 Sears Fall/Winter Catalogue, page 418. From christmas.musetechnical.com. |
My first two years of school were at the local public school, because the Catholic school only went from 2nd through 8th Grade, but despite the latter's uniform requirements our formal photos looked a lot like those found in the public school. So... the same loud clothing.
Despite the loud clothing, I had a hard time wrapping my head around these photos. My own kids are all adults now, so this feels like multiple lifetimes ago. Still, as I perused them, I remembered aspects of my life that I'd buried under decades of daily work.
Such as how I looked when I got glasses in Sixth Grade. My glasses came after our school photos, so I was glasses-free for my class photo, but in Seventh Grade... Between the bad plastic frames and the awkward horizontally striped shirt, I don't know how that photo could look worse. I also began having dandruff issues (thanks for the genetics, Dad), so if you want to talk middle-school awkward, that Seventh Grade photo was it.
In Eighth Grade, I got a new prescription which included new glasses with metal frames, and they looked a lot better. I may have looked more confident in the school photo, but I certainly was that awkward kid with the hormones who couldn't dance to save their life. (That was on display at the Eighth Grade Graduation Dance, although the most memorable part of that dance was the one kid who thought it would be funny to walk around with his pants down. The chaperones escorted him out.)
***
My classmates generated a large share of the memories of my youth, both good and bad.
Like the kid who became good friends with me in Kindergarten, to the point where we exchanged telephone numbers to try to get together during the Summer. But when I called him up, the woman on the other end of the line said "nobody of with that name lives here". And that Fall, he wasn't at school. It was as if he'd up and vanished.
There was the girl in Third Grade who loved to read as much as I did, and we had a semester's long competition as to who could read the most books. I kept pace with her for a while, but she ended up beating the pants off me in both quantity and quality of books**. I found her interesting and funny and vexing all at once, but at the end of the school year she told me that her family was moving, and I never saw her again after that Spring.
Oh man, I'd almost forgotten about the kid in Third Grade who never did his homework. And I do mean never. He'd get in trouble for that, but then one day when he came to Math class he told the teacher he'd done his homework, she was happy... until we were supposed to open our math workbooks to show we did our homework. Oh, those blank pages he presented did not go over well. "DON'T YOU LIE TO ME!!!" the teacher yelled and grabbed the kid by the arm, yanking him out into the hallway. There was an impromptu meeting among all of the other Third Grade teachers and the Principal, with the kid in tow, which dragged on for over 20 minutes. (I know, because I was watching the clock in total silence, along with the rest of my class.) I don't know the end result of all this, but the kid was never in class again.
In Fourth Grade, I absolutely loved my homeroom teacher; she was patient yet demanding, encouraging and calm, and she pushed my academic interests far more than the nuns ever did. But more than anything else she was tall. She was easily the tallest woman I'd ever known at that point --I want to say she was at least 5' 10"-- and I found out later that she was the daughter of a local doctor who played basketball back in the day. In what I now identify as a trend, she left the school at the end of the school year because she could make more money being a secretary for her dad's office than she could as a teacher.***
I discovered girls in the Fifth Grade, but looking at these photos now I'm having a hard time viewing the girls and trying to remember what I found attractive in them. I mean, they look so young, and my vantage point is a mid-50s man who looks at women in their early 20s and think that they look far too youthful for my taste.
There was the "love triangle" in the Sixth Grade between one boy and two girls that everybody seemed to think was absolutely cute, including the two girls involved, but the boy seemed very embarrassed by the whole thing. I was simply baffled, because I thought that if I were caught that way between two girls, it would make my head hurt.
A boy who was only there for Sixth Grade --his family moved to West Germany after the school year, so it's likely his was a military family-- taught everybody the "Diarrhea" song. He was constantly in trouble, and it was widely rumored he was in and out of juvenile detention.
In Eighth Grade, I had to deal with constant bullying from a girl who would get into my face and yell "WE HATE YOU!!" I've been bullied before and since, but that was probably the worst. I hated her with a passion, but the teachers did nothing and I decided I wasn't going to respond to her directly. But oh, I dreamed about hauling off and slugging her for that.
***
All that was well and good, until I reflected on what happened to some of the kids when they grew up.
There was one girl I crushed on --not my original crush, but one that people knew about in grade school-- who was very smart and attractive, but she got pregnant and she ended up marrying her boyfriend and dropping out of college. I think she may have eventually gotten her college degree, but I have no idea if she remained married.
A similar fate befell the kid who dropped his pants at the Eighth Grade Dance; he finished within a hair of being Salutatorian at high school and had a sports scholarship to a Division I university lined up, but his girlfriend got pregnant and... that was that.
The girl who bullied me in Eighth Grade? She developed an eating disorder in high school. I have no idea what became of her after that.
One classmate spent time in prison for embezzling funds, but I believe he's out now.
In a "no surprise" event, one of my classmates died when a drug deal went bad. He was a constant thorn in my side, and despite his small stature he was a bully. When I was in high school he was caught by the police slashing tires in the parking lot of our elementary school, which I was no real surprise.
Another classmate committed suicide by jumping off of the tallest building in town. I still have a hard time wrapping my head around that one, 30 years after I first heard it. He was the class clown type, and from what I've read about comics and depression I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but it still hurt.
Not all was doom and gloom, however. A few people married their high school sweethearts and remain married today (or at least as far as a couple of years ago). Others survived the bullying gauntlet and became successful in life. And still others are, well, doing their thing, I guess. If they're like me, they don't respond to correspondence about school reunions or things like that, because they prefer to forget their experiences in grade/middle school.
***
Admittedly, this reflection wasn't what I expected it would be, as when I began perusing the photos I didn't expect to be reminded of all of these events. I could have just shoved it aside and buried it deep in my psyche, but I felt it was important to let this stuff come out. There's a lot more stories I could tell from my grade school years, but I'm not exactly sure how to tell them.
My grade school was, well, kind of fucked up in its focus. I don't know if it's the case in other parts of the country, but here in Ohio the Catholic grade schools emphasize athletics to an inordinate degree. As in "far beyond the healthy levels" of emphasis. For example, my school's priorities were in full display on our annual "yearbook" that we were given out for free at the end of the year. My kids' yearbooks growing up included a lot of photos of the various classes and the kids doing all sorts of activities; my own only included the formal pictures of the sports teams that the school sponsored, as if sports were all that mattered at the school. (In some ways, it kind of did.)
However, there were at least a few pages for autographs and other comments, so there was that at least. And like a lot of kids, I got some signatures from people I knew.
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| This was in my Seventh Grade yearbook. Names have been removed for privacy's sake. And before you ask, no, we never dated. |
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| Again, this is from Seventh Grade. The guy who wrote this is, well, respectable these days. I think that blows my mind more than anything else. |
In perusing the autographs, I don't think I had an "bad" autographs, but that kind of went without saying. After all, you're not likely to ask someone you didn't like to sign your yearbook. Still, I can tell the years I felt more isolated than others by the (lack of) autographs in my yearbook.
But I do wonder about how much the petty drama drove so much shit at school. Probably 95% of it, if I'm being honest with myself.
***
Okay, I have to put all of this aside for now. I'm glad I got to put some of this down on pixels, because it feels rather cathartic to bring all of this out every so often. Maybe it's just me that I'm surprised that as many kids in my class of 90-100 eventually turned out to be as well adjusted adults as there were, but then again maybe the churn of shit below the surface is quite normal for any school. Who knows?
#Blaugust2023
*That wasn't the case; it was more the fault of the Pastor being a cheapskate. That particular priest was a stereotypical cigar smoking, hard drinking asshole in his mid-50s who always found something to dislike in whatever you were doing. His fingerprints were all over what high schools were welcome to recruit at the school as well; he went to the high school I eventually attended, and because of that he refused to let the local Jesuit high school recruit students. The same thing went for the girls' high school: the girls' school right next to my high school was welcome, the other, more prestigious ones were not.
**She was reading middle school level books by the end of the school year, and just cruising through them.
***I saw her years later when I broke my collarbone in Eighth Grade; she certainly remembered me, which was both gratifying and embarrassing to a 13 year old kid that his Fourth Grade teacher remembered him. Of course, I now know that isn't so unusual, but back then I certainly thought it was.
I found this an interesting read because in comparison I know almost nothing about whatt hapened to anyone I was at school with. With just a couple of exceptions, I don't think I ever saw anyone from my first school again after I went to my second and the same with my second once I'd gone to university. I didn't see anyone from university for much more than five years after I graduated, either. My mother did occasionally tell me things about people I'd been to school with, but only sporadically and not with any detail.
ReplyDeleteEven though we lived in the same house for the first eighteen years of my life and I've stayed approximately in the same area, give or take twenty miles, ever since, almost nothing of what happened to any of those people ever found it's way back to me. In those days, if you lived in the next village (I could walk there in twenty minutes), which is where most of my first school's catchment area was, you might as well have lived in another country for all anyone outside that village would ever hear about you.
There's also no culture whatsoever of school reunions in the UK so no-one ever does the catch-up thing. Maybe they do now, since American customs have become quite dominant, but not at any point when anyone I was at school with would have been invited. We did have the annual class photographs but my mother has all of those and I haven't seen any of them in at least forty years.
Can't say I'm sorry to have missed out on any of it. It seems like a very long time ago now. It might as well have happened to someone else.
The irony is that Cincinnati's West Side is well known for being an insular part of town. So when you wrote about how the next village over being another country I totally understood. When I was growing up, people simply didn't move away from this part of town. You may have worked in an office or factory upwards of an hour's drive away, but you always lived pretty much where you grew up. When I graduated high school and left town for university --even though it was only an hour's drive on the highway north of Cincinnati-- you'd have thought I took a Saturn rocket to the moon.
DeleteAnd I liked it like that.
I actively avoided anything resembling a school reunion --someone tried to get a 5-year grade school reunion together while I was away at uni, and I kind of shuddered and took a hard pass-- and I still do. I've tried to remove myself from school email lists but I somehow keep popping back on them, so I've given up and just dump them in another email box.
Still, most of what I learned that befell my classmates I heard years after it happened when I occasionally run into one of them around town. For a city with a metropolitan population of over 2 million people you'd think that doesn't happen at all with a grade school class of 100, but it does. And far more frequently than I prefer. Thankfully, my beard has changed my visage enough that people hardly ever recognize me, despite the red hair.
My wife, on the other hand, always seems to go to her class reunions, and frequently keeps up with her classmates to the point where I raise an eyebrow and wonder why she hasn't floated the idea of us moving back to her hometown now that the kids have grown. Maybe it's because she knows I'd never go for it. I may be flexible, but I'm not so flexible as to want to move to the South.
Really interesting read, thanks for sharing. I think you are a bit older than me, but I passed through the 70s and 80s in the US as well. However my dad was in the military, so we moved about every three years. When you are a kid and you move to a new town, for the most part everyone you knew in the previous one may as well have vanished from the face of the earth.
DeleteProbably because of that I have not kept up with anyone I went to high school and lower grades with. Like I really literally have no idea whether most of them are dead or alive. I guess if they were all being killed off one-by-one in a series of bizarre supernaturally tinged incidents I would have heard something about it, so I'm guessing that they are mostly alive . . .
Yes, I can understand your situation, as several of my adult friends are military brats, so they grew used to moving frequently. The irony is that while Fort Campbell (home of the 101st Airborne division) isn't that far away and Wright-Patterson AFB is just an hour up the road in Dayton, I hardly ever knew any military kids growing up. Or maybe I did, and didn't realize it. There was one house on our street nicknamed "The P&G House" by us kids, because it seemed that P&G people lived there for only 2 years at a time and then moved on. I found out much later that the 2 year cadence for a job position at P&G is pretty much standard; that sounds nice in that you're exposed to a lot of different parts of the company, but in my experience it can take you about 6 months to get comfortable at a new position and by the time you're getting good at your job it's time to move on.
DeleteAs much as cutting the cord once I graduated from high school allowed me to start fresh in college, there are times when I wonder what happened to certain people. I know that a quick google search will pop out some info, but it's not the same. Still, I also know that once I ping one person, word will get around and people I won't want to be in contact with will suddenly resurface, so from my perspective it's an either/or scenario. So far, I've chosen to be on the "radio silence" side of the fence.