My Senior Year - Part 1

I spent the first three months of my senior year of high school at Orange Glen in Escondido. This was in the fall of 1969 and I've already talked about some of the things that were going on at the time:
- Mom lost her job (again).
- We got evicted and moving to a ratty little apartment.
- There was the jerk at school who was telling everyone we'd been evicted.
- My unnamed band played that gig at the YMCA.
- I went to the Eric Burdon concert.

And then there was school...

For some reason I don't remember those months particularly well - I must have skipped a lot :-) But I do recall taking English, Pre-calculus, Astronomy, Drafting, Economics, French 4 and PE (flag football)... And here's some of the memories (in no particular order):

Plymouth's "Rapid Transit" tour stopped at Orange Glen High early in the fall. They put on a show in the auditorium with singing and dancing (ostensibly to promote safe driving) and brought along a collection of brand new 1970 muscle cars for us to gawk at... I specifically remember the B5 (blue) Plymouth Superbird, a brand new 'Cuda (with shaker hood), and a GTX. At least one of the cars had a "pistol grip" Hurst shifter (which had just been introduced with the 1970 model year) and I seem to recall that the Hemi and 440 6-bbl engines were represented... Yeah - the cars made an impression on me :-)

Next - I vaguely recall that one guy got sent home for wearing chartreuse bellbottoms with multi-colored flowers on them... I thought them were cool but the vice principal claimed they were creating a "disturbance"...

Some students tried doing one of those "smash an old car with a sledgehammer" fundraisers. The event was held in the main quad and it got out of control when a bunch of students stormed the car and rolled it over. That's when they found out the gas tank was still full... The car and a bunch of students got drenched. Yeah - they were just a stray spark away from one heck of a newspaper headline...

And on to English class:
I was really excited when the teacher told us we were going to spend an entire month studying comedy. I mean - how can that not be fun??? ... Well - I found out... Apparently there is no subject that cannot be reduced to tedium and drudgery by our educational system... Yes - nothing takes the fun out of funny like having to explain why... Don't know why - don't care why :-)
Another memory from that class involved this kid named Russ who always wore a pith helmet with red, white and blue stripes on it. He spent most of English class (first period) spinning the pith helmet on the tip of a pen and muttering about the colors... The spinning helmet looked cool - but not that cool... So one day I asked him why he was so fascinated by it and he told me that he dropped a quarter tab of acid before leaving for school every morning. That was apparently just the right amount to make things "interesting" :-)

Astronomy class:
The teacher told us that he'd give us a C just for showing up... So I got a C :-)

Economics:
I'm not 100% sure the class was called economics. It might have been a "life skills" kind of class. But one of the things we did was pretend to invest $1000 in various stocks. I ended up turning a pretend profit of $200. My primary investments were White Motors (trucking was expanding at the time) and Flying Tiger (contractor flying supplies into and around Vietnam). It was interesting, but I certainly didn't catch the investing "bug". I've never liked risk...
Then one day this girl in the front row got the giggles. I don't know what set her off but she could not stop. They teacher got really mad and no matter what he said or did the giggles just got worse. He finally told her that if she didn't stop immediately he'd send her to the vice principal's office... That really got her going - and she got sent to the office...
I felt really bad for her because that's not something you can always control... Heck - I almost got kicked out of LaMaze class once because I couldn't stop giggling - but that's not until 1976 :-)

Pre-calculus:
The only thing I remember about pre-calc is when somebody dropped a cherry bomb in a toilet in the girl's room. Our classroom's chalkboard was right across the wall from the toilet and the teacher was writing on it (the chalkboard - not the toilet) when it exploded (the toilet - not the chalkboard).
The wall flexed out about 4 inches when the thing went off - it scared the heck out of all of us... Yeah - this was back when messing with explosives was regarded as a juvenile prank rather than a federal crime...

Not much to say about drafting class and flag football... They were pretty much the same as they had been during my junior year...

And I think I'll leave French 4 to my next post... It's another one of those "short skirt" stories and I still haven't decided how much I should say about it :-)