The Bus

There are some odds and ends (mostly odds) I wanted to talk about before I finish my times at John Tyler High in 1970. Here goes:

There was a junior girl named Karen Hatfield who lived a block north of us on Chilton Street. We got off the school bus at the same stop and one afternoon I started talking to her as we walked home and when we got to her house she invited me in. (There was nobody else home).
So we chatted for a few minutes, then she proceeded to lay down on the couch. I asked her why she was lying down and she said she was tired... Then I asked if I should leave and she said no... Of course, I had absolutely no clue what was going on. She was looking at me expectantly and I'm pretty sure I was supposed to try and make out with her so she could get all offended and kick me out.
Yeah - A lot of the girls in Tyler were into "catch and release"... They would flirt with a guy they had absolutely no interest in just to prove that they could reel him before cutting him loose. It didn't take me long to figure that one out :-) So I only stayed a few more minutes before leaving and she never really spoke to me again after that... Like I said - I'm still not sure exactly what her deal was...

BTW: I'm pretty sure Karen wasn't really interested in me because I didn't even have a car - let alone a cool car. She liked guys with cool cars... You have to understand that cruising up and down Broadway was the main social activity for teenagers in Tyler back then and a girl's status was largely based on what kind of car she was seen in...
So - when I visited Tyler in 1972 (to be the best man at Wayne's wedding) he told me that after high school Karen married a guy with a 71 Mustang Mach 1 (429 Super Cobra Jet). And within a year she was stuck at home caring for an infant while hubby was out cruising in the Mustang... I almost felt sorry for her but she had gotten exactly what she wanted. She merely failed to anticipate the consequences :-)

Not long after the Karen incident it dawned on me that I could walk a few extra blocks and catch the bus near the end of the route thereby cutting my ride time in half. The bus was always "standing room only" by then but I was OK with that.

Speaking of standing room only - that reminds me of another incident (yes - it involves a girl):
The bus was particularly packed one day and I ended up standing right next to a seat occupied by a very pretty, very sweet blond girl who worked at the Dairy Queen. And from my perspective I couldn't help but notice that her blouse was unbuttoned enough to provide a lovely view of her bra. (There really wasn't much to see - she was quite slender). And it wasn't long before she noticed that I noticed and she got really mad... It was just like the La Jolla skirt incident all over again. She yelled "Hey! You're looking down my blouse!" and everyone on the bus was glaring at me... A couple of guys offered to beat the crap out of me but she told them it wasn't necessary... I felt really bad because (unlike the girl in La Jolla who was a total b-word) this girl really was very nice and I didn't mean to upset her - I just totally suck at ignoring things like that :-) Before that incident I had even been considering asking her out but afterward I figured that wouldn't go over very well...

Finally: Shortly after I switched bus stops one of my classmates noticed me there one morning and offered me a ride, which I accepted. I was in a particularly strange mood that day, and after making fun of the fact that his Mustang had a 6-cylinder engine I started discussing some of those bizarre thoughts I usually keep to myself... I don't remember exactly what the subject was but it was totally freaking him out - which only inspired me to get weirder :-)

Every day after that he went a number of blocks out of his way just to avoid driving past me... I felt kind of bad because he was obviously worried I'd think he was jerk if he went by without offering me a ride. But I honestly didn't care... After what I had put him through I wouldn't have offered me a ride either :-)

And the Rest

At this point I've talked about most of my classes at John Tyler High in the spring of 1970. The only two that remain are Debate and Sociology and I'll get to them shortly...

During my last 2 years of high school hardly a day went by that I didn't wake up and think "I should drop out of school today". That changed at the beginning of April my senior year when it dawned on me that I might actually graduate. After all those years (and 11 different schools) the journey might actually end without me throwing in the towel first :-)
Then I would be free to become one of the "workers of the world". Get a blue collar job, collect a paycheck and play my guitar... There was no way I was going to become a cog in the corporate wheel (like my dad) and spend the rest of my life busting my hump just to enrich some fat cats... Of course - I had to figure out how to keep my butt out of Vietnam first - after all, I was no "Fortunate Son"... Yeah - Canada was always on my mind... But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Back to the regularly scheduled subject matter:

There's not much to say about Debate class... I was still very good at public speaking because I knew I was good at it. Speech is one of those things where self-doubt becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy...
I have to admit that I was never all that good at thinking on my feet though - I'm more of a deep thought kind of guy. But I was lucky to get paired with the sharpest guy in the class. He was the son of a lawyer and nowadays is a judge and member of the Texas Judicial Council. During debates he was always jotting down little notes for me... Sometimes I had no clue what they meant but I'd argue the point anyway :-) I think I got a "B" in the class...

Next topic:

The sociology teacher was a very nice, very old lady. I seem to recall that she was supposed to have already retired but wanted to keep teaching so they let her stay on...
I don't remember much from the class other than she graded really easy...
Oh - and this one time were talking about drugs and one of the students admitted to being a Coke (tm) addict... Yes - he was referring to the soft drink. Everyone laughed, but he had a 30 can per day habit - not only is that expensive but that's a serious buttload of caffeine... No wonder he rode bulls for fun :-)

OK - and there was this one story the teacher told us... I've repeated it to a lot of people but nobody has ever thought it was funny so I'll tell it anyway:
Back in the late 60's a lot of people were sniffing model airplane glue to get high (and brain-damaged) so Texas outlawed selling model glue unless you bought a model at the same time.
As fate would have it one day the Sociology teacher accidentally broke one of her knicknacks and decided she might be able to fix it with model glue so she headed off to the store to buy some. Of course, she had no idea about the whole "huffing" thing so when she got up to the checkout this transpired:
Clerk: I see that you're buying some model glue but not a model...
Teacher: That's right...
Clerk: Well... Would you like to buy a model?
Teacher: No thank you... I think I'm a bit old for that...
Clerk: But then - what are you going to do with the glue???
At this point the teacher is getting irritated because she has no idea what the clerk is trying to get at and says:
Well, I'm certainly not going to use it to build a model!!!

Yeah - I thought it was funny...

I think I'm going to try and close out the high school stuff before moving on to other Tylerific topics. It should only take a couple of more posts to get around to why I didn't go to my graduation ceremony :-)

Physics Class

Before I talk about Physics class at John Tyler High School in the spring of 1970 here's a little photo montage I put together from a class directory I found online a few years back:

The girl on the left was the one with the run in her pantyhose (see my prior post)...
Girls number 2 and 3 were redheads. I had a huge crush on #2 but she had a redneck boyfriend who would have beaten me to a pulp if I had gotten near her... The third girl (the other redhead) was kind of cool. She used to hang out with Wayne and I during lunch. Her standard greeting was "Poof! You're a frog!" (there was a hand gesture that went with it)... I never asked her out - I was probably afraid she'd say yes :-)
The girl on the right was really short (4'10") and well endowed. I'm not sure why I found her attractive (maybe the well endowed part?) but I did... A few months after graduation I ran into her at a store and asked her out. She said yes and gave me her phone number... When I called the next day to make the arrangements she informed me that she probably shouldn't go out with me because her boyfriend didn't want her to... ??? ... I didn't know if she expected me to try and "persuade her" or what... Yeah - that wasn't gonna happen. There were already enough psychos in my life at that point :-)

And on to the main topic:

I had been taking an Astronomy class at Orange Glen High the previous fall but they didn't offer that subject at John Tyler High so they stuck me in Physics instead. (Close enough, right?)

Aside: This may sound strange coming from someone who has spent the past 30+ years working as a engineer, but I used to think of myself strictly as an "artsy" person. In high school I sucked at math and avoided science like the plague. (I've never taken a biology class - ever.) The only reason I signed up for Astronomy is that I needed more science credit to graduate and the teacher never gave a grade below a "C"... So transferring into a real Physics class mid-year was quite a shock :-)

Now - I have to admit that the Newtonian stuff can be rather entertaining - what with all the massless ropes and frictionless pulleys and stuff they use in all the examples :-) I actually remember one of the problems from that class at John Tyler:
Two men weighing 150lbs each have hoisted a 50lb barrel containing 150lbs of nails up to the top of a 30 foot tall building using a massless rope and a frictionless pulley (at the top)... But before they can tie off the rope the 1st man loses his grip and lets go. The barrel with the nails is heavier than the 2nd man (still holding the rope) so it comes down and he gets hoisted up to the top... But when the barrel hits the ground the bottom breaks and the nails fall out so the guy dangling from the rope is now heaver than the empty barrel and he returns to the ground while the barrel goes back up to the top. When he hits the ground he finally lets go of the rope which allows the empty barrel to fall and hit the 1st man on the head.

Now - the obvious question is "How much could you charge people to watch that happen?" but that wasn't it at all... The question was "How much time did it take?" I don't remember the answer, although I can probably figure it out... I just remember the problem because I replay it in my head whenever I need a good laugh :-)

The teacher's name was Mr. Maxwell. (That's funny because he taught physics...) He was one of the very few teachers I ever liked and was the only one who seemed to really "get" me - my quirky sense of humor - apparent lack of self-discipline - quixotic avoidance of unnecessary tasks - all of it :-) So I really enjoyed the class despite the fact that it was filled with Texi-nerds and I had no clue what was going on most of the time.

And, of course, there are a couple of stories:

First: We almost never went near the Physics lab but one day Mr. Maxwell wanted to demonstrate something related to electromagnetism and took us over there.
Now - the Physics and Biology labs were separated by a row of big picture windows and, as fate would have it, the bio-nerds were dissecting fetal pigs that day. A few of them brought their "partially disassembled" critters to the windows to show us. It was exceedingly gross and reminded me of why I never took biology. But that's not the point of the story.
Mr. Maxwell finally found the piece of equipment he was looking for but couldn't figure out how to hook it up. He eventually got some wires crossed and blew it up thus demonstrating why he never took us to the lab :-) He just put the apparatus back in the storage closet and said "If anyone asks we were never here..."

The second (and final) story involves that fact that Mr. Maxwell was from a really rural town and had a slightly more pronounced southern drawl that the typical Tylerite... One day he wanted to explain sinusoidal motion so he drew a circle on the board and said "Imahgine this is a tore". Now - I knew exactly what he was talking about but apparently I was the only one because this happened:
Multiple students: "A what???"
Mr. Maxwell: "A tore"
Multiple students: "What's a tore???"
Mr. Maxwell: "You know - a tore... Lahk on your core."
Multiple students: "What???"
Mr. Maxwell (exasperated): "Lahk the tores on the core that you drahve - a core tore!"
Finally, one of the students gets it and says: "Ohhh... You mean a tahr!!!"

That's when I burst out into hysterical laughter... The teacher understood why I was so amused but he was the only one.. The other students were like "What's so funny?"... And all I could say was "Ya'll talk just like he does but you can't understand him!"... They still didn't see the humor :-)

Epilogue: I was a Physics major at Reed College for a year before switching to engineering at Portland State. I kind of lost interest when they started in on the whole quantum physics / Schrodinger wave equation stuff... It just wasn't as entertaining as barrels falling on peoples' heads :-)

Government Class

Despite all the personal turmoil I was experiencing at John Tyler High School in the spring of 1970 I have to admit it was a fascinating time. The whole redneck experience was new to me, as was the level of racial tension... It was easy to understand why the black students weren't comfortable with the rednecks, but they really weren't comfortable with me either... I guess I should have expected that - the mistrust ran pretty deep...
The other thing that really mystified me was the way guys and girls interacted... It wasn't fundamentally different from what I 'd seen in California - it was just way more extreme... Let's just say there was a lot of abuse, stupidity, deception and hypocrisy going on :-) But that's a topic for future posts.

"Government" was my second subject of the day (after English) and it was a "double" class. By that I mean there were 60 students and 2 teachers in a double wide room. I'm not sure why they did that - maybe just avoiding duplication?
Regardless - there was a strong conservative slant to the way the material was presented. They spent a lot of time on the "domino theory" (the justification for the war in Vietnam) as well as the usual mom and apple pie stuff... Not that I disagreed with all of it... I just couldn't buy into the whole "love it or leave it" / "my country right or wrong" philosophy...

I never spoke up during class but I'm sure my sentiments were clear from all the eye rolling and facial contortions :-) Between my attitude and the long hair it should come as no surprise that the teachers strongly suspected me of having "anti-American" sentiments... And that gave rise to one of the proudest moments of my high school career:

The teachers spent a full 3 weeks covering communism - mostly focusing on how godless and evil it was... Now - I have to admit that I tend to agree. The whole premise is based on radically invalid assumptions about human nature. It's so obvious that Marx never had an actual job in his life... Amazing irony, that :-)
So when it came time for the exam I decided it would be fun to "play into" the teachers' suspicions and I actually studied - really hard... The class average on that test was by far the lowest of the semester and I was the only student who got 100%... You should have seen the way the teachers glared at me when they handed back the graded papers. It was so worth the effort - I still chuckle when I think about it... Yeah - I know - I find strange ways to amuse myself. Always have - always will :-)

I have lots of other random memories about that class. Like the "make believe" political convention we held in the auditorium and the time they showed us how to use the mechanical voting machines. BTW: Those things actually had "Republican" and "Democrat" levers so you could vote an entire slate with one pull of the handle... No need to think at all :-)

But my most distinct memory involves the girl who sat to the right of me. No big surprise there - right? ... She was a cheerleader and I thought she was really cute. I even managed to work up the nerve to engage her in idle chit-chat a few times...
Then one morning before class she stopped right next to my desk and said "I'm having a really bad day! It's only second period and there's already a run in my pantyhose... Look!"... And she proceeded to hike her skirt up to the very top of her left leg and hold it there for what seemed like an eternity... Yeah - I suppose there might have been a run there but I certainly didn't notice. I was too busy being mesmerized. Seriously - there aren't many things in all of creation as captivating as an 18 year old cheerleader's thigh :-) I'm pretty sure I stopped breathing.
For the life of me I have no clue what that was about... She never acted like she liked me... I suspect she was either messing with me or trying to make someone else jealous (southern girls did that stuff back in the day - probably still do)...

Anyway - she was one of the many girls from school I asked out that fall after I got my driver's license... She turned me down... They all did :-)

In a House Again

It just occurred to me that between the time we left Philadelphia in April of 1965 until the spring of 1970 we never lived in a house. Well - except for living with my mom's sisters in Germany - but that doesn't really count :-)

That's not to say we weren't always house hunting - it was one of mom and Karina's favorite activities. In Winnipeg we didn't have a car so the real estate agents had to chauffeur us around. And we looked at countless homes around Escondido, Carlsbad, Oceanside and San Marcos when we lived down there... Mom figured that if she could qualify for a loan she could talk her sister Vesti out of the down payment, but with her credit that wasn't ever going to happen...
Regardless, she never stopped believing that a bunch of money was going to somehow appear from somewhere and we'd be able to afford it... I guess it's a good thing that mom passed away before the internet went "public" - otherwise she would have been constantly hitting me up for money to send to Nigeria :-)

Aside: This thread has dredged up an apartment hunting memory from Winnipeg:
We went to look at a unit but the manager wasn't home so his daughter showed it to us. She was about my age (13 or 14) with short dark hair - kind of "emo" looking. Yeah - definitely not my usual type - but this girl was simply stunning. The second I laid eyes on her I was totally smitten. ... So the whole time we were looking at the apartment I was thinking "Please! Please! Please!" but (of course) mom and Karina hated the place... And I just couldn't bring myself to tell them why I wanted to live there - probably wouldn't have made a difference anyway... Sigh - I was depressed for weeks :-)

And back to Tyler:
So it came to pass that after a few months at Hollandale Terrace in Tyler we found a nice little house to rent about 6 blocks south - 1011 S. Chilton to be exact. ("Google maps" highlights it correctly.)
By then mom had a sizable circle of friends and decided it was time to start charging for doing astrology and "psychic counseling". She didn't put a sign out front or anything - she relied on word of mouth, but she had a small side room set up in the house with a table and chairs where she did her thing. And - I swear this is true - within two weeks complete strangers were coming up to me at school asking if it was true that my mom was a "witch"... I've never seen anyplace where gossip spread as fast as it did in Tyler :-)

Now - living in a house in Tyler meant that people from almost every church in town would stop by to save you. There was a steady stream of them - even more than usual once it was "common knowledge" that mom was a witch :-)
It wasn't until a year or so later when I "went Baptist" that I found out there's written instructions for doing the "door to door" thing... It's basically like telemarketing - you make your pitch and ignore everything the "mark" says. I suspect that's because listening could morph into an intelligent discussion or something - can't let that happen :-)

Aside: Pretty much everywhere we lived we ran across young Mormon missionaries (the ones with the suits and bicycles). They were always very nice and would actually talk to you (instead of just talking at you). We really enjoyed them - a couple of them even helped us move once (loading/unloading the car, etc).

But one of the main things that irritated me about all the religions is the whole "Now that you've heard the truth if you fail to accept it you will burn in hell" business... I mean - is religion really so lame that you have to threaten people with eternal damnation to get them to embrace it? :-)

Shortly after we moved into the house we got a cat named Chela and a miniature dachshund named Silly... Karina chose the name for the cat - it's apparently a Hindu thing. The dog's name is pretty self-explanatory. I'm sure there will be more pet stories later but I just have to tell this one now because it's so gross:
Silly's favorite treat was cat droppings. The fresher the better... That poor kitty could not take a dump in peace. The second any "substance" came out Silly would chase the her away and munch on it... I wish I could adequately describe the look on Chela's face as she watched Silly consume the "goods"... It was priceless... Needless to say, we usually avoided letting Silly lick our faces :-)

It's kind of hard to describe what was going on with Karina at the time. She was in constant motion but not getting anywhere... She moved out and moved back in - lived with this guy and with that guy... There were musicians, DJs, a recording studio owner and a restaurateur (I can recall at least 14 men she was involved with during 1970 - some of them married)... She even had her own apartment a couple of times when she was being "kept"... She was about 20 years old by then so mom had pretty much given up on trying to influence her - that greatly improved their relationship :-)

And it was around that time mom bought what would become my first car:
A white 1963 Ford Fairlane with a 260 V8 engine and a Ford-o-matic 2 speed transmission. It was a repo out of California and we paid $75 for it. It took 2 years to get a title on it and we drove it around with expired California plates that entire time - never got stopped for it :-)

Sigh - I don't know why it's taking so long to write these posts lately. I think it's because that was a very confusing and turbulent time in my life. I was about to graduate from high school at the age of 16, had never had a girlfriend, and had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with my life... I was so far away from being an adult. And now - 40 years later - I still often feel that way :-)