Travis put up a post on his blog about his High School, so I thought I’d add a comment, it’s always nice to have comments, well it got kinda long and I still had more to say, so I decided to put my “comment” and finish my thoughts here.

Sylmar High School

Wish I could say that school had been so easy for me! It wasn’t, in retrospect I wish I had just been paying attention, that would have made it easier. I was terrified of going to Junior High. We lived in Sun Valley in ’66. So I went to Sun Valley Jr. High. The town was not the scary place it is now, there were some bad areas but on the whole it was a fairly nice town, but the kids from the bad areas went to the school and all summer the older kids on the block talked about getting “scrubbed” on the first day of JH, and how the Chicano girls had razor blades in their hair (those were the days of the ‘beehive’ hairdos). My girlfriend Elizabeth was so excited and happy to be going into JH, I cried and begged my mom to not make me go…she told me to, “stop your crying and get out of the car” (I can’t remember now why she had driven us to school, we only got a ride to school if it was pouring down rain and then only if it was Friday and she had the car for grocery shopping).

Trying to remember my locker combo without having to look at a piece of paper was nerve-raking, If you couldn’t just turn, turn, turn and open, everyone would see you didn’t know the combo and you were a “scrub”, but if you didn’t look at the number you would be late for your next class, at least worrying about opening my locker and getting to my next class on time took my mind off getting “scrubbed”.

Getting scrubbed was having a group of older “cool” kids write/smear all over your face and any other exposed body parts, with dark red lipstick, and then they dumped you into a trash can, so everyone knew, you were NOT “cool”. The picture here is from Sylmar High and she is not really getting scrubbed/trashed, she’s way too happy. My first year of JH, 1966, is when they started letting the girls wear pants, actually carpi’s to school, but only on Fridays. However, I wasn’t allowed to, my father said “young ladies don’t where pants!” I wasn’t able to talk my father into letting me wear pants till I was in High School. Our skirt length could not be higher than 3″ above the knees, the girls dean walked around with a ruler and if she was suspicious your skirt was too high, you had to kneel down and get “measured”. I had to have a special education class for reading, it only took me a semester to improve my reading, no one wanted to be in a “Special Ed” class. The next semester I had Spanish. I didn’t like it much and never took another language class. All the girls had Sewing/Cooking in 7th grade. We made our gym bags in sewing. My gym blouse was white cotton and had to be ironed fresh every Monday and the shorts were black cotton. I also discovered a love of history, I had Mrs. Roth for Ancient Civilization, she brought history alive and I still love history today, even though the rest of my history teachers tried to kill my interest with the memorization of dates. The last time I chewed gum in class was in 7th grade in Mr. Smiths science class, when he caught me he made me stick the gum on my nose and wear it all through class. Science with Mr. Smith, was kinda neat and interesting, I brought home the cows eye we dissected to show mom and dad, they were impressed and then we put it in the garbage disposal to get rid of it, but you would be surprised how muscle there is in an eyeball! I had to go bury it in the back yard. My science partner was Melvin Herliska, a very sadistic JD. He got swats on a regular basis. I don’t think they did any good though, I saw him years later and he was still pretty much a hood. In the summer 1967 my family moved to Sylmar, so I finished JH (7th & 8th grades) at Olive Vista Jr. High. All the P.E. classes participated in a drill/dance/exercise routine which we did to the Hawaii Five-0 theme song. I don’t know why we did this but after practicing for months, when we did our routine, the local news channel was there to film us for posterity, I really was so embarrassed. I “worked” in the office for an elective in the 9th grade. I remember when we got the new electric typewriters! But to use them you had to score fairly high on the typing test. Ceramics was fun, and for some reason I took General Economics for math, I remember this kid that was very political and wore Nixon for president campaign buttons. He and the Mr. McHenry would have these huge debates on what was going to happen if …I was not political at all when I was in school, so I can’t remember what they were talking about. It was 1968 and I remember there was a lot of upheaval I know my dad thought if we were going to be in Vietnam then “we should get in there with both feet”. I have tried to figure out where he was politically, I don’t think he liked Nixon, he really didn’t like Johnson, I have heard that he was an anarchist, I think he liked to argue with people who thought politics was the answer.

In ninth grade I had two girlfriends, Bonnie MacCumber, she was a year behind me and she had a boyfriend a year ahead of me, and Judy Viana, she was in the same grade as me. They were my friends until after the 1971 Sylmar earthquake and Judy’s family moved to Missouri, actually they moved the very morning after the quake, and Bonnie just got more involved with her boyfriend, so Alana Hahn took pity on me and we are still friends today. I this picture was taken at Magic Mountain, we both worked there the first year it opened.
I had Mr. Mullally too, but for 12th grade biology at Sylmar High, he must have moved to the high school at some point since Larry had him at Olive Vista JH in ’63. Maybe he HAD to go to the high school, because he was still a DOM. Today he wouldn’t be able to be like that…us girls knew to keep our distance that’s for sure. One of the only reasons I passed biology was because of Mark Lillenberg, he would give me the answers to the hard questions, again if I’d been paying attention…I know I read all of Love Story in his class. I also tried out for cheer-leading when I was in 11th grade. Candy Stone did too, she said I should try too, she made class cheerleader I didn’t. I froze when I got in front of all the judges (teachers and current cheerleaders) I had practiced and practiced, I’m not sure what the lesson was I learned, I guess just that some things in life just build seemingly unseen character for later in life…whatever. When I got in front of everybody I knew I was in the wrong place, and I thought I would just DIE, but it ended and nobody laughed at me at the 20 year class reunion. My major was Home Economics, guess what I grew up to be? I made a sports jacket for my dad in 12th grade sewing, and that jacket and a dress, which I modeled, was in a fashion show the Home Econ. Dept put on, my dad was so proud of that jacket. He picked out the fabric! It was very “sporty”

Dad was very sick when I made the jacket and this picture was taken, he was probably barely 120 pounds. My last semester of high school I had work experience. I started school at 7:00am with Mr. Jacques for government (e-gads) and ended with Mrs. Woolley for cooking at noonish. That gave me a half hour to get to my job at Farmers Ins Group on Sepulveda in Mission Hills by 12:30. I was so preoccupied with working and my dad’s illness on one particular day, that while we were cooking in class, I sat down at the table while waiting for something to boil or simmer and lit up a cigarette without thinking. Mrs. Woolley just came over quietly and said I needed to put it out. I never went to any of the proms, I was asked once when I was a junior and then I started dating an older guy, I met him at the VA hospital dad was in. I went to a lot of the school dances by myself, sometimes I’d meet up with people I knew, but I found out that if you went alone you would get to dance more. I went to all the football games, home and away games, all through HS, that was a blast.

I hope there are lots of comments to this to get me to remembering the stories, I can’t think of any more right now…

Enjoy school while you can, there is no other time in life when all that is expected of you is to learn, what a golden time!