I wrote this letter to my grandma (Votaw) during Junior High school. She must have been away on vacation. Getting my “ears lowered” was my dad’s term for a haircut – I thought it was pretty funny.
This was the cover of the program for my first-ever graduation ceremony (my name is on the inside). This event happened when I graduated from 8th grade.
This is a picture of our Junior High class at church when I was in the 8th grade. On the back it says “Mildred’s last junior high group” but she’s not in the picture. I’m in the front row on the left, next to my cousin Daryl who has his arms folded. My dad was probably taking the picture; my mom is near the upper right corner. They took over leadership of the group. Other adults who helped were Bud & Marge Markel (in the upper corners) and Howard and Catherine Weed (next to Bud Markel). All of us boys wore white shirts and skinny ties.
After completing the 6th grade at Ocean View, I started 7th grade in 1964 at East Whittier Junior High School. In our district, junior high was grades 7 and 8; we never heard the term “middle school.” East Whittier School was two blocks from our house on Davista Drive, so I just walked down there every day.
Junior High school was for me (as it is for a lot of kids) a significant turning point in life. I found out some subjects that I liked and some I didn’t; I found out what I was good at and what I wasn’t; and I found faith in Jesus as my Savior. Quite a bit for two years.
Academically, I discovered that I liked math. I had a good teacher, and I picked it up quickly. I discovered that I hated P.E. I was slow, and uncoordinated, and unable to do well at most physical activities. It was very hard for me to figure out how to do a lot of the physical stuff. My teacher was verbally abusive; he would yell at me and ridicule me in front of the class for being slow and incapable. The other boys would laugh.
I joined the boys’ chorus and enjoyed that a lot. During my two years in the chorus, I progressed from 1st tenor to 2nd tenor to baritone and finally to bass. I remember that we sang sea shanties (“What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?”) and folk songs (“Lemon Tree”).
Junior High was my first experience with class periods and changing classes and teachers during the day. We had one period each day that was devoted to hands-on classes. The type of class changed through the year; I think that each class was about 7 weeks long. Assignments to classes were unashamedly sexist; girls went to sewing and cooking classes, and boys went to things like wood shop and metal shop.
I was hopelessly bad in those shop classes; the teacher was as patient with me as he could be and didn’t ridicule me like the P.E. teacher did. He had to give me a lot of help or I never would have got anything done. (I remember that he sighed a lot.) Another one of those classes was drafting; we had tilted drafting tables, and used tools like compass, protractor, t-square and triangle to draw our “plans.” It was kind of fun, but I never took another drafting class.
Another feature of junior high school was dancing class. My parents loved dancing, so they encouraged me to do it even though I didn’t really want to. I found that I was as bad at dancing as I was at P.E. – just didn’t really have the physical coordination to get my body to follow instructions. I finally mastered the waltz step, if it was a slow song, and found a girl that was willing to put up with me as a dance partner. But I couldn’t do any other steps, and never took another dance lesson.
East Whittier School had a large auditorium with theater-style seating and a projection booth behind the back wall. For history classes we often went in there to watch movies. I joined the “audio-visual club” and that qualified me to run the movie projector in the back – which was a lot more fun than watching the movies. These were 16mm film projectors, with sound (great big heavy things). We had to put the reel on the projector, thread the film through the sprockets and behind the projector lens, and attach it to the take-up reel. If anything went wrong with the projector during the movie, we’d have to fix it and get the movie started again.
In my eighth-grade year they combined all of the eighth-grade classes into one for the history class – we had to meet in the school cafeteria – to teach us about Russia and the rising menace of Communism. These were the Cold War years, of course. We learned all about what life is like in Russia, the evils of Communism and the danger it presented to America. I learned a new word: “propaganda”.
At church, the Junior High department was in transition. My grandparents had been the leaders of that department for more than ten years, and it had a wonderful reputation. But now Grandad was gone, and Grandma didn’t want to continue leading it on her own. My parents eventually became the leaders. There were other adults who were helpers, and they must have provided the continuity during my years. I remember being elected “president” in my 8th grade year, even though I didn’t want that role. I don’t think it meant much of anything; I remember telling my mom that my only qualification was that I was there every week.
One of the adults who helped out in the Junior High department was Lucy Davidson, the wife of our church organist. She would lead us in singing hymns from our children’s hymnal every week. She also led four children’s choirs: Cherubs (grades 2-3), Carolers (grades 4-6), Junior Hi (grades 7-8) and High School (grades 9-12). She had lots of patience and was so enthusiastic in her love for the music and the kids that it was contagious. I sang in all of her choirs through my years in that church. She taught us how to read our parts and sing harmony (I sang alto when I was in Carolers).
My parents had tried to get me involved in kids’ groups such as scouts and YMCA but had no success; I didn’t like those groups (it was hard to make friends with anyone) and I did not want to go to their summer camps. In the summer of 1965, between 7th and 8th grade, they sent me to Quaker Meadow Camp. I don’t know why – it was an unlikely choice, but perhaps it was the only place they could think of to send me. It was a pivotal decision, one that altered the direction of my life. Eventually it affected the rest of the family as well. But that’s a story for another chapter.
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