ALMA MATER

I moved to Valier eight years ago this month, which means that my mother died nine years ago on the 2nd of April -- missing April Fools Day by an hour or so. I’m not quite ready to write about all that, so instead I will write about my high school Alma Mater, from whence I graduated fifty years ago. Hardly seems possible. It was a double graduation as my mother concurrently earned her BS from Portland State University so that she could teach to put me through college, though I had a full-tuition scholarship.

My high school, Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon, was identified by some as one of the ten best high school in the nation. By now it is totally transformed into a struggling dangerous ghetto school. The change didn’t come from within but was imposed by a demographic distribution change forced by WWII ship construction, which meant Kaiser brought in labor from the American South, housed them "temporarily" by the river, and then a major flood destroyed their housing (sound familiar?), so that they moved up into northeast Portland into homes that were sometimes marginal to begin with. Black being a marker for poverty, the South being deeply rural and without an education tradition, and the economy -- once the war was over -- being resistant to jobs for blacks, crime crept into that part of town. In the 1970’s when I went back, the saying among cops and animal control officers was that the largest number of convicted felons in the city was in NE (black) and the largest number of unconvicted felons was in SE (white), cynically meaning that they knew both areas were packed with marginal people but white people were more likely to escape the system. In 1945 when I started walking up Sumner Avenue to kindergarten, no one had a thought about it but by the 1990’s there were black gangs along that street that meant squad cars never responded singly.

Back in the Fifties, Louis Montague was our study body president, a brilliant black man darker than Harry Belafonte and more handsome than Sidney Poitier. We produced a couple of brilliant black military men. (I tried Googling names with no luck.) There were few black faces in my 1954 yearbook but by 1957 one-fifth of the student body was black. Of course they were good athletes. In those years four of we Jeff students (three white, one Chinese) walked to school along Alberta, a distance of a couple of miles. Then I walked back again after supper for rehearsals. If my mother had time and energy, she’d come for me when rehearsals were over about nine or ten, but I often walked home alone and didn’t worry about it. No one bothered me.

In the 1990’s I created a shockwave when I walked up the solidly black Alberta Street. A barber nearly cut his client, who jumped when he saw me. Then there were broad smiles. We waved at each other. By now Alberta has turned the corner and become an “art” street packed with galleries and coffeehouses.

Jefferson in 1953, when I began walking there, was just retiring its post-WWI teachers, mostly gray-haired women of enormous dedication and idealism. Martha Shull, elegant daughter of a lawyer, who became the head of the National Education Association, explained to us that there were three kinds of magazines: pulp, slick and quality. She showed us examples of each, with the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s being her “quality” examples. But it was clear that most of us were “slick” magazine types: Life, Look, Colliers, Time. They pitched success available to all who would work, our obligations as the best nation in the world, and the wonders of science. Art was exemplified by Picasso and Pollock, crazed geniuses who made gold from straw in some mysterious way.

If I’d been a magazine then (and I read Seventeen, my brothers’ Boys Life and Mad, and my father’s Police Gazette -- which he hid behind the clothes hamper in the bathroom) I have no idea what it would have been. I had the equipment to be a straight A student, but chose to be a slantwise, “original,” unexpected person out of laziness, rebellion, and boredom. (No one figured that out.) The yearbook shows that all the girls wore Peter Pan blouses (some heartfelt discussion whether their short sleeves should be ironed with or without a crease) with a little silk scarf tied to make a sort of bowtie. So I wore one of my father’s tartan plaid ties to school, fancying that it looked English. People asked, “Are you pledging or something?”

I joined the drama department, an adjunct to the school housed in a new wing for the arts and run by a troika of artistes: one for band, one for choir, and one for dramatics, which we never called “theatre” and would have spelled “theater.” Melba Day Sparks, a Powers model married to a much older man who took devoted care of her, put in twelve and fourteen hour days to push us through professional quality set-construction and play production. She became a national head of Thespians. There are MANY stories. She attended Northwestern University (which is why I went there) and knew Alvina Krause in her very early years. (Didn’t like her -- thought she was hard.) I became close enough to the Sparks, who were childless, that I babysat their house with its dobermans and huge outdoor cage of finches and nightingales. The house was chartreuse on the outside and very dark dramatic colors inside. That’s where I found House and Garden and House Beautiful magazines, which marked me forever. (This room where I sit is dark grayed-out purple.)

It was thought very important in those years to “track” the gifted into special classes. But somehow girls were always gifted in English and boys were always gifted in science and math, so the two streams were mutually exclusive and English classes became all-female. They drifted along in a hazy way. After all, we’d only get married.

It was also very important to be creative, which meant largely innovative: “original” -- not much attention given to mastery of skills or awareness of what those skills might be. We were a middle American bunch, admiring the exceptional but essentially wary of too much wandering from the normal. Psychology was based on the idea that a person should have a “good personality,” meaning pleasant and going-along -- not necessarily sturdy enough to survive challenges or flexible enough to adapt to different situations. The idea was to avoid those.

I can’t remember anyone slipping into insanity, depression, suicide, drunkenness. My group knew nothing about drugs or crime, or didn’t admit it if they did. Some people simply disappeared. Much later it turned out that many of our faculty members were lesbian (I can’t remember any gay men being identified) which was not reproached or remarked, maybe because it was a practical arrangement for many whose male partners were killed in battle and because they were seen to be affectional rather than erotic relationships. They were lifelong, faithful, calm.

I suppose it seemed a world of great serenity and safety, but I was not fooled. Carlie Gilstrap, the social studies fast-track teacher, had us up at 5AM listening with bated breath to see if Hungary could get its freedom. Some nights I lay awake listening to the big planes flying in and out and wondering which of them had atomic bombs in their bellies. Once I quarreled with my mother (actually we quarreled often and violent enough to scare my little brothers) and threatened to run away. “Ha!” she scoffed. “What would you do for money?”

“I guess there are men who would pay me.”

“You wouldn’t know what to do.”

“I expect they’d be happy to teach me.”

She was genuinely frightened that time. I was, too. When she was the PTA president while I was in grade school, there was a pedophile (we thought there was only one at a time) who hadn’t been caught and the parents had a meeting where a cop came to defend their process. My mother couldn’t find a babysitter, so she took the three of us with a pile of comics and sat us in the back of the auditorium with orders to just read. She had not anticipated that the father of a molested child would be there, become distraught and provide many details we found interesting. There was always lurking danger. My father traveled for a living and my mother kept an automatic pistol in her nightstand.

I never dated through high school or even college. My escort for the Senior Prom was my Presbyterian Sunday School advisor, a sweet young man a bit traumatized by the Korean War.

Now all that is reversed. Crime and perversion seem everywhere from the top down. The beloved mayor of Portland was revealed as sleeping with the teenaged babysitter. One of the county commissioners was known by insiders to be a “chickenhawk.” You know the national scandals. Cops are always suspect. Ministers? Ha.

What we fear now -- what I fear -- is not black gangs or even meth addiction which is everywhere even out here on the prairie -- is disease, even in our food, and economic collapse. Corporations were seen as figures of honor and protection in those days when Ronald Reagen introduced GE Theatre. Now they are seen as almost rogue nations, controlling their own mercenaries and canceling pensions people spent a lifetime earning.

Did my Alma Mater prepare me for all this? Those resourceful gray-headed women knew that the world can turn upside-down in an instant. They had read their history of civilization and had their losses. They were open to people of all kinds, insistent that we could all achieve, and willing to dedicate their lives to other people’s children. What my Alma Mater gave me more than anything else was role models.

It’s not their fault that I didn’t follow their examples.