HIGH SCHOOL

Judy Dixon, Joyce Thomas, Mary Scriver

Maybe 1954

High school is the institution where I spent years teaching, mostly on the Blackfeet rez but also student teaching in Evanston, IL, and one brief more recent experiment with a white small town school.  It often strikes me how the patterns of high school dominate our lives in terms of politics, status, marketing, and authorities.  We go on through life managing and believing in what we learned as adolescents, including sex.  A misfire in the teens can haunt a person all their lives — but the failure to progress beyond high school as a society might destroy democracy.

Therefore I’ve been thinking about my own high school years and made contact with a friend from the years of transition into high school, which separated us because of class, family, marriage, and education.  J. is the mother of many, Catholic, educated at parochial schools including college, and very involved in business and sports.  Her life has been mostly domestic.  These days she is on oxygen 24/7 but still keeps up with the housework, trailing that feeder tube.  But she wants to claim equivalence with my solitary over-educated life — and she should.  Still, that insistence on “I’m just as good as you” is unsettling.

High school terrified me.  School of any kind terrified me.  I was sure I’d be set upon by mobs and maybe killed.  It was 1953 so that wasn’t what happened, but it had happened to me in the primary grades, except that I wasn’t killed.  I WAS chased and mocked.  I don’t remember my parents interfering — they may not have known.

I got a double message at Jefferson High School in Portland.  One was that I was a nerd (we didn’t have the word then) with Shirley Calhoun, a conservative minister’s daughter; Florence Cameron, a used book family’s daughter; and a few others.  Plain girls with brains.  We were sort of invisible but good students and in those days good students were “tracked” or streamed.  Some of the “popular” (wealthy) girls were in the enriched classes.  I stuck tight to Joyce Thomas, a St. Andrews girl, who was pretty and popular but not rich.  I could not understand algebra without her coaching me.

Melba Day Sparks and me

I was in beginning choir but could not sing and knew it.  When I went to choir class, I passed the door of the dramatics classes and they were far more interesting, so the sophomore year I signed up there.  It was duck meets water.  I was absolutely smitten by the glamour of the teacher, Melba Day Sparks and attached to her instead of any other students, except the three that I walked to school with.  We prided ourselves on not taking the bus for the two mile walk.  When I began to be in plays, I walked the distance at least three and sometimes four times a day.  The last time was rather late at night, so sometimes my mother would come to pick me up.

By this time my mother was attending Portland State and finding her own world opening up.  I was terrified that I would come up short, miss a cue, flunk, get lost, forget to do my homework.  Now and then I had a real meltdown at home.  I never even considered dating.  I had been pressed into taking a ballroom dancing class in eighth grade, but hid in the bathroom the whole time.  I was very awkward in spite of ballet classes earlier and being in the Portland Park Bureau summer pageant.

Today a kid like me would be taken aside for a good listen and a lot of personal attention.  My clumsiness would be addressed with personal coaching, but such a thing — even for athletes — didn’t exist in those days.  I didn’t know how to practice (flubbed piano lessons) and classes were so easy for me that I barely had to study.  But I read so much that I always came out high on standardized tests, which were practically worshipped by the school.  

I didn’t just read books, but also the dozens of magazine subscriptions my father took:  Time, Life, Look, US News and World Report, and the like.  Also, the Police Gazette, which he must have bought on a newsstand and hid behind the clothes hamper because he read it in the bathroom with the door locked.  I never talked to anyone about what I read.  It has shaped my writing, which tends toward long-form journalism without really getting there because of the lack of formal research.

I didn’t know about Atlantic and Harpers, much less The New Yorker — we were not high brow people.  But monthly I walked down to the drugstore on Killingsworth where there was a real marble-countered soda fountain, an array of pinball machines with attendant teen boys sporting ducktails and mocking mouths, and a magazine stand.  As far as my allowance would stretch, I bought McCalls, Lady’s Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and so on.  This meant I knew enough to become the Betty Crocker Homemaker of the Year out of a class of 500.  My mother laughed and laughed, because I’m as bad at housekeeping as she was.  I'd never taken "home ec."

When I began to house-sit for the Sparks (I was considered highly reliable and honest, though knowing myself from the inside, I question that) I read Melba’s magazines:  Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, House Beautiful, House and Garden, Architectural Digest.  These were not high brow — they were wealth-based, but not at the highest levels — just high middle-class.  

My father’s taste in classical music, considered a marker of sophistication, was actually standard sentimental symphonic music, usually Russian like Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky.  I kept KPAM radio on at all times because it was classical music.  In those days I still thought of my father as being sophisticated and knowledgeable.  As I grew more worldly, he became ordinary.  I never considered the issue in terms of my mother.

My ballet fixation persisted and I went to the downtown “big” library where I found the top floor.  One of the best things about it was going up the wide marble stairs and pretending it was a palace in Italy or France.  The ballet books were in French, but I’d stare at the pages in hopes that the little miracle when I could suddenly read English would repeat with French.  There was a bronze statue, table-sized, that I later realized was Malvina Hoffman’s work.  Portland, because of its Boston ties at founding, always valued Beau Arts bronzes and has many monuments in the style.  My family visited them specifically but knew nothing about the artists — just the subjects.  No one has proposed pulling them down.  None are Confederate.

I did a paper on the Commedia dell Arte for dramatics and took the bus over to Reed College to use their library.  Very impressed with the place, I would have loved to attend as a student if it weren’t so close to home.  (I thought of attending the U of Chicago decades later as somehow being equivalent to Reed.)  Reed was mostly presented as being for scandalous eggheads.  I approved.

Zeta Tau Alpha, U of Oregon

At some point the Thespians, which naturally I belonged to rather than the “common” sororities and service clubs, visited the U of Oregon where we had special backstage tours of their stage, a state of the art construction even more cutting edge than the one we had at Jeff.  (Which was itself a professional stage with a light cage, fly gallery, pin rail, real dressing rooms with lights and mirrors  — far nicer than the dank old Civic Center where the Park Bureau extravaganzas were staged.)

What blew me away was not the stage but rather staying in a sorority where the girls were required to sleep on a screen porch en masse in bunk beds, but each had a little study room they shared with a partner.  The whole place was very elegant in a self-consciously Southern elite way with columns on the front veranda and a shrimp pink piano in the main room: I suppose it was a drawing room.  This was far beyond anything in my family knew.  I still remember the smell of the place, somehow perfumed.

When I was in high school plays, I usually acted for comedy, the fat girl or the nutty granny or one of the witches in “Mrs. McThing.”  My senior year I was the Empress in Anastasia, double-cast.  It was meant to be a showcase for Delores Mezyk. our Rose Festival princess who was a star dancer wearing satin corsets, rather English music hall costumes.  (Later she became an ice skating star and teacher.)  I helped write assemblies with skits in them and was even allowed to dance once wearing a “rose” costume that glowed under black light so no one could see the range of skills and size in the dancers.  On the second day I was finally on the Northwestern campus, believing I knew all about theatre, Laurence (then David) Pressman, now a well-known actor, asked me what I thought of the Method and I was totally baffled.  Never heard of it.

“Dramatics” became my family in high school and even though the tightest groups dispersed after each production, we were still loosely together as the drama department.  I had two other loyalties: one was to English class, esp. writing, though none of my teachers really knew much about literature or writing, and the neighborhood Presbyterian Church, which was narrow and self-important as any small town congregation.  The minister was a bigot, who resented the Chinese family next to the church.  Pearl Lee was and remains a close friend, though we hardly understand each other.  It’s a declaration more than an experience.  

I was comforted by my touch-and-go relationship with St. Andrews, the Cathedral Catholic church a few blocks away.  My earlier devotion to fairy tales gave me a medieval understanding of what church should be, more of a parish understanding (a parish is based on an area) than an allegiance to a church which developed when Protestants separated.  When my thinking moved into the Fifties political segue between science and social justice, the Catholics were a great comfort to me.  I thank my lifelong friend, Judy (Julie) for this.  

But it puts me into a tension between what I am now and what I rejected.  My operating theory is that of a mechanic:  save all the pieces.  But also an inventor -- what if. . . ?