I can only speak about where I went to school in California in Glendale, before that in Tujunga and before that in El Cajon and Vista.
I didn't find physical survival to be a problem much until I was in Horace Mann Grade School in 3rd Grade. Then it got very scary from then on. However, I remember being in first grade and walking home with a friend and an older boy from my grade school laughed and banged our heads together and made us cry. We each had headaches for a couple of days from this. So, we walked another way home but had to run across a 4 lane highway with cars going 45 to 65 miles per hour and cars screeched their tires and one of our teacher stopped and asked us why we were crossing there. The boy who hurt us got in trouble and we didn't see him in the Grade school anymore after that because the teacher was upset we were almost killed because of what the boy did to us.
Later in 3rd Grade my teacher was having problems and lifted boys up by their ears in my 3rd grade class. She never did this to me because I didn't want to go deaf so I was obedient to her wishes. But, she made many boys cry by lifting them off the ground just by their ears until she was fired as a teacher.
So, this wasn't a good start to my 3rd grade education by watching boys be tortured like this in my class. It terrified us all to have to deal with this.
Later, my 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Krell discovered that I was a writer and read my story in front of class. She was one of the best teachers I ever had in Grade school.
The real problem for me actually was going to Junior High School. In this junior high Wilson junior High School kids were either pretty rich or pretty poor and there was many cultural clicks I didn't understand then because I came from lower middle Class and middle class background and not an upper class on. In the middle Class and lower middle class if you fought with someone you were let into that group and became "one of the gang" if you fought well. But, if you didn't fight well you were rejected and people continued to beat you up from then on. However, there was no entry into the Upper class at all unless you were upper class at this school and this confused me a lot. So, the upper class not only wouldn't fight you they would reject you for being of a different class than they were. So, there was no way at all into upper class groups that had been regimented since these kids were in Grade school. So, I hung out with the Car Clubbers and the Surfers both of which entertwined and to some degree became the same thing at my school. So, if you imagine Grease the movie with John Travolta combined with long haired blonde haired surfers this was the group I gravitated to. However, I was more of a surfer and mountain climber even then. So, though I helped friends build race cars for street racing I wasn't interested in racing other people and dying myself as a driver. I preferred to compete with myself and I like sports where I was excelling by myself like skiing and surfing and mountain climbing and things like this. I really wasn't interested in competitive sports at all but I was interested in anything out of doors that was fun like hiking, swimming, surfing, skiing and riding motorcycles etc.
In junior high there were the worst conflicts of all. So, to avoid fights we had contests where we would hit each other as boys as hard as we could on the shoulder without flinching. So, it was a contest to see who could not flinch or cry when hit as hard as one could with the tip of their knuckle into the opponents upper arm. This was extremely painful and if you could "tough it out" without crying or flinching then people would leave you alone. You took turns hitting each other as hard as you could and "Standing off" until you both agreed you both were "Tough" and were "Men". Once you had been defined to be tough enough to be a man people generally left you alone. However, many boys who weren't big or strong enough would be tortured with their heads in toilets, rolled down the hill in trash cans and not everyone survived this either physically or mentally.
However, I was tough enough and always big for my age so I could convince other boys that if they attacked me I would put them in the hospital, so generally speaking I didn't have to have the really big fights with people arms and legs and heads got broken or where people died sometimes from knife fights etc.
So, being big and strong and willing to demonstrate to people physically that you could kill them or hurt them allowed you not to have problems. You had to never smile in these situations or it was over for you. So, a serious face and not looking away and being willing to put someone else in the hospital kept you okay in most cases unless you were dealing with someone really crazy and self destructive.
So, if you could survive being hit as hard as the other person could into your arm (which brought a black and blue mark on your arm sometimes for weeks with extreme pain) you could avoid having to put someone else or being put in the hospital yourself.
This was what public school was like in Glendale, California from 1956 until I graduated Junior High in 1963. For some reason I didn't have to fight people in High School. Whether this was because people were more grown up or because I was then 6 foot 3 inches tall and eventually 6 foot 4 1/2 inches by age 22 I'm not sure.
No comments:
Post a Comment