CHAPTER 65
Choices of educational pursuits at NORCO were pretty much the same as at Downingtown. I had come close to flunking the Academic curriculum at Downingtown, so since my parents had made it clear that college was out of my future anyway, I decided I needed to follow a more practical course of study.
There was Agriculture, but I had no interest in farming. There was General, but this was where the potential drop-out boys in their leather jackets and switchblade knives went. That is a bit unfair; boys interested in Mechanical Drawing and certain other of the trades would take this course. General was still basically a catchall, though. It was only open to boys. (Actually, they finally did away with the name General and called this course of study Industrial Arts.) The equivalent choice for girls was Home Making, sometimes called Home Economics or HomeEc. This left Commercial. My friend Ronald was taking Commercial at Downingtown. It would prepare you for business, thus this seemed the reasonable choice. I wasn’t overly fond of a future working in an office, but I was less interested in the other choices.
I reported to Homeroom 16 and a Mrs. Pennypacker (right) where I
received my class schedule. I showed up to my first period subject after that. I walked into the room and what I saw was a sea of female faces. I was the only boy in the school who took Commercial. They had designed this course to teach girls to be secretaries, not to teach boys how to be businessmen. Downingtown had actually made some separate designations within Commercial. There was Clerical Practices, Bookkeeping and Secretarial. NORCO went with Commercial, and that really meant Secretarial with maybe a bit of bookkeeping tossed in. When they built the new school they renamed this as Business Education.
After the teasing and bullying that I had been through in Downingtown I didn’t need this. I knew very well what would be my reception around school as the only boy in a girls’ curriculum. I wasn’t going to set myself up for more ridicule if I could help it. I marched right out the classroom door down to the school office and changed my selection to Academic.
Later I thought, “Larry, that was stupid. You would have been the only boy among ALL those girls.”
(These last two photos were the actual Commercial classes Norco, 1958)
I might have switched to Academic from Commercial, but there was one Commercial course I selected as my elective, typing. I had been hunting and pecking at my old Underwood since the day I received it. I used it so much I thought I should learn how to type properly.
I reported for my first typing class. I wasn’t the only boy, not that
there were a lot of we males in the room, but there were a couple more than me. The teacher, Mrs. Machamer, (pictured both left and right) said the class was four typewriters short. She called out four names, including mine.
“You four have been transferred to Art, but only for a semester,” she assured us. “Next semester you’ll come to typing and these pupils will take Art.” That was her promise.
It didn’t happen. When I protested to the office after the mid-terms I was told, “Oh no, Typing and Art are both full year courses.”
I never have learned to touch type.
effort. I was filling in time until I went back to Typing, not realizing I never
would. When I didn’t, I was angry all over again. I had Louis Gaston (pictured left and known as Gas Can) as an art teacher, but he left no impression upon me that year. I wasn’t too bad at drawing, but I just coasted earning a C in every single marking period and a C in the Midterm. That is seven straight Cs in Art, but my final grade was a B. Now how is that possible?
I would say it wasn’t. I got an A in the Final Exam. That final must have counted for a big percentage of the grade, because I would have averaged my marks out to a 2.33, which would be a C plus. Mr. Gaston averaged them out as a B.
(Picture on the left is one of my sketches: Horse Study #3. Righ is one I called “The Racer”; Above is a“Face Study”)
I had an overall grade for Tenth Grade of 2.33, which as we’ve seen equates to a C plus. That is still an improvement over Ninth Grade at Downingtown where I barely passed with a D average. I would have gotten a B for Tenth Grade, but Algebra II pulled me down. I finished with another D in my nemesis subject. I had pretty much given up on Math. I figured I just couldn’t do it. Art, English and U.S. History were my best subjects.
I had my homeroom Teacher for English. Mrs. Ruth Pennypacker (pictured left) reminded me of the characters that the actress Marion Lorne always played, a bit of a fidgety gibbet. She was another teacher with difficulties in controlling her class. Despite the distractions of misbehavior about, I actually improved over the year in English. I had straight Cs the whole first half of the year, but then all Bs the second half. Mrs. Pennypacker assigned short story writing in the second half of the year. I wrote a tale called, “Rescue” about a hiker who is trapped on the side of a cliff overnight. It had a twist ending. I got an A on my story and that helped me bring up my second half mark.
“Look, Arthur, do you see the face? That’s the Man-in-the-Moon who watches over sleeping children during the night.”
He squinted at the bright circle. It had dark spots, mountains on the moon. If they were looked at that way there was no face to be seen. The image was all in the mind. But the light of the moon was real and it fell into the open gorge onto the rocks jutting from the cliff sides. The pale light twisted the rock into shapes and it was very beautiful inside the canyon.
Art sighed. His right leg pained. He shifted weight to the other leg, which eased the hurt. In a short time his left leg began to pain more than he could bear. He inched down, pressing against the wall, and got to a seated position with his feet dangling over the edge. He swung his feet back and touched the hard wall beneath him. He could tell from this touch that it was very solid and he smiled briefly. This meant there was less danger of another cave-in.
He shut his eyes. The noisy scene crashed back in his mind; the sudden cracking, the tumbling rock bouncing against the peaked boulders below and the tearing of the path from the wall, chunk by chunk, coming in his direction, stopping just short of where he stood wide-eyed. Inches, a few last inches between his life and his death. He had watched it go, broken stones and pieces of gravel, falling into the crevice. Rocks flying into the river, forming rings and subtle splashes that were quickly washed smooth. Another few inches and it would have carried him with it. The thought was cold and he shivered.
‘God, my God my God, I can’t get up.”
Excerpt from “Rescue”. written in 1956
Owen J. Roberts High
1968
Agnes Manser, Editor
Bucktown, Pa
Found in my collection Sins of the Sons, (1962)
I had Margery Kelz (pictured right) was the new unlucky teacher who attempted to make me understand Algebra II. I already stated how poorly I did. I don’t even remember anything about this teacher, except she was sort of pretty. I know I was totally floundering in that subject. My foundation was weak coming in and if you don’t learn the basics in Algebra I, then you are over your head in Algebra II. I don’t even know how I kept from flunking. She must have had a kind heart. Of course due to my prior experience at Downingtown I did not approach her asking for help.
I had young Mr. Robert Heinbach for U. S. History. He was on his first job fresh out of teacher’s college. He wasn’t very tall and he looked like a high school student himself. He tried to be one as well. Instead of establishing authority he tried to be “one of the guys”. He would hang around with some of the boys before and after class and ask who were the “easy girls”. Was that really something a teacher should do?
I was doing pretty well in History until the fourth and fifth marking periods. I don’t know what happened. I had an incomplete for the fourth. I see I was absent four days in the fourth and two in the fifth. I probably missed a test at the end of the fourth period or missed doing all my homework. Maybe I had the flu. I got a D in the fifth and then I went back to the Bs I was getting earlier in the year.
Biology was my favorite subject that year. I am disappointed I got
a C for it. My grade average was 2.5, which I think should have given me a B. I had straight Bs for the final marking periods and the Final Exam. I really respected the teacher, Mr. Allyn Brown. Everybody did. He was sort of like Mr. D at Downingtown, except in the end he sold out for more money and went elsewhere for the next year. He made the class interesting and took an interest in his students. In the spring he had us to his home for a cookout and he took the class to the Audubon Bird Sanctuary on a field trip. It is a shame the school lost him after 1957-58. Pottstown’s Hill School, a very prestigious private institution, lured him away. Hollywood people like Franchot Tone’s kids went to the Hill School.
Foreign Languages have never been my forte. I flunked Latin and here I was essai d’apprendre le francais. I wasn’t looking forward to the experience. Mr. Stewart Elliott (pictured left) was another teacher with control problems, but he really liked me. I figured it was because I was never a troublemaker in school, but from what I saw in future years I wonder if there wasn’t another agenda going on with him. I ended up with a C for the year, but it is my own fault. I got a D on the final exam after scoring Bs and As all year long. Frankly, those marks strike me as inflated. Mr. Elliott also gave me excellent in Cooperation, Integrity, Responsibility, Seriousness of Purpose, Concern for Others and Politeness. Really, was I such a saint?
Norco didn’t give grades for Physical Education. You were either
satisfactory or unsatisfactory. I was satisfactory (obviously the bar was set fairly low). The Gym Teacher was an ex-Marine drill Instructor and he didn’t run gym much different than boot camp, except he didn’t use cuss words or call us maggots. He sometimes called us “girls”. His name was Louis Buckwalter (pictured right) and he didn’t take any nonsense from anyone.
Mr. Buckwalter was a scary dude
on first blush. He was the complete opposite of Mr. White at Downingtown. Mr. White was fairly soft spoken and easy going. Of course, Mr. White usually turned the gym classes over to the student teachers from West Chester State and they all seemed to be short guys with Napoleonic Complexes. Mr. Buckwalter was not short. He was at least six foot. He had a trim, solid body, a Joe Friday haircut and a D.I.’s disposition. He wasn’t above yelling at you or utilizing ridicule. Yet he seemed to know which kids responded well to that approach and which didn’t. He knew when to employ encouragement or praise. He would demand you make an effort, but he could recognize when you did. He had student teachers, too, but he seldom let them run the show.
I still didn’t like group showers or being on the skin team, which was where I usually ended up. I was close to my adult height, but below the average in weight for my age group and embarrassed by my thinness. I was thinner now than in Junior high. I still sucked at basketball and that was never going to change. I just couldn’t get onto the fowl rules. I would be called for a double dribble or traveling (I still don’t know what the heck traveling was). I could hit the net from almost anywhere on the floor; unfortunately, it would too often be the wrong net.
I was doing well in most other gym activities. I wasn’t being made
fun of so I was slowly losing my fear of it happening. Team captains weren’t picking me last (except basketball, nobody wanted me on their basketball team, including me). I was even above average in some activities. I was good at tumbling and track and field events involving running and jumping. I did very well at the high jump. I didn’t do well in things
using a lot of upper body strength, especially equipment. I wasn’t bad on the pommel horse at all. (Pictured right is the pommel horse from The Rocky Horror Show.) I got by somewhat on the parallel bars, but I was very poor on the horizontal bar and rings. I couldn’t pole vault worth a darn either. For those younger people out there, pole vaulters in the 1950s were very muscular through the shoulders, chest and arms as opposed to the leaner vaulters of today. In those days the pole had very little give to it. It didn’t flex or bend where the vaulter could use it to
fling him or her self over the bar (pictured left). It was a stiff pole that the vaulter literally pushed off of with upper body strength (pictured right, Bob Richards, U.S. Olympic Champion).
I’ll do a little editorializing here. They should be two classes of pole-vaulting in the Olympics today, straight pole and flex pole. It isn’t fair to
measure the stars of fifty years ago with those of today. Today’s competitors use a pole far different and more flexible than past stars like Bob Richards you can’t compare the two. Robert Eugene Richards (left) was the only two-time Gold Metalist in pole vault. He later became a minister. He even ran for President in 1984. As far as I know he is was alive at age 94 in 2021.
In the summer between Ninth and Tenth
Grade I had send away for a package called, “The Art of Self-Defense”. It purported to be designed by a bunch of big name sports stars who would teach any kid how to be more physically fit and how to fight. The preponderance of named stars were boxers, Ezzard Charles (pictured right), Willy Pep, Joe Lewis, Tony Zale, Sugar Ray Robinson and Rocky Marciano. There were stars from all major sports, though. I remember Mickey Mantle and Stan Musial were two from baseball, and I believe Doak Walker
was one of the football stars (pictured right).
It came in a large, green portfolio. There were these “Life Magazine” sized booklets. They were mostly on boxing. There was one on the rules and one on the history of boxing. There were individual booklets on how to
execute the left hook, the uppercut, the jab and the right cross. I did practice these instructions faithfully that year, even training with a jump rope.
I was more interested in the conditioning program that was included. This is where the other stars supposedly designed it. You had a booklet listing several different calisthenics. There was this cardboard wheel. It had various sports listed as pie pieces on the outer edge. You turned a smaller wheel, attached in the middle by a rivet, until this cutout portion was over the sport of your choice. The recommended exercises for that sport appeared in the cutout.
You got a chart to list your exercises and show your weekly
progression in reps. For instance, you might start with 5 pushups. Each week you would note how many more pushups you could do. It also had a chart where you wrote down your body measurements at the beginning: neck, bicep, forearm, wrist, shoulders, chest, waist, hips, thigh and
calf. My bicep was 13 inches around when I began doing these exercises. I got it up to 17 ½ inches. One problem I had was my body type. I have freakishly long arms. Once when I had a suit altered, the tailor yells over to another tailor, “Hey, Joe, come here and look at these arms!” Did you ever feel like a sideshow display? My arms tended to look like pipe stems no matter how much muscle. (Pictured left, my more recent arms.) My wrists were seven inches around, but also seven inches long. Despite my faithfulness to this program, my body still remained skeletal.
During the year Mr. Buckwalter held a contest. Everybody had to
do certain exercises as long as they could until only one was still able to do it. Ray Ayres won it for push-ups. I won it for sit-ups. I could do a lot of sit-ups. (A few decades later my son won in a sit-up contest in Cub Scouts.)
It was during Gym I became friends with Ray Ayres (pictured right). Ray was a jock. In fact, he was a jock’s jock, he was that good. At Downingtown, Jocks were those who would have pulled my shorts down or stole my underwear. Ray was not of that sort. He was an overachiever in everything. He was outstanding in every sport he attempted. He was an honor roll student. He was popular with girls, who considered him “cute” if not handsome. They only place I outdid him was being six feet tall to his five foot six.
We had a gym class, I don’t remember what the activity was that day, but I didn’t do particularly well in whatever it was. After the period, Ray came up to me when I was dressing and he told me what I was doing wrong. He wasn’t making fun of me; he was helping me. He gave me advice on what to change so I would do better. Next thing you know, Ray’s my best friend in Norco.
I was beginning to have a best friend for every occasion. I was a best friend with Ray Ayres at school. I was a best friend with Richard Wilson at home. I was still best of friends with Ronald and Stuart in Downingtown. The odd thing is they almost never met or intermingled.
There was one thing that happened that year in gym, which annoyed me no end. In July 1956 President Dwight Eisenhower had launched the “Presidential Physical Fitness Test.” The government mandated the test throughout the high schools in the United States. Every kid was tested and the percentage of success for each individual exercise was published as well as the overall percentage of those who passed every one. A student teacher administered the test to us. He walked around with a clipboard on which he checked pass or fail on each exercise. I passed every single one until the very last and there he marked me as failed. This was a leg raise. You raised your legs at a forty-five-degree angle and held them there for a certain amount of time. I did this, but he marked me fail because I had my legs apart instead of my feet together. I had misheard his instructions. Frankly, I think it is more difficult that way because you aren’t supporting your one leg with the other. I offered to do it again properly, but he wouldn’t let me. I could have done it. It angered me because I passed that darn test.
Tenth Grade remains a bit misty in my mind. I think it was because nothing particularly outstanding happened bad or good. With the exception of Ray Ayres, and that happened late in that year or possibly early in Eleventh Grade, I didn’t make any other real friends. I didn’t make any enemies either. No one hassled me or teased me. I didn’t do spectacularly in my classes, but I improved greatly over Ninth Grade and I had no trouble with any of my teachers. In fact, two of my teachers were very encouraging and nice to me, Mr. Brown and Mr. Elliott.
I also knew whom to avoid.
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