1 School daze
First grade started badly. I’m told I spent my initial days staring out the classroom window, leading my teacher to conclude that I was retarded. Fortunately, she asked Mrs. Boyle, who the year before had been my sister’s first-grade teacher, whether Huey family had academic challenges. Mrs. Boyle suggested that I was probably just bored as she knew that my sister always shared her lessons with me when she came home from first grade. So I already knew how to read, write, add, and subtract – and how to stare out windows.
By great luck, Mrs. Boyle was teaching another first-grade class, but this one was for kids too young to start first grade the previous year and thus had to enroll in “junior first.” They were roughly ½ years older than I was, already had one year of in-person teaching, and thus were chronologically and academically advanced by my standards. Mrs. Boyle invited me to join her class. I did. Suddenly I had to work to catch up and to ignore windows.
A few kids in her class were exceptionally smart, which made the class even more challenging. Mike McConnell was brilliant and later graduated Valedictorian at Dartmouth.
Mrs. Boyle herself was an excellent teacher and person. She had a science background and delighted to show us us simple scientific demonstrations. Luckily, she decided to teach us again for the second grade. Mrs. Boyle jump-started and enlivened my first two years of formal education. I was lucky.
Most of elementary school is a blur. I did well in classes but was never at the very top of my class. Mike and a few others were always there.
Junior high (7th through 9th grade) is also a blur. Kids from two elementary schools merged. Dave Campbell was the key addition. Later in high school, Dave was Student Body President, captain of the cross country team, National Merit Scholar, etc. He later graduated summa cum laude (B.A. in Chemistry and Physics) at Harvard and earned a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and worked with Stephen Hawking. By any standard, Dave was an all-around superstar. Being in classes with him and Mike in junior high and high school reinforced my self-opinion that I although I was smart, I was not elite smart. Nevertheless, growing up with such off-scale smart and successful friends was a gift, as later in life I was rarely intimidated by smart and successful people. In fact, I instinctively sought out opportunities to be with them. Why? They are always interesting.
A few teachers were memorable, especially Mr. Glenn, who taught an accelerated algebra plus geometry class in 9th grade. He made us work but made math (especially geometry) challenging and fun for me.
My most striking memory from junior high was unrelated to academics. On rainy days, our gym classes moved inside to a basketball court, where we played a game called “bombardment,” which is similar to “dodgeball”. We would split into two groups and then violently throw rubber balls at each other. I loved bombardment; it was faster and more exciting than traditional team sports. However, one boy always sat quietly and alone in the bleachers. He was a pacifist. For him, ‘bombardment’ symbolized war. He refused to play.
At the time, I thought this kid was decidedly odd – hey, bombardment (despite its name) was just a game and not symbolic of war. Years later I realized that he was the first of my contemporaries to take an independent and moral stand. We were at an age when most of us (me included) made decisions (e.g., dress, hairstyle, music) based on strict conformity to some arbitrary standard. I never knew that boy’s name, but I have often wondered who he was and what happened to him. Was he an independent thinker or merely following his parent’s wishes? I will never know, and it does not matter. What does matter is that he introduced me to the concept of developing and maintaining a personal ethic. It did take me a few years to recognize that lesson – and to appreciate it.
For high school, I attended Long Beach Polytechnic (10th and 11th grade only). I was on the C-basketball team (small guys) and varsity gymnastics (good enough to compete in “floor exercise,” but not to place).
I did well in classes. Miss Barbara McMichael was my 10th-grade English teacher. She treated us as adults, which was a first.
The following summer, I joined my classmate Denis Morel and his mother on a tour of colleges up the California coast. I did not like Stanford’s campus, but I immediately felt at home at UC Berkeley’s. Denis and I walked all over campus, hiked up into Strawberry Canyon, and rambled through the Botanical Gardens. We both imprinted on Berkeley and both ended up going to college there.
Back at Poly for my junior year, Denis and I ran into Miss McMichael. We knew she had been an undergrad at Berkeley, and we told her how much we had enjoyed the campus, especially the Botanical Gardens. She blushed and was briefly silent. Then she mentioned that she and her date had sneaked into those Gardens one night and that both had ended up covered with nasty rashes from poison oak.
I realized that she was confessing – if discretely – that she and her date had had sex in the Gardens. This was a personal story, but she must have trusted us. But what I did not realize at the time was that she was gay. That was something not even she could reveal to us in 1961.
Sadly, she died a few years later of cancer. She cared for her students. She treated us with respect. We learned English (literature and grammar). I miss her.
In many ways, Poly was a great high school (“Home of Scholars and Champions”). But in my junior year, I was ready to move on, even though this meant that I’d miss my senior year. In 11th grade, I applied to be a foreign exchange student in Germany and to attend to Deep Springs College (see Chapter 5), where most entering students had skipped their senior years in high school. I was admitted to both but chose to go to Deep Springs rather than Augsberg (Bavaria). My life undoubtedly would have been very different had I chosen Augsberg, but I have zero regrets that I chose Deep Springs.