I Somehow Survive What Used to Be Called Junior High School: Part 1

Santa Monica Pier, 1961.

One’s first few days at Orville Wright Junior High School, the first institution of lower learning north of what at the time wasn’t yet called LAX, were days of wall-to-wall terror. It was customary for upperclassmen to attack new inmates with pieces of chalk they’d swiped from their various classrooms, and to write disparaging identifiers on their backs. What a tizzy our instructors were in that first week, unable, as they were, to write on the blackboards! Their pedagogy cruelly thwarted!

OWJHS was in the middle of a community that, almost certainly for financial gain, had repudiated antisemitic housing covenants years before, with the result that maybe one in five of us was Jewish. If we stooped to pick up the pennies our gentile classmates would roll toward us in the various corridors, we were confirmed as Christ-killers. (It is imperative to bear in mind that one cent in 1960 would be worth $8.46 in 2025.) On the High Holy Days (unobserved at the Mendelsohns’ (Ma and Pa preferred the original, legal spelling)), there were nearly as many empty desks as filled ones in many classrooms. As per Los Angeles Unifieid School District policy, such an absence was attributed to an Urgent Personality Necessity.

“Right,” many a resentful young gentile scholar was heard to observe, “like they needed to take a shit or sump’n’.”

Somehow the Los Angeles Unified School District had come to believe that, while their female counterparts were learning to bake cakes and fold laundry in Home Economics, boys should learn to grow their own radishes. I am all thumbs, none of them green, and I got a C, but also a lovely bag of radishes planted by some poor devil in the preceding semester. I was a lot better at agriculture than I was at wood, electric, or metal shop. I adored print shop.

Speaking of money, there was no spectacle quite like that of [first name not remembered] Espinosa, a gigantic chicano boy buying himself a submarine sandwich every morning for 35 cents ($112.96 in 2025) for Nutrition, a little break between second and third periods during which those who’d recklessly neglected to eat The Most Important Meal of the Day could keep their blood sugar at a level ordained by the LAUSD. My guess is that Mr. Espinosa paid for his daily feat of gluttony with funds extorted from smaller classmates. No one at the school, including the teachers, wasn’t smaller. I never gave him a nickel, not because I was brave, but because I had learned to make myself invisible both to pretty girls and to bullies. I wasn’t sure which terrified me more.

Ah, the teachers. Just short of 100 percent of them should never have been allowed to open their mouths in the hearing of impressionable young people. One day in Algebra, Mr. Robinson, who, halfway through the semester, didn’t lack for chalk, turned his back on us and drew a circle on the blackboard so near to perfect that both he and everyone in the class gasp. In less enlightened times, I think he might have been adjudged a witch.

My homeroom teacher was Mrs. Balch. I have never known anyone whose surname suited him or her more perfectly.

The PE coaches, former Hitler Youth Rall and Heydenreich, reveled in intimidation. One didn’t “change” (into his shorts and T-shirt) for PE. Rather, one was understood to “strip” for it. Exactly what a shy 13-year-old needed to be told! There was much pretending to be soldiers, standing first at atten-hut! in straight lines, and then, if we were lucky, at ease. Get ‘em while they’re young!

At the time, many surfers lightened their hair with peroxide. Herr Heydenreich informed us that this was a definite sign of incipient homosexuality. I was hopeless at gymnastics, and got out of them because of notes from home about a succession of imagined physical ailments. I could climb up a rope, slowly, but not the fucking steel pole.