Where Were You in High School?
Joe: Where was I? Toledo, Ohio. St. Francis de Sales High School, class of ‘62.
Fern: I guess what I really wanted to write about is who were you in high school? Would we have been friends?
Joe: Well, we’d have to meet first, and that would have been unlikely since mine was a Catholic all-boys school. We met girls--Catholic girls from Toledo’s three all-girls Catholic high schools -- at Friday night sock hops in the gym. People like to satirize religious excess, but the priests and brothers really did monitor the school dances--especially during slow numbers—making sure that close-dancers backed off a bit to “leave room for the Holy Ghost.”
Fern. I was in an all-white suburban high school with Jewish, Italian and Irish kids whose families had left Brooklyn and The Bronx. I loved high school. Well, the social part. I didn’t do too well academically.
I threw out my high school diaries when we moved from the old house. When I read them again, I thought: Was I really that girl? Boy crazy. Superficial. I always wrote about what I wore that day. And how my hair looked. I set it on orange juice cans to attain a perfect flip.
Perhaps I was deeper than that and just assuming the persona of a popular teenage girl. My most favorite class was creative writing. The first story I ever had published (about my immigrant grandfather who lived with us in the suburbs) was in the high school creative writing magazine. My teacher said it made him cry!
Did you write in high school?
Joe: A lot. The usual essays for English and History and Religion, of course. The closest we had to “creative” writing was the ten-line theme. Every day we had to turn in a new “ten-line theme.” Not only did it have to be interesting and “come to something” but if it went over or under exactly ten lines you had to go rewrite it. I came to learn that you could be pretty creative in exactly ten lines. But I still have a callous on my second knuckle middle finger from writing with a pen.
Fern: I didn’t study much, but I read books all the time. One time we were going to discuss a novel in English class and I was absent. My teacher, Mr. Columby, was as casual a teacher as I was a student. (His “real” job he told us was being an agent for the jazz great, Thelonious Monk.) My friend Carol told me that when Mr. C saw I was absent, he gave the class a study hall.
But high school was mostly for the social life. I was in the popular crowd. All my friends were cheerleaders. They were on the yearbook staff. All of them were in the honors track. There were “tracks” in high school. Academic track for the kids who were going to college. Commercial track for the (girls) who were going to secretarial or “beauty” school, boys who were going to be mechanics or truck-drivers. Academic track was divided into A (honors) and B (average kids who were going to college.) I was the only one among my high school crowd who was in B track. I hung around with the smart kids but I wasn’t in any classes with them.
Joe: You were smart. You just didn’t study.
Fern: My goal was to finish all the homework I had in study hall so I didn’t have to take any books home.
Joe: I didn’t have a single study period in all four years at St. Francis. Two to four hours of homework per night was not unusual. All I did was homework.
Fern: My sophomore year, I was on the girls’ basketball team. This was only because the girls’ team was composed of the girlfriends of the boys on varsity basketball. Today – in the time of Caitlin Clark -- this seems unbelievable. And it wouldn’t be so even many years ago in Iowa.
I made one basket the entire season. That was because I had the ball when an actually athletic girl on the other team came toward me. Scared, I threw the ball up in the air and somehow made a basket.
The coach was laughing so hard that she called a time out.
Joe: I spent part of the first year in high school on crutches because of hip surgery. So by the time I started my sophomore year I was walking okay, but I was developing into a pretty reserved, very shy person. Then Father Dean, my English teacher (who was also director of the school plays) announced that the Fall production would be Stalag 17. I’d seen the movie and loved it. I asked him if I could try out to be on the crew.
Fern: The roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd!
Joe: Exactly. Father Dean suggested I try out for an acting part. He’d heard me read aloud in class and thought I might have an ear for delivering lines. It was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: I was still that shy guy, but not on stage. On stage I turned into a real ham. By my senior year I was playing leading roles. Here’s a picture of me as the villain in 12 Angry Men.
Fern: My friend, Barbara said it would be good to have some extra-curricular “activities” on my school resume when we applied for college, so I joined a group of volunteers called “candy-stripers,” high school girls who schlepped carts and delivered flowers, candy and cards to patients in the local hospital. Some of the girls wanted to be nurses (never doctors). Not me. I was squeamish at the sight of blood. But I thought the uniforms we wore were cute.
On my very first day, I walked into the hospital room of an older man who pulled back the covers and asked me for the urinal. That was also my last day.
Joe: There you are, seated second from the left, a cute blonde girl in a candy-striper outfit. Be still my heart. My best chance at meeting you in high school would’ve been to get myself hospitalized. I think you would’ve liked me.
Fern: I would have.
Joe: But maybe just as friends.
Fern: Yes, as friends.
You know, high school girls have notoriously bad judgment when it comes to boys: the football heroes, the bad boys in fast cars, the brooding boys who have anger at the world, the boys whose sense of entitlement encourages unfaithfulness.
Joe: That was not me.
Fern: But it might describe the ex-husbands of many women.
I went to one of my high school reunions after I had been divorced and had lost a child. A girl I knew came up to me and said sadly, “Oh, and you were always such a happy girl.”
I believe that happy girl is still me. Seasoned, perhaps. Wiser. And grateful. In part it’s because I’m growing old with someone who really gets me. And someone I trust.
Joe: It’s nice to go down memory lane with you. It’s also good to write something that isn’t about politics today. And that doesn’t mention – you know who.
Fern: That bully-boy? That braggert? That loudmouth jerk? The guy who makes fun of the disabled kids? Who cheats on the final exams? The guy who snaps the back of the girls’ bras?
We may have led different lives in high school, but we all knew that kid. And whoever thought he’d be so present in our lives once again?
Joe: You had to go there, didn’t you?
Fern: Sorry. I couldn’t help myself.
I love this! I probably would’ve been pals with Joe in high school, but Fern would’ve intimidated the heck outa me. Popular, cute, talented, funny? And blond. And happy? Exactly the kind of person I want in my orbit now, but back then, any possible friendship would’ve been undermined with a kind of jealousy I finally lost in youngish adulthood. Ah, the pals I forsook due to that green eyed monster! Thanks for this. It’s good to look back and think about well, how good it is not to be back there!
St Francis’64 Followed Awesome Joe and Mike Geha!