Steven Levinson

Jerry, you are so wise.  Love the cartoon.

Jeff, don't get me wrong.  WHHS was ultimately one of the best things that ever happened to me.  I have never been in such company before or since.  My comments arose out of Jerry O's invitation to share what we most dreaded during our WHHS years.  I was simply voicing my view, like Dick Winter's, that the dread didn't arise out of the possibilie imminence of the Day of Judgment, but, rather, internal and iinterpersonal self-doubt and feelings of exclusion and inadequacy in relation to the social dynamic at school, early on, that was out there in plain sight.  I tend not to block memories.

Philip Spiess

OMG (as they apparently say on Facebook or somewhere):  I was gone for one week, taking my dolce far niente on Tilghman Island in Chesapeake Bay, when this Forum, far too dormant for weeks, apparently erupted with reminiscences and confessions of our days of yore.  (Jerry Ochs, your simple question was a social bombshell!)

So, of course, I've got to add my two bits.  First, Dick Winter, you've struck home with your classic fear; it was certainly mine, and in just about the same way that you've described it.  The trauma was added to by the fact that we had one phone in our house, centrally located, so that any time I tried to call for a date, the whole family was listening in -- Jesus Christ!  No wonder that I didn't marry until I was 32!

Latin class (and, yes, German class with the Frau!):  Don't call me to the board, please, please, don't call me to the board!  Ahem!  My freshman year in Latin with the head of the Latin department, Miss Rife (spelling?):  she had all of our names on file cards, and she would shuffle them at the beginning of class, then call on us in the order of the cards.  I sat right in front of her desk, and, about three weeks into class, a card flipped out of the stack as she shuffled, and it ended up on the floor in front of me.  I glanced down, and saw it had my name on it; quickly putting my foot on it, I later surreptiously picked it up and pocketed it -- I was never called on again (Al Weihl may confirm this; we sat next to each other, and used to give each other back rubs).

Also, I used to say that I was in no social clique because I associated (to a degree) with all the social cliques (well, I didn't exactly socialize with the jocks).  I'm stunned by Steve Levinson's comments, because we were good friends and I never imagined that he felt like a social outcast; I was more intimidated by Steve and Dale Gieringer and Johnny Marks and other good friends because I thought they were smarter or more talented than me (well, maybe they were).  It's interesting, too, that my very best friends (and I'll name them here):  Don Dahmann, Tom Gottschang, Robert St. John, and Jim Stillwell, never show up on this Forum; my other best friend, Jeff Rosen, changed high schools in mid-stream, so that's probably why we don't hear from him.

Was I afraid of the atomic bomb?  It was there in the background, as a possible inevitability; I don't remember being unduly concerned about it (although the air raid sirens scared the hell out of me).  I don't remember any bomb drills in high school; at Clifton School, yes -- and to this day I don't know what useful effect they would have had.  As to the modern day fear of shootings in schools, when I taught Middle School in the last days of my career, and these things were happening, I constantly tried to address this subject in faculty meetings, re:  the large glass windows we had in our classrooms -- perfect targets -- and what tactics should we take, should a shooter emerge on campus?  (I never got any kind of response.)  I did tell my students, who were worried, that I would protect them in case of an adverse event, and I meant it, though I had no idea what I meant myself -- I would have had to improvise if the situation had occurred.  But I loved my students and was dedicated to them, as I'm sure many teachers are.

Other high school fears:  I took swimming for most of my years at WHHS, but increasingly I began to dread Whitey Davis's "up the pool and back" races; it gave me the pip.  Eventually I stopped taking swimming classes.  (There were also the icy cold showers.)

But now there are also the new friends I've hobnobbed with (verbally) on this Forum, classmates who I really did not know well in high school (Larry Klein and Paul Simons are cases in point), but whom I've come to know better via this Forum -- so let's keep it going!

Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

Steve or anybody, please clue me in on what you meant by MOTs.....

Only the guys have offerred up their fears of being rejected by girls they asked out on a date. What about the girls and their feelings?? Since I am definitely not a neuter, I will share some of the towering sense of inadequacy engendered by being totally ignored as a social being. My memory is not what it used to be or even should be, but honestly, Danny Brown is the ONLY guy from school who EVER asked me out. I felt ugly, I felt stupid, and despaired of ever seriously interesting a guy enough to want to share his life with me since not one of my high schoolmates was sufficiently attracted to me to want to spend a couple of hours with me on a date. I was quiet, I was shy, I didn't know how to flirt, I was Jewish, but shoot, my figure wasn't THAT bad! The guys had all the initiative, remember. In those days, a girl couldn't exactly ask a boy out on a date.....

So pardon me if I won't offer a shoulder for you guys to cry on. I was miserable during high school and could do nothing about it. I just did my homework, sat in class, and moved around the corridors. Nobody saw me or heard me. High school for me was something to be endured and gotten through.

Barbara Kahn (Tepper)

We probably had little idea about what others were going through. My impression is that High School is an egocentric time of life. As teens we were worried about ourselves, our own images and if the phone would ring. This is where some regrets pop up for me - wishing I'd extended the hand of friendship to more people.  

As for the class stories and fears, it's interesting that most of the guys have centered around Latin and languages. English, Latin and French were the only bright spots for me. The rest was all a maze to just find a way to get through it all.  

Phil, your story of putting your foot on the card with your name and never being called on again is my favorite. What a stroke of luck and something you had to wait to share until you were far out of Miss Rife's reach.  I don't know her - didn't have her. I don't remember all my teachers but I especially loved Mrs. Levy in English and Mme O'Neill in French.  

Paul Simons

Judy "MOT" means "Member Of Tribe" - the tribe being, not the Navajo or the Sioux but the Hebrews, the Jews.  I can't argue with the idea that cliques existed or that they could cause emotional duress. I was an outsider, not very "popular" but in my case I didn't do anything noteworthy or interesting so I can't blame anyone or any institution.

We know what high school value systems are. These days there is plenty of evidence that being a big wheel, a big "winner" in high school means absolutely nothing in later life. In fact it appears that being a real top dog around the old schoolhouse can lead to being a colossal bore, bully, and fool as an adult. I'm not thinking of anyone in particular - of course not, perish the thought!

Anyway I have no complaints. Incidentally FYI Judy I thought you were HOT! But I was out there, it took getting away from the past and into the present and the future - i.e. college - to find a real girlfriend, a real relationship.

Steven Levinson

NOW we're talking!  Thank you, Judy and Paul, for your candor and the courage of your last comments.  Maybe some of the nepenthe will wear off the general discussion.

Mary Vore (Iwamoto)

My memory of the major fear was during the Cuban missle crisis.  I was in some history class (not an AP course), and we had a young teacher.  One morning during the height of the anxiety, she pointed to the window behind the class and exclaimed "Look, their's a mushroom cloud!"   It scared the bejesus our of me and most of the class. I do jnot remember her name, and doubt she lasted long at WHHS - she certainly didn't measure up to the other excellent teachers. 

Ira Goldberg

Paul, my wife, Wendy, speaks about how she admired you. She was also a music groupie who really liked your talent. So, no matter how we saw ourselves in those years and how we felt, others unbeknownst to us looked up to us. My take is that we were all good people, did the best we could under the circumstances of going through adolescence, meeting high standards, developing identities, etc. and that counts more than anything. PS, I was clueless as well re. the term MOT, so I’m glad to have my blissful ignorance lessened slightly. Judy, I’m saddened to learn how difficult those days were for you. It shouldn’t have happened. Wish we could go back to rectify things like that. I know others who lived in the shadows so to speak, but have not ever commented here. Finally, for us all, I know of teachers who in retrospect would also have been kinder and more supportive, but who also suffered the angst of scrutiny due to little more - in those days- than looks or race or gender. 

Jerry Ochs

Wow!  Did my question open Pandora's box, a can of worms, a box of chocolates, or all of the above?

My next question is: how do we keep this going?

On the subject of the battle of the sexes, I would like to describe a typical subject of discussion among young boys, i.e., how to get to second base.  My neighborhood friend Alan Bohache suggested The Gradually Diminishing Concentric Circles Approach.   That is how entirely clueless we were.  Can one blush in retrospect?

Philip Spiess

Barbara:  I am not proud of the Latin class file card episode; it indicates a lack of a personal ethical standard at that time, which, if I'd had such in this circumstance, would have caused me to hand the card back to Miss Rife.  I can recognize a couple of other of such incidents in my life, one, at least, in college, which I needn't go into now.

We all seem to recognize regrets about past behaviour as we express our high school feelings in this Forum, but I continue to marvel at how we all keep coming together now through these acknowledgements on this Forum in ways we never could have -- and never did -- in high school.

Jerry:  Ahem!  I met my wife, Kathy, in Cooperstown, New York.  I was on the staff of the New York State Historical Association, headquartered there, and she was in the graduate Museum Studies program, which it ran.  At the time, I was living behind the National Baseball Hall of Fame -- but I never got to first base with her.

Jerry Ochs

Please don't think I'm a sex fiend, but I found this and felt the need to share it.

Nancy Messer

This whole conversation has amazed me.  I was an Avondale MOT although I never realized it.  When coming to WHHS, this was a large group of people I already knew so things were more comfortable.  I assumed all of us came there as part of a group from elementary school.  I was an outside member of the group - not popular and no attachment to any specific person in the group.  At WHHS this continued - being one person just kind of wandering around.  However, it was all part of a problem I was trying to deal with at home - having a mother who thought I was totally "stupid" in every sense of the word and frequently told me so.  I avoided her as much as possible and spoke very little.  As a result my social skills were never really developed and I had very few activities at WHHS other than classes.  My mother died of cancer when I was 21.  It took around 7 years to start coming out of the shell I had put myself in.  As an adult I have wondered how I would have turned out if she had survived.  Things turned out for the best - I will always love being part of WHHS - both the good and the bad -  and the class of '64 is the best of all of them.

Jerry Ochs

After posting that video, I remembered snippets of sex ed for boys at WHHS.  We watched a film about two teen boys who picked up two girls and one boy contracted a venereal disease.  I think it was an attempt to scare us.  Speaking of scaring us, they showed us a traffic safety film that contained terrifying images of bodies burnt to a crisp and blood-spattered windshields.  That double punch made necking in a car feel like dicing with death.  What did they teach the girls?

Jerry Ochs

Nancy: I sometimes felt that I was an alien who had been dispatched to monitor human behavior until the mother ship came to take me home.  I think a time-lapse video of a butterfly struggling to exit its cocoon nicely sums up the transition from teen to adult.

Paul Simons

First it's an interesting coincidence that when I clicked on this email, with Jerry's link to the fairy-tale like explanation of sexual intercourse, I have on the radio the NPR program "1A" and the topic of discussion is the  punitive attack on women's reproductive rights being conducted in a number of states across this country, including Ohio. Compared to those behind this attack the lady in Jerry's video appears brilliant, thoroughly informed, and saintly. I understand that this web log is intended to be non-political but this is beyond politics, this is about an attack on the very ideas and ideals that are part of what WHHS has meant, before we got there, while we were there, and after we left, contained in the school motto Sursum Ad Summum - Rise To The Highest - not Inferos Descendere - Descend To The Depths - which appears to be the motto some live by these days. In particular after science classes with people like Mr. Lounds and Mr. Ankenman, and in light of enormous and hard-won progress in electronics, genetics, astronomy, and medicine to name a few, the outrageous disrespect of science and scientists is intolerable. We never heard of DNA, never imagined driving a remote-control car around on the moon for years using solar power, or re-attaching a severed limb, or being able to take a photo and put it in front of the whole world in 30 seconds with a device that fits in our shirt posket, but it's been done, we take it for granted now.

Second thanks Ira and Wendy for your kind words. I feel lucky that I get to keep on jamming and I'll semd a link to you by separate email to some new music that I've been working on.

Philip Spiess

Jerry:  I could have sworn that our real sex education (however fuzzy and inaccurate it may have been) took place in the Boys' bathrooms and the Boys' locker room, and maybe at lunch -- teachers were not involved in these discussions.  I do remember that in 8th Grade Gym class, one boy (who shall here be nameless) showed up in the locker room with a lipstick kiss imprinted on his jockstrap, which impressed us all, even as we found it hilarious (and shocking).  (Whether he had put it there himself is another question that remained unanswered.)

Although I am a firm supporter of public education in general, we sent my son to a private school because we did not approve of two matters in the Fairfax County (Va.) Public Schools at that time (mid-1990s):  (1) As parents, we were required to sign a statement that our child could be punished in any way that the school system saw fit; if we did not sign it, we were fined $50; and (2) the sex education courses, for children reaching puberty, required that the child keep a sexual diary (!) that would be reviewed by the teacher of the course!  This, of course, was an invasion of personal privacy, and we would have none of it, so my son went to Browne Academy, a private school where I later taught.

In the eight years I taught 5th and 6th grade Middle School at Browne Academy in Alexandria, Virginia, I was mildly appalled at the sex education the school offered in the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade years.  (We had sort of kept our own son age-appropriately informed about sex as he grew, but more formally instructed him when he turned ten years old.)  The classes were obviously separated by gender; the boys were taught by the male phys ed teacher and the male science teacher; the girls were taught by the female phys ed teacher and the female school nurse.  Each year learned a little more (apparently).  I learned something of what was being taught because my 5th and 6th grade students, who trusted me, and who knew I would be straightforward with them, brought me questions from their classes -- indeed, they wanted me to teach the sex education courses!  (I had let them, or rather their parents, know that the study of History was, in essence, the history of Sex and Violence -- which it is.)  But I was forbidden by the school to teach them about sex, let alone answer their questions (which I sometimes did in a kind of round about way), so I had to leave them disappointed.  What they were learning was, if I understood what they were telling me, was pap:  it was leaving them with more questions than answers -- and we know, I'm sure, from our own experience, that that is the age that wants to know -- and needs to know (even if they're scared to know) -- about sex.

To sum up, ours is the most prudish nation in the world when it comes to sex -- and most of this is due to our devoted service (much of it lip-service -- which is to say hypocritical) to religion.

Jon Singer

     I am not sure of the class year.(Could it have been ninth?). I recall we had gym for a half year and health the other half.  Mr. Will Bass was our health teacher.  He addressed the class but once and we essentially had study hall thereafter.  He told us to pay attention, then instructed us. "Just leave it in your pants."

     By and large, I followed his instruction.

     As long as we have been on the couch this past week, let me say that this may all be repressed memory as Will kicked me rudely and violently in the posterior and permanently threw me out of eleventh grade gym (one of my two "Fs at WHHS) when I had objected to Will's inaccurate measurement of Harold Silberman's distance on the standing 3 jump.  

Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

Jon, I for one would love to hear the whole stories behind those two "F"s you confessed to.... I certainly think any statute of limitations has long passed to be tittilated by such stories. I'm basing this on the amazing turn the main topic of messages has taken of late.

Judy Holtzer (Knopf)

Who taught girls Sex Education? I am a complete blank.

Jerry Ochs

Shucks, I got three in grade 8: PE, Latin, Advanced Algebra? (or some math class that was at a higher level than usual).  I blame it on the sudden appearance of axillary and pubic hair, and the need to learn how to French inhale so I'd look cool.  Priorities, priorities.

Philip Spiess

I had another sudden memory flash:  leaving aside that Mr. Counts (a buffoon) taught "Men's Health" in 10th or 11th grades (possibly both, if my records are correct), which covered some vague aspects of male sexual development, I remember a class (was it 11th or 12th grade?) that was a co-ed sex education class.  It was team-taught by a man and a woman teacher.  I somehow remember the man as being Mr. Brandon (who taught History -- was that possible?) and the woman as a large, cheery, blowsy woman, whose name I forget (my annuals are difficult of access, otherwise I could identify her).  Both teachers were too eager and cheery by half for the course in question; all of us (or perhaps I'm just projecting myself here) were a bit nervous and on edge, given that the class was co-ed (well, yeah, there were a couple of girls in the class I was interested in, and I didn't necessarily want them to know what I was thinking or feeling -- or how my body was reacting to them); in short, I sweated a lot in that class.

Does anyone else have a memory of this class, and can anyone else fill in any more details?

Paul Simons

Thanks Phil and others for opening this area of discourse. It's been many years - did the sex ed class feature actual demonstrations by Whitey Davis and Mrs. Manoukian? Or were the instructors the greatest substitute teacher of all time Mr. Fish and Mrs. Vines? I just don't recall. 

Steven Levinson

Philip Spiess

Steve:  Thanks, it was Mrs. Foley.  (And, uh, is there any "normal" form of sex?  I guess the question shows how underinformed -- or overinformed -- I am.)

Paul:  You're just trying to ruin my dinner.

Jerry Ochs

Paul: You wrote "Thanks Phil and others for opening this area of discourse."  What am I, chopped liver?