Mom enrolled us at South Gate Junior High for the fall term of 1963-4. I was in the 9th Grade. For high school and junior high, South Gate did have students who graduated in the Winter term as well as the Summer Term each year. For a few days, mom drove us to school in her 1960 white, four-door Rambler since the junior high school was almost at the entire other end of South Gate and Firestone Blvd. from where we lived. But we did have to walk home and then walk to school fairly quickly.
Unlike at Yorba Junior High School, South Gate Junior High did have a year book published each semester, yearly in high school. (Maybe Yorba had a yearbook and we just could not afford to buy one; I don't remember.) But a year book such as this one reminds you that you did have friends and acquaintances who cared about you and did write silly or serious messages in your book. I knew that I took a journalism class that fall, depicted above; I just did not remember that our class got its picture in the yearbook. (I am in the upper right hand corner of the shot.)
Although there is no mention of it anywhere in either yearbook from 1963-4, that fall was when President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. When we learned of this in our individual classes that awful day in November, we trooped out with our teachers as they lowered the school flag in tribute to the slain president. It was difficult to get away from the news, and the news of the assassination of the assassin, that entire weekend after we were sent home later that day.
Steve Page, who signed my yearbook above, gave me a guided tour around town that fall, to locate all the model kit shops. I ended up going regularly to one in Cudahy, an unincorporated area north of South Gate, not far from our apartment on Orchard. Independent of that, I also discovered the Loop Market magazine store. The market itself was a grocery store with an awning out front along its entire length. The magazine section, with an entrance separate from the grocery store, delineated by the large wooden shelves and the metal racks themselves, carried everything from Time magazine, to aviation magazines, to softcore gay porn, which I soon became drawn to. (When my friend Randy visited before the school term began, he assumed when he saw those mags on the upper shelves, well above the aviation periodicals, that they were Playboy-type magazines for women--even I knew that they weren't primarily for females but never let on.)
The Loop Market was named for The Loop in Cudahy where the street cars made their mandatory railed swing through the station, to pick up passengers before heading back up through Huntington Park and then on into Los Angeles itself. By the time we moved in with mom, the street cars had been taken out of service and the tracks covered in blacktop along the entire route. Buses made the same swing into the same station. But the last couple of times that my friend Mike and I drove through that area, we've had a difficult time figuring out where The Loop was--everything in that area having been significantly altered. The Loop Market is also long gone. That whole block of retail businesses, in fact, is gone.
No comments:
Post a Comment