This was the first year back at Laural. Our forced year at Pope Pius X Catholic School was over. But, somehow, I was emotionally messed up at the time and abruptly decided I didn't want to go to my new class--to this day I don't know why I decided to rebel. Something just snapped. I began crying and pulling away from both my mom and the teacher. I didn't care that I was making an embarrassing scene as, together, one had each arm, they dragged me into the classroom where the other kids sat, amazed as they looked back at this startling entrance.
As you can see, our class had 34 students, so I was seated at the back table since there weren't enough desks at the beginning of school. I quickly settled in, and I don't recall that any of the other kids mentioned it to me again. One of my fellow students became a good friend. It was he, during one of our combined classes in the cafetorium for a film who, when the lights were turned off, exposed himself as a joke. I thought it was pretty daring at the time. (In the class photo, I am standing beside the teacher.)
It was amazing that I could spend an entire year of my life in a classroom with a bunch of students and a teacher and, so many years later, remember very little of those hours and that year together: the start of school, the several holidays, the days when one or more were sick with a cold or were forced to stay home, the many recesses on the playground, lunch at the cafetorium. What the mind chooses to retain and what it simply discards after so many years can be fascinating.
I can stare at a clear picture of so many of my fellow students and I have to wonder what happened to them all. What twists and turns did they experience after 3rd grade? I know my own challenges and disappointments and successes intimately. But what of them? How many of them are still around? Except for Don A., I really don't have any memories of any of these other kids, especially not their names. Why do I still remember Don's first and last name, yet remember none of the others? Or if I have a shard of memory, I would not know whom to attach it to in the photo. Who were the cool kids? Who were the geeks or misfits or outsiders? Not a single black child was enrolled at Laural that I recall. It can be proven in this photograph, the one from kindergarten, and the final one from 4th grade in March of 1959.
You could buy a kid's plastic replica of Sputnik in a store--I saw one at the mall. The fall that this class began the school year we soon heard about the Soviet satellite. The space race was on. More math and science were required for the U.S. to keep up since we were already behind.
In February of 1958, just a month before this picture was taken, two military aircraft would collide over Norwalk, not far from Whittier. Everyone aboard was killed, as well as a housewife on the ground who died from falling debris. In a few years, I would attend school in South Gate, CA, and one of my classmates' father was aboard one of the two planes. Ann would actually, though briefly, date Jay. Sometimes it could be a very small world indeed.
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