Rambleback was the name of our school yearbook. South Gate High School was the Rams. I'm in the third row up from the bottom, fourth student in from the right. South Gate tended to be a mostly white school, with very few Hispanic or Black students, easily counted on one hand for each class. On the other side of the tracks, literally, from South Gate was Watts, just a few short blocks from where we lived.
Besides Mike Mebs and Richard Meyers, whom I met when I started at South Gate High in the fall of 1964, I also became friends with Bill Vogt whose parents owned the Southland Motel, just two blocks from our house. I was able to swim in the motel pool for a few weeks that summer until they realized that their insurance policy did not cover guests other than those actually staying at the motel. Before the Southland Motel, his parents had owned a motel in the desert, not far from where the destruction of the service station took place for It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, which Bill watched from afar. When the Watts Riots broke out in August of 1965, a National Guard sand-bag machine gun emplacement was set up just a couple of blocks from the Southland Motel. Bill told me all about seeing it up close; however, I did not have the courage to walk the three or four blocks and have a first-hand look myself. We could easily see the smoke rising from the many fires to the west of South Gate, and that was more than enough--the palpable smoke and the many local and national TV broadcasts.
Between the riots and the Vietnam War footage increasingly on the nightly news, the 1960's easily seemed like a confrontational and especially violent decade. Fortunately, South Gate was peaceful, and South Gate High School was spared any confrontations. I walked the five and a half blocks to school each day without incident. Mike, Richard Meyers, sometimes Leslie Peters or Richard Wright, and I hung out for breaks or lunch. Mike, Richard Meyers and I were in the corrective gym class each day throughout high school. Not only was it an easy "A" on the report card, we didn't have to play competitively with the much more athletic students in our class. At that age, I actually benefited from being overly lanky and relatively unfit. But I could walk fast, not just hunting down comic books but also once every few weeks, I would have to leave school early and walk to Huntington Park to get my braces adjusted.
One of the first things mom did was to work out a financial arrangement with the orthodontist to get both Ann's and my teeth fixed. Dad was sending her $75.00 per month and most, if not all of that, went to the orthodontist to pay for our braces. I believe the total cost was over $1,000.00 for each of us, Ann's being slightly more. I would wear braces throughout high school and even into college before they finally came off.
Our orthodontist was an older, overweight fellow. In his lobby, he had a map of the world. Around all of the communist countries, he had placed push pins and used red yarn to delineate those parts of the world under communist domination. Waiting for my appointment, I got a geography and political lesson while I sat there. The periodic adjustments were often torture, and that evening all I wanted to eat was soup because my whole mouth ached. I'd also have to take aspirin to cut some of the pain so I could try and sleep.
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