Several of the schools we attended back in the early 60's, especially in Orange, looked rather shabby in the mid-90's when I visited them with my mom and took videos. Now, in these contemporary photographs, the schools look much better. Paint and nicer looking fences help them to appear less like prisons and more like schools. When we attended, there was no need of chain-link fences or gates or padlocks. Apparently, in the 1990's, there was.
Ann tells me that she and Freddy no longer attended Handy Elementary but went to another one along the way to Yorba, where Pam and I began attending in the fall of 1961. Perhaps with the overpass and the Costa Mesa Freeway, they felt that kids on our side of the freeway should not cross over. For me, entering Junior High meant Willene had to buy me an athletic supporter and we had to attend gym class, taking showers together for the first time. Years earlier, when we lived in Whittier, dad would take me and Tommy Tipton on Saturdays to the YMCA to swim. One Saturday, dad had to drop us off early, so we got our swim trunks on in the locker room and exited to the large, indoor pool. What we saw shocked us. Every instructor or boy splashing around in the pool or diving off the boards was totally naked. We'd never been aware of a nude swimming class in the mid-50's in conservative Whittier. We did not know what to make of this, and being the only two with swim trunks on, we stayed in the pool and churned water by the side, feeling distinctly the odd ones there.
Dave Moore and I became best friends at Yorba, much more so than at Handy Elementary School. Though I had a best friend, I realized very soon that there was an even greater dichotomy between popular, especially affluent, kids and the rest of us. There was a new boy who attended Yorba during our second year there, and I thought he was attractive. I asked a girl in my class about him one morning, yet she arrogantly responded, "Oh, I wouldn't tell you. I only tell popular kids." I didn't imagine even then that she was particularly popular herself because her family certainly wasn't affluent.
What the rest of us noticed also was that those students whose parents were comfortable financially could afford to indulge their offspring. Clothing fads became an everyday occurrence. Boys wore Pendelton shirts. Girls wore boys' white dress shirts with suspenders and pleated wool skirts. None of the rest of us could ever hope to keep up. It was enough that our clothes were generally new and clean and pressed.
It was at Yorba that I endured my first experience with prejudice for having an Hispanic last name. I was tricked into having to go to detention by this one boy whom I was asked by our teacher to take to the vice principal along with two others who were flinging spit balls in class. When we got there, he whispered, "You better not tell him that you didn't do this because it will only make him mad." Knowing the VP was a mean bastard who used to jump in his jalopy with other staff and head off to catch students fighting after school, I kept my mouth shut but was forced to appear at detention. My first afternoon there, a girl behind me made some remark. I turned around to look at her but said nothing and turned back to face the teacher, a man I did not know. He looked at me and, addressing the class, said, "You better turn around and keep your mouth shut, Sanchez, or we'll send you back to Mexico where you came from." At the time I didn't realize that he was attempting to demean me in front of everyone. All I could wonder was why he thought I was from Mexico when I was not.
Willene did try to demean us all the time. She would make us wear those bright yellow kids' raincoats when it was going to rain. When the weather was chilly, she would make us wear wool hats which nobody wore in Southern California. She would stand at the sliding glass door of the house and watch us all the way to the intersection of East Collins Avenue until we would disappear from sight. If she saw that we had removed any article of outer wear, she would say in her ignorant way when we got home, "I stood there at the door and I seen ya do it." Her bad grammar would grate on my ears every time.
In a music class, my teacher thought that I might have talent when we were listening to a recording and I noticed, when no one else did, that one of the singers in the chorus started to sing the wrong word and the recording engineer obviously did not notice the error. After a few listenings, the other students and the teacher finally detected what I had heard. I told her that we had an old, discolored trumpet that had belonged to my Uncle Leon. I was then transferred to the school band. Unfortunately, Willene wanted to make sure that I showed no promise and discouraged me in any way she could, forcing me to practice every night in the cold garage. When I did not practice every single night, she insisted that I would have to quit the school band. So I had to tearfully explain to the teacher that I would no longer be able to participate and would have to change music classes again, putting me way behind the other students in the previous class. Dad later asked why I was no longer practicing and I told him that Willene had forced me to quit. It surprised me that he was not even aware that she had made me quit.
This was the first time that most of us experienced a dress code. A few of the female teachers would force the girls to get down on their knees to ensure that their skirts touched the concrete sidewalk so that they weren't too short. One of my classmates came to school in a multi-colored pair of trousers, each panel being either red, green, yellow, or blue. He was sent home. Unrelated to the dress code, mom bought me a nice shirt that had 3/4 sleeves. Not short sleeves and not long sleeves. I loved that shirt because it was unique. However, after a few weeks, Willene, probably recognizing that I liked it just the way it was, informed me that she was cutting the sleeves because that shirt was just too hard to iron.
Fred and I used to do chores for a young married couple in the triplex to earn fifty cents each, each week, taking out their trash or washing their car. One Saturday, when we were leaving early and they weren't awake, we wanted to wash their car first. Freddy had the bright idea that he would steer the car while I pushed it out of the garage. He foolishly turned the wheel too sharply and the bumper of the aqua Ford Falcon caught on the garage door spring and bent it. Dad's insurance covered the repair of the damage, but we were forced to repay the deductible, $25.00, a huge sum of money for us to repay. It took us many months, with every penny or nickle or quarter we got from anyone going to repay our debt.
I was also friends with Randy Bancroft from across the street--his parents owned a duplex. He was very much into building plastic airplane model kits, and he was very good at it. I could almost never afford to buy a model kit because they were usually 50 cents or 99 cents, so I lived vicariously through him. His family also had relatives in Arizona. They would almost always fly to Phoenix from Orange County Airport on Bonanza Airlines on one of their Fairchild F-27A Silver Dart twin-engine turboprops. I envied him for that, too, and would always enjoy it when he bought an F-27A model kit to build a Bonanza plane. The model kit builder, Revell, for the F-27A, would have you contact one of the small regional carries flying the F-27 to ask for decals of their paint scheme--West Coast, Pacific, Bonanza, Piedmont, Northeast.
In my final year at Yorba, I really stood out in my English class when we were supposed to rewrite a Shakespeare play to make it more contemporary and then perform the play for the class. One student modified The Taming of the Shrew by making it a hillbilly, Lil' Abner-type, farce. I was asked to play the main character, as well as act in the plays of two other students who picked different Shakespearean plays to modify. We even performed the Shrew in the school cafetorium later in the term for a talent event. I think we came in second to two boys who simply performed a Smothers Brothers comedy skit.
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