Second row from the top. Third picture in from the left. Our images become frozen in time for those who knew us back then but never saw us again, as they were to us. I wonder if anyone has attempted to reassemble a class and juxtapose, perhaps even cruelly, what they looked like in high school with what they look like forty or more years on? Most of us don't preserve well, certainly not after forty-five years tacked on to when we were 16 or 17. This was the year that a handful of black students who would normally have gone to Jordan High School in Watts joined our class and began attending South Gate High School. I believe it was because those who made the decision suspected that they would get a better education at South Gate High. I became friendly with Patricia Summers because we took German together. She was a remarkable student and, I was surprised to find out, she also liked Barbra Streisand as much as I did. She and Peggy Taylor ended up in the top three or four in our graduating class. I suppose it was as much of an education for us as it was for them.
Mike and I became good friends in 1965-6. We were also good friends with Richard Meyers, but only at school. We were expressly forbidden to visit him at home, where he lived with his mother and grandmother and dog, Ginger. He was incredibly smart and witty. He was teaching himself Russian, and he read books well beyond us. But he never visited out houses, and we were told never to visit his. He actually did visit my house once. He learned that we kept a house key under the mat on the front porch. So he got to my house early, let himself in, and was sitting on the couch in the living room as I came home. When I entered the living room, without a word to me he got up and walked out the front door and went home. He was always one for doing the absurd. And he read everything by Stephen Potter, the British inventor of the term One-upmanship. Best described as tongue-in-cheek self-help books to make someone appear to be more knowledgeable or intelligent or superior by faking it.
Richard never really needed to fake it. He was smarter than we were, smarter than almost anyone else in our class, and he had the grades to prove it, semester after semester. But it must have been very lonely for him. We were his only friends but, as I said, we were all friends at school but not outside of school. We almost never spoke on the phone either because he discouraged that, too. Looking back, perhaps Richard was a bit like Jim Gendron from the 6th grade, a bit too eccentric for his own good.
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