He Was He And She Was She-Growing Up Absurd In The 1950s
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
There was a lot that now seems weird about growing up the keep your head down, don’t make waves, “if your mommie is a commie, turn her in” Cold War red scare 1950s night. Literally on that “keep your head down “part when we did the drill-the nuclear fall-out down in the school basement put your head between your knees drill that haunted every school kid’ s nightmarish dreams. Weird given too that the roles we were forced to play didn’t make sense sometimes. Didn’t make sense except that gentle father Ike called the shots and that was good enough for our parents who like us did not have a say in making that world, or being asked about making it. Some of the terrible psychological burdens we faced as kids would have been infinitely easier to take if we had not been cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all crammed into some roles that we were ill-fitted for.
A look at the photograph above from my old friend and colleague Jack Dawson’s junior high school days at Myles Standish in his hometown of Carver about thirty miles south of Boston graphically puts that chamber of horrors into perspective. Jack from a young age had his heart set on going to college, to be the first in his family to go to college, and his parents despite their poverty encouraged that goal. A lot of what drove Jack in those days from what he told me one night when we were cutting up old touches over high-shelf scotches at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston was reading, reading every book that he could get his hands on, in pursuit of that goal. What he was not interested in were sports since he had two left un-co-ordinated feet and mechanical things since he had two left un-co-ordinated hands both of which were pushed on him, pushed on all of us by a theory of education that said we needed to be exposed to these skills whether we liked them or not.
Jack was able to fake the sports part since you could lose yourself in some team thing and not be exposed to the glare of being left-footed unless you touched the ball or something. He was not so lucky about the mechanical aspect. See Jack had two problems, one was Mr. Fisher the woodworking teacher who expected every boy in his charge to become a master woodworker under his tutelage. And old man Fisher (he had served in the AEF in World War I by the time Jack came under his loving care so yes he was an old man by Jack’s time) was determined to put the screws to any boy who did not buckle under. Needless to say Jack failed the old man by every measure. The required shelf that he expected every boy to construct to pass the class in Jack’s hand just collapsed under the weight of mis-cut pieces, poorly joined together, and painted like he was some public employee.
Mr. Fisher would not let such a dastardly thing go unpunished. He would place such an errant boy in the Home Economics class by agreement with Miss Foster, the Home Ec teacher to make cookies and clean up the kitchen with the girls. Needless to say in that sex-sensitive coming of age time any boy would be shell-shocked and Jack, a sensitive boy then even more so. So Jack took his beating.
And Jack took it in a manly way if we can put that term to good use today. But that brought up the second problem, the one that was the one that broke it all for him. See Jack was crazy for Melinda Loring, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed junior high school heart-breaker. Who also happened to be aces at making things out of wood since her father owned the lumber yard/hardware store in town. To add insult to injury Mr. Fisher had Melinda come in and make a crackerjack shelf just to show his boys up. The same day Jack exhibited his fallen wreck Melinda was present. She had led the laughter in the class when his shelf crashed like some demolished building just imploded. Needless to say Melinda never gave Jack a tumble, never acknowledged his existence after that episode although word had been out through that infallible teenage grapevine that has the NSA beaten six ways to Sunday for good intelligence that she had been smitten by Jack too. Jack made me laugh when he recalled that his own daughters when they were in junior high school actually elected to take the regardless of sex woodworking shop and rightly so since they made the worst cookies in the world bar none. So the Earth turns.
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
There was a lot that now seems weird about growing up the keep your head down, don’t make waves, “if your mommie is a commie, turn her in” Cold War red scare 1950s night. Literally on that “keep your head down “part when we did the drill-the nuclear fall-out down in the school basement put your head between your knees drill that haunted every school kid’ s nightmarish dreams. Weird given too that the roles we were forced to play didn’t make sense sometimes. Didn’t make sense except that gentle father Ike called the shots and that was good enough for our parents who like us did not have a say in making that world, or being asked about making it. Some of the terrible psychological burdens we faced as kids would have been infinitely easier to take if we had not been cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all crammed into some roles that we were ill-fitted for.
A look at the photograph above from my old friend and colleague Jack Dawson’s junior high school days at Myles Standish in his hometown of Carver about thirty miles south of Boston graphically puts that chamber of horrors into perspective. Jack from a young age had his heart set on going to college, to be the first in his family to go to college, and his parents despite their poverty encouraged that goal. A lot of what drove Jack in those days from what he told me one night when we were cutting up old touches over high-shelf scotches at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston was reading, reading every book that he could get his hands on, in pursuit of that goal. What he was not interested in were sports since he had two left un-co-ordinated feet and mechanical things since he had two left un-co-ordinated hands both of which were pushed on him, pushed on all of us by a theory of education that said we needed to be exposed to these skills whether we liked them or not.
Jack was able to fake the sports part since you could lose yourself in some team thing and not be exposed to the glare of being left-footed unless you touched the ball or something. He was not so lucky about the mechanical aspect. See Jack had two problems, one was Mr. Fisher the woodworking teacher who expected every boy in his charge to become a master woodworker under his tutelage. And old man Fisher (he had served in the AEF in World War I by the time Jack came under his loving care so yes he was an old man by Jack’s time) was determined to put the screws to any boy who did not buckle under. Needless to say Jack failed the old man by every measure. The required shelf that he expected every boy to construct to pass the class in Jack’s hand just collapsed under the weight of mis-cut pieces, poorly joined together, and painted like he was some public employee.
Mr. Fisher would not let such a dastardly thing go unpunished. He would place such an errant boy in the Home Economics class by agreement with Miss Foster, the Home Ec teacher to make cookies and clean up the kitchen with the girls. Needless to say in that sex-sensitive coming of age time any boy would be shell-shocked and Jack, a sensitive boy then even more so. So Jack took his beating.
And Jack took it in a manly way if we can put that term to good use today. But that brought up the second problem, the one that was the one that broke it all for him. See Jack was crazy for Melinda Loring, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed junior high school heart-breaker. Who also happened to be aces at making things out of wood since her father owned the lumber yard/hardware store in town. To add insult to injury Mr. Fisher had Melinda come in and make a crackerjack shelf just to show his boys up. The same day Jack exhibited his fallen wreck Melinda was present. She had led the laughter in the class when his shelf crashed like some demolished building just imploded. Needless to say Melinda never gave Jack a tumble, never acknowledged his existence after that episode although word had been out through that infallible teenage grapevine that has the NSA beaten six ways to Sunday for good intelligence that she had been smitten by Jack too. Jack made me laugh when he recalled that his own daughters when they were in junior high school actually elected to take the regardless of sex woodworking shop and rightly so since they made the worst cookies in the world bar none. So the Earth turns.
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