The Gym

Another CK Alum suggested I write about "sock hops". He made his suggestion about 2 weeks ago and I've been trying to figure out what to write ever since then. He probably should write the blog post himself, because obviously he has some memories about those dances.

I have put a picture of the gymnasium at CK High School and one of a sock hop during the early sixties, from a couple of annuals, our Echo--the gym picture because as I was thinking about sock hops I began to think about other things the gym was used for.

Let's start with the sock hops. Until I started to look through my old Echos for a picture of a sock hop, I had forgotten that they were held after football and basketball games. (Those were the days we stayed up LATE!) My very first aural memory when Dean suggested sock hops as a theme, was a song, "Venus", sung by Frankie Avalon. We danced the "chalypso" to that song and others that had a Latin beat. For those of you who don't think I have spelled that word right, let me remind you that the word was a combination of Cha-cha and Calypso. Remember the Calypso, Harry Belefonte and our first exposure to Island music? Day-o, day-ay-ay-o--midnight come and we wanna go ho-ome...Anyway, Venus, Goddess of love that you are...we danced the Chalypso to that song, we did the stroll to some slow tunes, including the one titled The Stroll. We danced our version of the jitterbug, which by the late 50s was the dance that had evolved on American Bandstand, which we watched on our black and white TVs every afternoon after school.

Some girls probably learned how to dance from their older brothers or sisters, but I was the oldest in my family so my partner was the handle of the refrigerator. I danced with that cool partner in the kitchen when nobody was looking, because I would have been absolutely mortified if anyone had seen me. The Trouble and the Beauty with the frig was that it didn't move--when I got with a real partner at a sock hop, he moved, and maybe not even with the beat. I recall liking sock hops, liking being with a group of kids, moving with the music, dancing. I don't REALLY remember, but I'm pretty sure I went with a group of girls--strength in numbers--and there was probably intrigue and nervousness, as we wondered who would ask us to dance. In some sock hop pictures there are musicians so it appears there was sometimes live music, but I recall music coming from other sources--I think the person who suggested this topic would remember better than I where the music came from.

The gym was the hub of the high school and in addition to sock hops we went there for assemblies, pep rallies, to have our pictures taken for the Echo, basketball games, cheerleader tryouts and maybe most memorably of all, P(hysical).E(ducation).

P.E. was and probably still is, one of the most emotionally charged memories of high school. For those not athletically inclined it was an hour a day of mortification, unwanted strenuous activity, communal showers, sweat, complex rules, an hour we tried to get out of in any way we could. I can see all of us girls lined up in our snow-white shorts and blouses, trying to get noticed, or remain hidden, while "captains" were choosing teams, hoping to get on a team with our friends if we had to be on a team at all. If you had no physical talent, as appeared to be the case for me, team play was the worst, because others were counting on me to pass the ball to someone who could score, dribble the basketball only the 3 times allowed in "girls" basketball, not mess up. It was bad enough that I couldn't do a proper summersault during tumbling, or get out of the way fast enough in dodge ball, but if I let down a team member in basketball, I couldn't face myself. I had to pretend to take all the yelling with good humor, otherwise I would have cried. Lots of girls hated the showering after the class, but that was the easy part for me. Run into the shower with your towel around you, get your feet wet so the P.E. teacher would think you'd taken a shower, run out, get dressed. Easy. Kind of like the "ostrich principle"--if you didn't look at anybody else, they weren't seeing you. I got lucky during tumbling season one year--I fell off a chair at home, cracking my tailbone. The doctor gave me a 6 week pass from P.E. What a beautiful 6 weeks that was!

I wonder what P.E. was like for girls who liked sports and who did well at them. I got a little taste of what that might have been like when we played badminton and volleyball on summer potluck nights in the 70s, at a church I attended. I was actually good at both--I had confidence, which grew every time I was able to stretch to hit that birdie or jump to return a volleyball over the net. It was fun, my body worked well, I felt like an athlete. I was astounded that the same person who slumped her way through P.E. could actually do well on a court and that others found me a valuable member of a team. It was a total turnaround from the way I had felt about myself in P.E. and a tremendous confidence booster. I wonder if P.E. is still as brutal a class as it was when we were teenagers.

Pep rallies, on the other hand, were one of the best memories of what went on in the gym. Hundreds of us attended, from all classes, following the cheerleaders in rhyming chants, meant to psych us up and get us ready to cheer our team on to victory in the basketball or football games that night. The cheerleaders, who seemed like stars, worked hard, jumped high, screamed at us to scream louder, raise the roof, follow the leaders. Fight, fight, fight for CKHS, win the victory, we sang. 2 bits, 4 bits, 6 bits, a dollar--all for CK stand up and holler! we yelled. We stomped, we clapped, we sang, we roared and afterwards the enthusiasm for the game that night was high and excited. We carried that energy to the games and we yelled and sang there, too, and sometimes we didn't even watch the game, because we were so busy showing our pep. We can only hope the guys running up and down the court or busting heads on the field, trying to win another game for the school, didn't realize we weren't always watching. We loved them just the same and we were always proud of them, no matter how our attention span may have wavered.

The gym--we spent a lot of time there, we sweated, we yelled, we danced, we were thrilled, we were embarrassed, we had romance, we had intrigue, we had hopes and dreams. We were youthful, energetic, confused, happy, frustrated. The gym held us all, and all our emotions.

School Lunch

From left, Nancy K., Jeanette Y., Yours Truly, Anne H., Vicki C., Anges, Helen C.

One of our number, the number being CK Alum of '62, recently challenged me to write about "school lunches" and being the writer type that I am, I am taking her up on that dare.

What I remember about the lunchroom and what went on there is only what I remember, meaning it is not the whole story.  My memory is spotty about those high school days and I am always finding myself responding to some fascinating, what should be memorable, high school story, with "Wow!  I don't remember that at all!"  So, being in my own little world during high school means I only remember my portion of what was actually going on.  I hope some of you will share your memories of "school lunches" so we can get a clearer picture.

I remember that lunches were divided into First Lunch and Second Lunch.  I don't know what that meant exactly, as to WHEN those two lunches were, but I do know it all depended on your schedule of classes, or maybe it all depended on which one you chose when you were choosing the classes you were going to take (a frequent dream of mine, by the way, the choosing of the classes).  I know that my group of friends all wanted to have the same lunch period and we managed to get it, judging by the picture above, so maybe it was chosen BY us, not for us.

I was one of those people who brought their lunch to school every day.  I certainly had many lunch boxes over the years, because I never was able to buy hot lunches, even though I would have died to get them.  I am pretty sure the lunch box I had was red plaid--that's the one that I picture.  And what was in that red plaid lunch box?  Sandwiches, tuna, peanut butter and raspberry jam, or bologna with mayonnaise.  No lettuce, not because I wouldn't have liked it, but because it would have been horribly wilted by lunch time--there were no thermal lunch boxes then, only tin, with a space for a thermos (pint-sized) of milk.  But I got to buy milk and sip it with a straw, which had a certain cache for me, since I couldn't buy the hot lunch.  Better than nothing.  

So I had my lunch, which sat in my lunch box in my locker until lunch time, getting warm and soggy.  I suppose there was fruit in there sometimes--or a cookie--something to break up the monotony of the sandwich.  I didn't pack my lunch--my Mom did--and she wasn't very creative about it, I'm afraid.  But I didn't care, because my main goal at lunch was to get something off of somebody else's hot lunch tray!  Not a single one of the girls I had lunch with seemed to understand how cool it was to be able to have a hot lunch.  They took them for granted, I guess.  They hated the food that was dished onto them, particularly Shepherd's Pie.  Well, lucky for me and for them, Shepherd's Pie was one of my favorites of the coveted hot lunches.  When Shepherd's Pie was on the lunch menu for the day, I was in heaven.  I knew that at least one of the girls at our table would let me have the whole thing.  They would eat whatever else was on the tray, but I would get the Shepherd's Pie.  Oh, glorioski!  Did I ever love those mashed potatoes and carrots and string beans and meat and gravy all mixed together. I can still taste that Shepherd's Pie as if it was yesterday.   I liked the Swiss Steak, too, which most of my friends did not like and there were probably other meals they gave to me.  It's a wonder I didn't have to diet in those days, isn't it?

The other thing about school lunchtime that I loved was the laughing and the talking we did.  Was the lunch an hour or 30 minutes?  I don't know.  But I do know that we filled it with gossip about boys, joking, teasing each other, griping about our brothers/sisters, complaining about teachers, homework, organizing slumber parties, wondering who was going to be asked to dances, making elaborate plans for how to get a boy's attention.  I don't recall talking about clothes much, we didn't wear makeup except lipstick for some of us, we didn't talk about our weight or our hair, that I recall. 

I suppose we talked about what we were going to wear to dances.  That was always a problem in my house--how we were going to afford the dress for the dance.  I remember getting a used white dress for one of the dances and buying green velvet ribbon, which I made into little bows and sewed onto the dress.  It reminded me of a dress I'd seen in Gone With the Wind, so I was happy with it.  And with every dress there had to be shoes and gloves, because (remember?)  we used to wear gloves then.  I had a pair of little white gloves (and one pair of white heels) and probably one of the lunch discussions was how to wash the white gloves and keep them clean.  We might have talked about the white buck shoes we all wore then--and the little powder packet we used to slap on the shoes to keep them white.  We might have talked about starching and ironing our petticoats, the more petticoats you had under your full skirt the more status you had.  I only had 3.  Poor me!  We might have talked about getting permanents to keep our hair curly--for those of us who had straight hair.  Many of my friends had curly hair and I don't believe there were hair straightening techniques then, or they would have used them.  No teenaged girl is ever satisfied with her hair.  My mother started me out at 4 years old with my first perm and bankrolled them, at the Cinderella Beauty School in downtown Bremerton, for the rest of my school career.  After high school there were no more perms for me.  The smell of the "neutralizing solution" was enough to put me off them forevermore.

I bet we talked about football and basketball games and cheer leading.  Some of our circle aspired to be cheerleaders and one of us, Helen Callison, actually achieved that goal.  Bonnie and I tried out once, but alas, we did not succeed.  But we all went to the games and cheered for our Cougars and sang the school song and the fight song and in my case, didn't really watch the games.  I knew all the rules, because I watched sports on television with my Dad, but high school sports, for most of us girls, was more a social occasion than a sport to follow, unless one of the boyfriends was on the team.  Then it was a different ball game, so to speak.

Which brings us full circle back to school lunches, which were not about eating, except when there was Shepherd's Pie.  School lunches were about being social, about eating with friends, about laughing, as that picture, which was in the Senior section of the 1962 Echo,  shows.  They were about belonging and that high school family that you form, that is more important, sometimes, than your real family and often more supportive.  There is a movie that I would recommend, called Mean Girls, that is all about high school, about lunch rooms, about the angst of the teen years.  I don't recall being one of the Mean Girls.  I hope I wasn't, though, as I say, others might have different recollections.  I hope we didn't cause angst, because we had enough of our own--in our families, in our "romances", in our insecurities, which are at their height in high school.  Any and all of our anxieties could have been aired at that lunchroom table, during that one blessed hour (or half hour) of the day when we were allowed to forget about classes and what might be going on at home.  Mostly, though, we just laughed.

PS:  I nagged Silver City Brewing (www.silvercitybrewery.com), in Silverdale, to please add Shepherd's Pie to their regular menu and they finally did.  Try it some time--it's absolutely delicious and the taste of it takes me back to that lunch room 40-plus years ago.  But now I have to pay for it with money rather than with my dignity!  I think it tasted a little better when I had to grovel for it.

Sponsoring a Child in Africa

What an incredible rush (as we used to say back in the day)!!!  I just committed to sponsoring a child in Senegal, West Africa.  I listen to KZOK radio every morning--specifically the Bob Rivers Show.  They are the ones who create Twisted Tunes and they don't play much music, other than what they have created.  Mostly they talk, interview comics or scientists (Bob is very into science) or people in the news, but for the past couple of years they have been involved with World Vision, an organization that Bill Gates also supports.  Bob and other members of his show have been to Senegal to see the conditions first hand.  They have all sponsored children and have child-sponsor drives every year.  This year Bob's son, Keith and his wife and Arik, the show's producer, went to Senegal.  It was a world-view changer for Keith.  Keith just returned and he was on the radio show this morning trying to explain his feelings.  He couldn't stop choking up.  I have been listening to these drives for a few years now and been tugged and pulled, but had resisted actually sponsoring a child--it s $30 a month commitment and I felt that it was too much for my limited budget.  Yes, I have a husband who is rolling in dough, though most of it goes into savings for our retirement, but our finances are kept separate, so anything like this comes out of my Social Security and pension from the State, which isn't huge.

However, this morning, listening to Keith talk about these kids and his epiphany, listening to him come to tears every time he attempted to talk about it--that got to me like nothing has before.  So I got online and I went to the website that KZOK has put links to all over their website and I chose the second child they showed me, because she is almost exactly the same age as my granddaughter, Alison.  Her name is Sokhna Diarra, born March 15, 2005.   She doesn't go to school yet and my donation will help her do that when the time comes.  I have the World Vision address so that I can send her letters, which I will do as often as I can.  I felt that I spend so much on stupid stuff, coffees, books I don't need, (shelves of them I haven't read yet), clothes I don't need and my grandchildren have everything they have ever wanted and more.  I can afford this and I must do it.  I used to dream of becoming a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa and then marriage and children happened and the Peace Corps became something that wasn't ever going to happen.  I also used to dream of being Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall, going to Africa, studying primates.  Well, that was pie in the sky--no degree in anthropology or any science that would get me there and an aversion to outdoor camping(!).  So Africa has been in my dreams for decades.  Here is my connection to that continent.  Rather than being a tourist there, which is still a possibility, I am going to help this one child.  

I will put addresses here to the KZOK website and to the World Vision website, just in case anyone who reads this has a charitable inclination.  It feels good, but more important, much more important than how I feel right now, is that this little girl may have a better life because of the money I am sending.  She may have more opportunity, she may have more faith in life from the letters I will send her and the gifts I will send her.  Hopefully, one day I will meet her.  They wrote in the little description of her and her life, that she is in "satisfactory" health.  Maybe this will help her achieve good health.   

www.kzok.com 

  www.worldvision.org  

I'll keep you posted on how this is working out, but I have great hope that Sokhna will benefit and it's going to feel damned good to write to her and send her things.  She will be grandchild #7.  And 7 is a lucky number.

Summer Laundry

Who can do a long post when the weather is so beautiful that all you want to do is hang your laundry outside and sit in the shade and drink cold things while it dries?  As we know oh so well, it will be over before we have a chance to get used to it.

And, in other news:  Welcome back to the Real World, Ralph!  I hear your bridge is open.