We Boomers...

70's Parents lamenting: "They have no respect for their elders, they dress like bums, and their music...it's just noise!"

That post about the Blizzard of 1978 reminded me of my time in Goff Jr High. Nostalgia comes into play but I temper that with the fact it wasn't all fun. It's true that no matter what age you are, now or then, there were great days and some real ugly ones.

 

I called Goff Jr High the “Rat Trap.” Goff at the time was processing the tail end of the Boomers through and there was a good many of us. The administration of the building ran the place like a prison camp. It was an education on how to follow orders. We were guided through the maze to the next class, to the cafeteria and to wherever.

“uh-TEN-HUT! Eyes Foward...foward.....MARCH!”

I suppose there was no other way to manage that large a group of young teens but some of the teachers and administration took to it with the relish of a camp guard.

“You there! No talking! Get back in line!”

 

Teachers doubled as hall monitors as the classes changed. They would stand at strategic spots, looking for those known trouble makers and keeping an eye on them, while those looking more innocent would pull pranks behind their backs. There was a definite us and them mentality.

The bell would ring, and a flood of kids would spill into the hallway with a instant burst of talking that was quite loud. Then there was that “tramp, tramp, tramp” of 900 pairs off feet going down the hallways all at once. In about four minutes, the changeover was complete and most of the kids were in their next class. Occasionally we'd hear a burnt out teacher in an adjacent classroom scream at his class to “Sit down and shut up!” Those teachers needed to retire.

There was an old World War II ditty some kid reworked that made the rounds in the school about the most pissed off, run down teachers we knew. He swapped out Hitler and Mussolini’s names for the two most hated teachers.

 

Whistle While you Work!

Hecker is a Jerk!

Bertoncinni, Bit his Weenie

Now It Doesn't Squirt!

You have to love the level of maturity fourteen year olds have.

There were some teachers who could command respect from us without resorting to screeching and threats of detention.  The best one was a woman too. She had little problem in her classroom when it came keeping it manageable. She made friends of us and did it well too.

 

Miss Knight was a recent Providence College English major graduate who might have been 25 years old at the time. She was your perfect 70's chick too. She was thin and wore the latest clothing but nothing Disco. She sported Dorothy Hamil's haircut and drove a really beat to crap Alfa Romeo.

She looked cool to us.

Knight's english class was enjoyable and not drudge work as many of the others were. What made it enjoyable is that she blew about ¼ of the class time just talking to us about pretty much anything.

We kids would toss subjects at her that in no way you could even joke about in a classroom of today. She stood up in front of the class and told us that some of her friends were gay. That topic elicited a ton of questions from the girls in our class. The boys sat there and stared, as most of us had no clue to what gay really was, beyond the sexual aspects. She told us of her love life in college, but nothing graphic. One of the conversations we had ended up killing the entire class period. She spoke of getting high.

Now, how about this. She never got into any hot water at all for talking to us about it. Not only that, she very nearly was promoting pot smoking to us kids. That day's conversation made the gossip circuit in the school and there was no reaction from the teachers nor administration. Nothing.

I can see her still, leaning on her desk, explaining why pot made listening to music on headphones so much better. That and how a Snicker's Bar tasted far too heavy and sugary when stoned. She said pot would enhance all of our senses. We kids kept raising our hands to ask a zillion questions about it. I, however, sat there very quiet. I wasn't about to add to this conversation with any stories; or, betray myself with well-informed questions about being stoned, lest any suspicions about me were further enhanced. She had reason to suspect me, and I had my concrete evidence on her too. We both caught one another getting stoned once.

I've mentioned before that my first concert was Frank Zappa. I went with my older brother and his friends who were well supplied with pot and mescaline. I never got any of that mescaline but my brother and his friends kept lighting and passing joints up and down our little group. I became fried.

This being my first concert I had take everything in. I stared at the 13,000 people in there and thought of the Roman Colosseum. The trusses that held up the Providence Civic Center's roof and Zappa's PA system, which were suspended by these very thick cables, were interesting to me. I had never seen any of this before.

During the intermission when they brought up the main lights, I could see better and looked at all the people around me. Over my shoulder, to the left and up about three rows, sat a women who was sucking greedily on a joint. I stared...is that...no...yes! It was Miss Knight.

Of course, her head happened to turn around and spot me sitting the few rows below her. Our eyes met then and we both darted our heads away. I wasn't thrown by the fact she had a joint in her mouth. I was too busy asking myself, “Shit, did she see me passing joint after joint between my brother's friends and I? She must've of!”

She had guts I guess, talking like she did in that class that day, with me in there. Or, perhaps, she didn't care at all. We both knew about one another and sort of made an unspoken pact to shut the hell up.

You have to understand. The late 70's were a time when nearly all prohibitions, restrictions on behavior, were thrown OUT. What the adults did in the 60's, filtered down to us kids in the 70's. No one cared really. There was a phrase back then that I still remember, “Too Young to Know and Too Old to Care.”

What a time it was then. What a different culture. 1978 was when sex couldn't kill you and cocaine was regarded as safe before it's quality shot through the roof in the early 80's. These were the early stages when living like libertines hadn't the time to damage you much yet.

*****

I'll compare the young and hip Miss Knight to an older teacher we knew. One who now that I think about it, we treated unfairly.

Mr. Sable, aka: “The Hook!” was my homeroom teacher in 9^th grade. He won that nickname because his right hand was bent in the shape of Peter Pan's Captain James Hook's hand. He would use this malformed hand as a pointer and still could manage to jam a piece of chalk into it and write fairly well on the blackboard. I will admit, as a young teen, this was slightly disgusting. But, being young as we were, being unfair, immature and not knowing dick about life, we adjudged this man as less than what he was. We were fresh kids still. Healthy, full of life and pretty. Life hadn't chewed us up yet time and again to where we finally learned that scars, physical and emotional, aren't really ugly, when everyone now owned quite a few.

Mr Sable, at his age and being a World War II vet, had a lousy time connecting to us young upstarts in an age where parents shared their drugs with their kids. What brats we were then too. We had it all in a sense. Money, safety and the freedom to stay up till 3AM wandering the neighborhood without the cops giving a crap.

I am sure Mr Sable had his particular opinions on our upbringing, but unfortunately for him, the world evolved beyond his generation's values. So, he had to put up with our guff. I have to say this too, he did it expertly. He never flew off the handle when some kid made an off color comment about his hand or his old fashioned nature. A very even keeled man he was.

I found out, years later, why his hand was in the miserable shape it was. We were talking about old times when Mr Sable had come up. One of us, who happened to know his family somewhat, said his hand was ripped to shreds by a German MP-40 sub-machine gun in the Ardennes forest.

When I heard that, it stopped me.

“He was in the Ardennes offensive?” I said with some surprise

“Yep” I was told. “My neighbor, and old guy, was in the same unit as Sable.”

The battle in the Ardennes forest wasted hundreds upon hundreds of American lives. The Germans had a defensive structure that made such good use of the dense forest and very narrow roads, that the Americans trying to invade it, were tossed into a wood chipper.

Had we known about this, had we kids known that Mr Sable's hand was the way it was due to being wounded in that war, we might have acted differently. But the tough old bird never did mention why he was deformed.

Miss Knight and Mr Sable. One was young and cool and the other, not. One had the easier time dealing with the kids and the other, not. One made her kids her friends and the other didn't.

You see what maturity brings to you after all these years when you can look back on what you thought you knew?