Info and registration here.
Update your contact info here to receive future informative emails.
Category: Uncategorized
At Edison Junior High, our 7th grade Metals Shop teacher was Mr. Connor, a strict disciplinarian. At the end of the year, Mr. Connor was promoted to Dean of Boys, the primary job for administering corporal punishment to miscreants.
That fall, he was replaced by Mr. Whitaker, fresh out of Northeastern in Tahlequah. He taught five sections a day of Metals Shop. In 8th grade 29 other miscreants and I were assigned shop first period, so it was also our homeroom.
Mr. Whitaker had a terminal case of “don’t give a ****”.
Thirty 13-year-old boys were given free run of the shop, essentially a small-scale metal fabrication facility. Most of us had a year of metals and wood shop under our belts, where we were taught beginning level projects focusing on simple plans and safe tool use. By contrast, Mr. Whitaker’s style was “free form” — like a mashup of Montessori method on a shop floor. Mr. Whitaker told us our assignment was to build something — anything — of our own choice.
One kid, a notorious hoodlum, had the idea to craft a set of brass knuckles. Mr. Whitaker’s only question: Did he plan to bend them out of bar stock or cast them?
Another kid planned to turn a working mini-cannon on a lathe. Mr. Whitaker didn’t give a ****.
No consideration was given to economic use of materials. At the end of the nine weeks all the bar stock was twisted like pretzels.
Even less consideration was given to safety. Drill presses, lathes, hacksaws, cutting blades, a welding machine, soldering irons, and a blast furnace — what could possibly go wrong?
Six weeks in, all 8th graders were given a standardized test in their homeroom class. Mr. Whitaker refused to proctor it beyond insuring there was an adequate supply of No. 2 pencils. Let’s just say the test became a community project. Mr. Whitaker simply did not give a ****.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that of the 31 people in the classroom, Mr. Whitaker was not among the top 10 in maturity. Thirty of us were 8th grade boys, mind you.
First day of the second nine weeks, we had a new permanent teacher for Metals Shop. About that time our English teacher assigned a novel, Lord of the Flies. Suddenly our 8th grade Metals Shop experience started to make some sense.
We never heard from Mr. Whitaker again.
Everyone at Edison knew Coach Haney. He was the Head Coach of a successful basketball program, and as I recall he was an Assistant JV Football Coach.
Football was my sport, by default, because I sucked at everything else. After football season ended, the “6th hour boys” were expected to at least make an effort to try out for a winter sport. Swimming? Get real. Wrestling? I feared getting my ass kicked by a real wrestler. And I’d never played basketball. I searched frantically for alternatives.
One morning before school I caught Coach Haney and asked if he needed any basketball trainers. Mike Hollifield and David Pitcher were already varsity trainers, but Coach Haney said I could help out with the junior varsity team.
Through that experience, I learned Life Skills like counting towels, sweeping floors, keeping a basketball scorebook, and running the electronic scoreboard. I also became Edison’s King of Popcorn, which we sold at basketball games and wrestling matches. Fifteen cents a bag. The worst part of the job was the dad jokes: “Eating up all the profits, eh?”
One afternoon Coach Haney was in a bind; he needed someone to keep score at a tournament game. I couldn’t, but to my amazement I found a volunteer within a few minutes. I can still remember Coach Haney’s response when I told him: “You’re a good man, Maley! I’m going to give you a varsity letter!” And he did. Not a huge deal in the scheme of things, but his small gesture made an impact on me, one that I remember 50 years later.
Coach Haney was, what, 5’3″ in slippers? But he was a giant in terms of his impact on the lives of young men.
The Friday before Election Day 1972, the Nixon campaign scheduled a last-minute whistle stop rally in a huge hangar at the Tulsa airport. It was our junior year; school let out early, so I hitched a ride home (I thought). My friends thought it would be a great idea to go see the President. Super, I says.
The problem was, the rally was in the late afternoon. Our last football game of the season was that night.
The crowd at the airport was huge. We had to park two miles away and walk to the hangar.
Nov. 3, 1972 – A crowd of 20,000 greeted President Nixon in Tulsa. A huge traffic jam prevented an estimated 10,000 more people from reaching Tulsa International Airport, where he spoke …
In his speech, Nixon promised “a peace with honor” in Vietnam.
A small group of George McGovern supporters attempted to interrupt the speech with chants of “no more Nixon” and “Watergate.” Nixon supporters tried to drown them out with their own chants of “four more years” and the combined noise kept many from hearing the president’s speech.
In the election a few days later, Nixon defeated Sen. McGovern in a landslide. He also carried all 77 counties in Oklahoma by a margin of more than half a million votes …
Being short is a big disadvantage in a large crowd, and it seemed like I was surrounded by a basketball team. To top it off, the place had the acoustics of … well, an airplane hangar.
Never laid eyes on the S.O.B. Never heard a word he said.
Not only that, the rally didn’t matter one whit. The next Tuesday, the Nixon/Agnew ticket rolled to a historic landslide. Before three years passed, both men had resigned in disgrace.
In the football game the night of the rally, we got our asses kicked in a game we should have won. I got on the field for exactly one play, during which I got kicked in the ankle. By the end of the game it looked like a misshapen eggplant.
To this day, I don’t like crowds, I don’t trust politicians, and I’m glad I was never a fanboy.
Top Row: Mr. Shepherd, Principal; Mrs. Lawson (Kennedy); Loni Rombach, Denise Birchfield, Tim Hannis, Mary Vruwink, Larry Seale, Claudia Lukken.
Row 2: Kenneta Claxton, ? Moore, Jill Nelson, Yolanda Nava.
Row 3: ? Talbert, Mark Gassaway, Cindy Polson, Bruce Zwahlen, Daneille Irvin, Harold Sanditen, ? Adamson, Mike Wilcox.
Row 4: Carol Clark, Vicky Pollok, Brett McCormick, Cynthia Hilst, Lisa Johnson.
Row 5: Nancy Noel, Me, Mark Bennett, ? Tillison, Paula Mashburn, Chip Allison.
(My memory is not that good; I wrote the names on the original…)
These are my mostly random memories of 6th grade at Patrick Henry.
Blue Boy
The summer of 1967 was the Summer of Love in San Francisco. I remember being fascinated by the images of freaks and hippies in Life magazine, and by Blue-Boy the Acid-head getting his come-uppance from Sgt. Friday on Dragnet. Tulsa was still a white-bread city, just about as insulated and segregated as it could be; Admiral Place was the de facto demarcation line between White and Black. Schools were still segregated, and blacks were sparsely represented in popular culture, mostly in subservient roles. Julia was still in the future.
The first personal interaction I can remember with a black person was with Mrs. Lawson, who was Section 6-3’s homeroom teacher. (Later in the year, she would marry and become Mrs. Kennedy.) Mrs. Lawson was young, attractive and vivacious in an era when the typical teacher might be uncharitably described as a “schoolmarm”. Mrs. Lawson had a quick wit and she refused to treat her 6th-graders like babies.
At Patrick Henry the 6th grade teachers organized an end-of-the-year trip to Six Flags in Dallas for the graduating students. The bus left at 6 am and returned close to midnight. The trip was a privilege the teachers held over their classes’ heads all year long, as the teachers could blackball potential troublemakers for misbehavior. Mrs. Lawson told us, “I’d be afraid to send some of you kids off to Dallas — you might come home little mommies and daddies!”
Which reminds me of another rite of passage for 6th graders — “hygiene films” about our budding adolescence, one for boys, one for girls. We were given information slips to take home to our parents, so they could opt to hold students out, sex ed being very controversial. My slip got, uh, lost. If the boys’ film conveyed any information about the birds and the bees it was lost on me; all I remember was something about growing hair in my armpits and needing to use deodorant. My understanding of Mrs. Lawson’s “mommies and daddies” remark remained abstract.
1968 was a year of social upheaval: the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the King assassination and the ensuing riots. If we talked about these issues in class, I don’t remember. We were, after all, 6th graders, and Mrs. Lawson had us focused on grammar and math.
One date I remember is March 12, 1968. I rode my bike to school that morning, wearing a light jacket. During the day a Blue Norther blew in; the temperature plummeted and wet, heavy globs of late-season snow started to fall. They let us out of school early, and I hitched a ride home in the neighbors’ car. Total accumulation was about 12 inches. It was several days before electrical service was restored.
(In my family, we remember that storm because that’s the day my brother Denny first met his future wife Dee. She was a senior at Edison and her car was stuck in the snow. Ever chivalrous, Denny offered her a ride home. They will celebrate their 48th anniversary in January.)
I didn’t sleep a wink the night before the Six Flags trip. We had a blast. None of my classmates became little mommies and daddies as a result (as far as I know; maybe in the other sections). Mrs. Lawson-Kennedy had done her part to introduce us to the world beyond Patrick Henry Elementary School. The next year, most of us would be “7-B’s” at Edison Junior High.
My early childhood in Kansas was a mashup of the idyllic TV lives of Opie and The Beav. In summertime, boys played wiffle ball and rode bikes all day long. When it got really hot we swam at Wilson Lake (an old sand pit, really). I tagged along with my older brother and friends to the railroad trestle on the river — the Little Arkansas (pronounced ar-KAN-sas once you cross the state line) — to fish and catch crawdads. We shot firecrackers and BB guns and played games with no parental supervision. Dad’s back-porch whistle, which could be heard blocks away, was our dinner bell. After dinner, we held hide-and-go-seek marathons until way past dark.
Skelly had the best road maps.
Then came the first of several oil-industry dips and turns that would shape my life. My dad labored over linen maps as a draftsman for Skelly Oil Company. Fifty years ago this month, in August of 1966, Skelly closed its Wichita District office. Dad’s next Skelly paycheck, they told him, could be picked up at the headquarters office in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the “Oil Capital of the World“.
Moving meant leaving Valley Center, a little bedroom community on the edge of the Great Plains outside Wichita. For me, it meant leaving friends and school. My older sister and brother opted to pursue their educations in Kansas, which was their home. In Tulsa, I would be an only child. The new kid.
First impressions of Tulsa from our house-hunting trip were not good.We drove the 200 miles in blistering heat. Our old Rambler lacked A/C. As we finally arrived on the outskirts of Tulsa, we passed Depression-era shotgun houses along U.S. 64 in Sand Springs. We continued on past refineries and Route 66 motor courts that lined Southwest Boulevard in industrial West Tulsa.
Goodbye to Opie and The Beav and the land where the deer and the antelope play. My 9 year-old imagination ran wild: Would the midwestern Maleys’ new neighbors be the Joads and the Clampetts of Bug Tussle (before Uncle Jed went a-shootin’ for some food)?
Winston Court ca.1966. Not to be confused with the Windsor Court.
First blessing: the Winston Motor Court had a swimming pool.
I was miserable on that house-hunting trip. I couldn’t know it then, but the Maleys’ second blessing was an angel masquerading in the form of a real estate agent named Shatzie Wilson. Shatzie was pleasant, kind and patient with the whiny 9 year-old in the backseat of her station wagon as we scoured available housing in south and east Tulsa. In the days before realtor.com and Redfin, an agent’s only source of market intelligence was a 6-pound Multilist book.
Shatzie had good advice for Ann and Bob. She focused their search on areas with good schools. There were houses in their modest price range in an area called Ranch Acres. Patrick Henry Elementary was a feeder for Edison Junior and Senior High, all schools with great reputations.
Once they found a house they liked, Shatzie advised Ann and Bob to act quickly since the market was brisk. It would be a good idea, she said, to offer $100 over the asking price in case there were multiple offers. (In 1966, $100 was a lot of money.) The strategy worked; another offer had come in at the asking price at the same time.
The little brick veneer ranch on Louisville Ave. would be home for Ann and Bob for the next 30+ years.
To be continued in Part II.
While everyone is in a party mood, please take the time to go to this link and fill out the form to update your contact info. Two lines: Name (incl. maiden name) and preferred email address. You can add phone numbers, physical address etc., even give up your friends in the comments, but all that is optional.
If you received an email from me around May 12 and are OK with my using that address, you don’t have to do anything.
If you don’t want emails, you can keep up with class events by joining the Facebook Group page. I assume that anyone who has a Facebook account and any interest at all can find it. We are, after all, grown-ups. Most of us.
Even without FB, anyone with a computer and access to The Google can find this blog. Want proof? Click here.
I’m also sensitive to the fact that, for any one of about 114 reasons, someone may not wish to reconnect. I can relate. High school was painful at times. For many years I believed I was exclusively attracted to girls who were either maternal or into good grooming. That’s because whenever I asked a girl for for a date, the answer I got was either “I’m babysitting that night” or “I’m washing my hair.” Once I got “I have to babysit and wash my hair.” Talk about covering all the bases.
Anyways, thanks for your help in keeping the contact info current. Since I don’t live in Tulsa, I’m not always running into someone at the grocery store, at the liquor store at the gym or at church.
Go to page Where Are They Now? to see who we’re missing, and to send email address updates for you and your friends. (Email addresses will not be published.)
Heidi asked me a couple of weeks ago to post this — she got tired of waiting on me and emailed it herself. (Sorry Heidi!)
It’s a pdf form you can complete on your computer. Email the completed form to Heidi at hnelson14 >at< gmail >dot< com.
From Heidi Nelson:
Don’t forget to order your 40th reunion picture CD that Mark has so graciously shot for us. It includes the whole class and shots throughout the night. He has also agreed to include any of your pictures on it, if you wish to share them with the class. He didn’t charge us for coming out and recording the night, so show your appreciation by buying a copy for only $22. Don’t delay, do it today!!
Send your check or money order to:
Mark Montgomery
P.O. Box 3203…
Tulsa OK 74101
Include on a separate piece of paper, your name address including city, state and zip. (Don’t forget to include your own pics)
Tulsa Edison Class of 1974 Reunion Weblog 