High School Memories

This coming Wednesday, June 25, will mark the 60th anniversary of my high school graduation.

On the same date four years earlier, June 25, 1961, I had graduated from eighth grade in our parish elementary school. Both schools were connected with my home parish in the Bronx. Both were within walking distance of home and in the dominating shadows of our parish church's great gothic towers. Both schools aimed to replicate the seeming solidity of post-war American society and the seemingly stable and super-successful mid-century American Catholic Church.

Since I went to the parish high school, the transition from grade school was much less abrupt and challenging than it might otherwise have been. School was a little more than a block away, and the Augustinian priests who formed much of the faculty were already familiar figures from the parish, for whom I had been serving Mass for years. 

As academic "tracking" was common then, the freshman class was divided into three sections. I was in the so-called "scholarship section, which meant we studied Latin instead of tying and French instead of Spanish! We were 30 in my section, about half of whom were guys from other parishes, one of whom eventually became my best friend for life.

Our principal liked to say that one should learn as much in four years of high school as in eight years of elementary school. I certainly found high school more academically demanding at first, although I quickly adapted and did adequately enough. (I ended up graduating sixth in my class of 56.)

The principal was also the math teacher, highly devoted to the "new math," as it was then called. It was so "new" in fact that for the first month or so we had no textbook and had to use mimeographed copies of the first few chapters until the books finally arrived! I never liked arithmetic much (a residue of the trauma of my abrupt immersion in long division in the fourth grade), but I did well in algebra and really liked geometry.

In support of our principal's somewhat illusory aspiration to heighten the academic standard of what was, after all, just a small parochial high school, we also took lots of standardized tests - the National Educational Development Test, the Iowa Test of Educational Development, the National Merit Scholarship Test. I always scored well, often in the highest percentile, and so earned several plaques to celebrate this otherwise irrelevant accomplishment.

Unlike the many exclusively Catholic boys' or girls' schools, ours was what was then called "co-institutional." That meant both boys and girls shared the same building, but in separate "Departments," which were for most purposes separate schools, each with its own separate faculty and administration, its own separate entrance (photo) and stairway, separate lunch periods, and, of course, completely separate classes. The system had its obvious advantages and its obvious disadvantages, as any system does. For many, attending classes uncomplicated by too much adolescent sexual tension may have been beneficial. For introverts like me, however, I wonder whether a more normal environment might have helped better develop much needed social skills. 

Other than the weekly school Masses and the annual retreat, one of the very few school activities both boys and girls participated in together was the annual school musical. For each of my first three years, the school put on a variety show, directed by a guy who annually went from school to school putting on such programs. These we light-hearted musical reviews, with corny titles like Just for Kicks (JFK) and Mad About Manhattan. Being in the "chorus" for those shows every year was one of the highlights of the spring term. To be sure, I didn't discover and latent talent, and I studiously avoided having to stand out on stage, but I genuinely enjoyed being part of the whole collaborative project, as well as the "cast party" at the end, at which one of my favorite teachers would sing The Chattanooga Choo-Choo.

Sometime in sophomore year, I had some tentative conversations with my English teacher (the same priest who sang at the annual "cast party") about possibly becoming a priest myself. In the end, my post high school years and experiences took me in a different direction and I ended up a priest by a much more roundabout route. I have often wondered what would have. happened had I entered the Augustinian novitiate in 1965. Would I have been ordained a priest at a more "normal" age, or would my vocation been one of the casualties of the social and religious turmoil of the 1960s - and of my own emotional immaturity at that time? (One interesting thought: had I entered and persevered after high school, then at some point I would likely have met and maybe gotten to know the current Pope!)

In reality, I experienced those high school years - conventional as everything seemed to be in so  many ways - as a mixture of good and bad, but also as a time of increasing inner personal turmoil. 

Coincidentally, the outside world was itself also becoming more turbulent after the more peaceful-seeming 1950s. My high school years coincided with the Civil Rights movement - the sit-ins, the freedom riders, and the whole very public, long delayed challenge to a long-standing unjust state of affairs. (My high school had exactly one black student.) It was a time also when high school students were beginning to align themselves politically.  My class had its share of Goldwaterites. My own alignment was closer to a pro-civil rights, moderate-to-liberal Democrat. Internationally too it was a scary time. The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in October of my sophomore year. And, of course, the defining trauma of my high school years came in November of my junior year, with the assassination of President Kennedy. More happily, I was still in high school in February 1964 when the Beatles came to America for the first time and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Watching that famous broadcast, I could not, of course, have anticipated the cascade of social change that was waiting in the wings, but there was a sense that new and exciting things might be possible.

The Church was changing too. My freshman year, the high school yearbook was dedicated to Pope John XXIII and the imminent ecumenical council. It included this curious prayer for the council: "grant that they may be vigilant, united among themselves, not seeking the triumph of some idea which is dear to a group of men, a nation, a Religious Order, but only to follow with docility the inspiration of your grace." Like so many things we parochial high schoolers expected our future to be like, the future was not quite what we predicted or thought we were praying for. 

Soon enough, we were all to be affected by wider social forces and political, cultural, and religious transformations that brought an end to our placid, narrowly insular, parochial world. Meanwhile, as all those external changes were taking place in the wider world, an inner turbulence was taking over my own life, as my decidedly mixed experience of high school celebrated its tepid end 60 years ago this week.