Growing Up an East Sider: Be True to Your School

The Beach Boys got it right with that old song. Being true to your school was a thing back when I was growing up; now perhaps not so much.

For East Siders, as for many across the country, who you were and are is often tied to what school you went to. I never gave it much thought until recently when my husband and I had lunch with an old high school friend on a visit back to the Cities to see our children and grandchildren over Thanksgiving.

Scott Degel was one of those rare things girls sometimes have - a male friend who was really and truly a friend. He never tried to hit on me, and I often cried on his shoulder (my on-again/off-again high school boy friend was one of his best friends). He sent me a message via a school website about a year ago, and we decided to get together when I was back in town. This seemed like the perfect opportunity. I was a little apprehensive, though. I wondered if we'd recognize each other. Each of us had changed quite a bit, after all. We hadn't seen each other in nearly 45 years, but in an instant the old friendship was rekindled. We talked a lot about the old days, surprising each other with bits and pieces we didn't know about back in those days.

Delighted to meet his wife Mary, I realized that except for the schools we attended, she and I probably would have been good friends. We connected instantly, and I wish I had known her back then as well. But that wouldn't have been possible.

You see, she went to a different high school. Scott never spoke of her, and I didn't even know he had a girlfriend then. You didn't talk about it if the relationship crossed school barriers. I do recall that my senior year in high school one of the Johnson cheerleaders was seriously involved with the captain of the Harding High School football team. It was close to scandalous! They did later marry, so apparently the mixed school thing wasn't such an issue after all.

I started out my school days in kindergarten at the old Mounds Park Elementary on Pacific just west of Earl Street. Originally spelled 'Mound', as you can see if you look closely at the name carved into the building, it was an old imposing school by the time I went there. At the time, we lived in the lower level of a rented duplex at 1167 Bush, about a block and a half east of Earl.

(Side note: I find it somewhat humorous that I struggle with remembering things now but recall the address of every house I've lived in, and that's not a small number.)

And I walked to school. It astounds me now when I look at the map how far it really was. My recollection was that I walked just a few blocks, but in actuality it was over a mile away. I was just two months past my fifth birthday when school started. Can you imagine sending a five-year-old on a journey like that? My mother may have walked me to and from the place where the kids gathered to cross with the help of the school patrol, but I'm not sure. She had two toddlers and a new baby at home, so it's not likely.

These days you wouldn't let a small child walk a block alone, let alone a distance like that. But things were different in those days; there were no school buses and life felt a little safer. I don't recall my daily walks as anything unusual. Every kid walked back and forth to school, sometimes twice a day, because most schools had no meal program so students went home for lunch.

At some point during second grade there was a fire in the school. I think it started in the girls' bathroom, where the stalls and the toilet seats were all made of wood. The damage was bad enough that we finished out the school year in the basement of a church on a busy corner on Earl Street. I think it was Earl and Third, but I don't recall for sure. I don't even know if it affected the entire school or just my classroom. Mounds Park Elementary was restored, but I never went back there.

Farnsworth Elementary (photo courtesy of spps.org)

In the summer of 1963, my parents bought their first house - a one-story brick and stucco home on the corner of Earl and Orange. 1264 Earl, just down the street from beach house at Lake Phalen. There were no charter or magnet schools in those days, only neighborhood schools. You went to the one closest to your home. When school began in the fall I went to Farnsworth - just a few blocks up the street on Arcade.

As fate would have it, my dad and his brothers and sisters had also gone to Farnsworth. Bertha Moats - the principal when I attended - had been there when my dad was a child. His youngest brother, Steven, was just a few years older than me, so it was assumed by some of the teachers that I was the youngest sister. (I ran into that same thing when I attended high school. My parents had both been Johnson High students as well. It got even worse when my uncle and I attended some classes together at the University of Minnesota. He would sit in class with his wife on one side and me on the other. The professor had a hard time with the names, processing what relationships might be at work there.)

And unintentionally I perpetuated this family tradition. My two older children went to Farnsworth for a couple of years, and I ended up as a classroom helper there, until we moved to Duluth. Without deliberately looking for a home in that neighborhood, we bought a house on Ivy right behind Johnson. So Farnsworth was the logical school - three or four blocks away. By then you could choose schools, but I liked the idea of a nearby school, plus I had a sentimental fondness for Farnsworth.

From Farnsworth I moved on to Cleveland Junior High School for seventh and eighth grade, and then to Johnson Senior High. Junior high was somewhat uneventful. I do recall the building was relatively new, a lot of glass, concrete, and steel. There were three highlights of those two years (not necessarily in any order of importance): I fell in love for the first time with a shy boy named Marty who sat behind me in Spanish class; I broke my collarbone falling off the uneven parallel bars in the gym, missing the mat just slightly because my spotter, the gym teacher, was distracted by the male gym teacher standing in the doorway chatting with her; and I got to attend the school police patrol picnic at Como Park for two more years because I was in the marching unit at Cleveland, and we were part of the parade.

One year we did a routine to 'Anchors Aweigh" and I was required to wear a pair of blue jeans, a white t-shirt, and sailor caps. That meant my mother had to buy me a pair of jeans, which I would never be permitted to wear again. (At that point we were just being allowed to wear pants to school, but only matching pant suits and never blue jeans; that came my junior or senior year in high school I think.) My mother was enraged that we would be wearing jeans out in public, because in her words, only farm girls and whores wore jeans. Ah mom, the times they were a-changing.

Oh, and my math teacher, Mr. Mortensen, had been at Pearl Harbor the day it was bombed. He didn't talk about it much, even when students asked. I knew quite a bit about what happened there, as both my paternal uncles had fought in World War II. One uncle was a history teacher who had a fondness for telling war stories and for giving history books as presents at Christmas and birthdays.

In my school days, I was following in the path of my father and his siblings in school attendance at Farnsworth, Cleveland, and Johnson. My mother had gone to a different elementary school, but at some point her family moved and she attended Johnson, where she met my father. My journalism teacher, Gordon Grant, knew them as young teenagers in love. He was in his first year out of teacher college and had them in his English class. I think he got a kick out of telling me about them passing notes and whispering in class. Hard to imagine my parents as love-struck teenagers.

Part of the Johnson Courier staff, 1972-1973

I graduated from Johnson in June of 1973, with lots of adventures to recall. I was co-secretary of the Student Council my senior year, along with Jeff Bauer, Bob Sanft, John McDonough, Lenora Haas, and others. For two years I was co-editor of the yearbook (the "Governor") with my best friend Cindi Johnson, as well as sports editor of the school newspaper, "The Courier", also with Cindi and some of our other friends, like Julie Heaton and Judy Bateman (shown here).

One year the Johnson yearbook won a national award. Cindi and I got to go on a loosely-chaperoned trip to Chicago for a national high school journalism conference. We stayed at the Parker House Hotel, and we flirted with guys from far-away schools. We also got into some mischief. They probably still talk at the hotel about the gang of teenagers who filled an elevator with furniture from the lobby. We thought we were so grown up when we walked to a nearby restaurant for dinner, like we were adults. I recounted our meal when I got home, and my dad almost fainted at the thought of a group of out-of-town teenage girls strolling around downtown Chicago at night.

I loved being the sports editor - it gave me the opportunity to spend time with the guys. Once I took a stack of pre-signed hall passes (Mr. Grant was pretty liberal with those) and got the entire football team out of class for an outside photo shoot. But I also had my serious, academic side. Sports wasn't the only thing I covered for the school newspaper; as co-editor of the paper covered current events and wrote some in-depth pieces on other subjects as well. One project involved interviewing mayoral candidates and writing about the political races.

As I look back, most of my friendships from those years were with guys. All platonic. I think that because I was so close to my dad growing up that I felt more comfortable around males. My relationship with my mother was pretty nonexistent. To this day I still find myself more comfortable around men than women. Go figure.

I played cards in the cafeteria before homeroom most mornings. 'War' was the favorite. We also saved gum wrappers to fold into interlocking chains. I attended physics and German classes I wasn't registered for just for fun. (Some of my school friends may still recall physics teacher Mr. Risch and the 'wheel of misfortune' that could land you in 'the sin bin' for offenses such as chewing gum in class.) Frau Tschesche named me 'Annalisa' in German 101, which I dropped in on because my boyfriend was in it. After a few days she realized I wasn't on her class list and that was the end of that. I was part of the Pep Club and the National Honor Society. I took drama and was in several school plays. Often I skipped lunch to swim in the school pool. I went to Young Life Bible studies in the evenings and taught Sunday school at my church.

But I also hung out with the jocks and partied with some of the less-than-academically minded. I found I had a fondness for cheap wine and cigarettes, sometimes sneaking out to hang with friends in Witches' Woods. I believe I had my first beer there. And to the chagrin of my close gal pals, I was sleeping with my boyfriend. I was definitely a study in contradictions. And I was loving it.

Johnson High School tennis team, 1972-1973

I made the boys' varsity tennis team my senior year and got a letter at the lettermen's banquet. I spoke at the event since I was the sports editor, and I had the thrill of sitting next to and introducing Herb Brooks as our guest speaker. Herb was a Johnson alumni who was then the hockey coach at the U of M. (Herb would later go on to coach the U.S. Olympic hockey team in 1980 to a victory which became known as "the Miracle on Ice.")

That varsity letter was proudly sewn by me onto the tennis team jacket my father had worn when he played. I started off playing with his old wood racquet, but a mishap during a practice at the tennis courts on Johnson Parkway and Maryland destroyed that relic. So I quickly upgraded to a somewhat revolutionary titanium Head model. Lightweight metal racquets were all the rage then, and many professional players were making the switch. The teardrop configuration created a bigger sweet spot than the traditional oval, and of course I wanted to be in on that action.

To pay for that new racquet required almost an act of God, because it meant taking money out of my college savings account. Unfortunately my parents were on a trip to Jamaica or some other such place and I needed their signature to do that. We had an upcoming match and I was desperate. An understanding neighbor across the alley loaned me the cash, and I was able to repay him when my parents returned. But I certainly got a stern lecture about what that money was supposed to be for, and it wasn't for what my mother considered a frivolous activity. She wasn't all that thrilled about my being on the team anyway, and she almost died of embarrassment having to admit it was her daughter getting a boys' varsity letter when she was asked at the banquet which team her son was on. Having me at the head table because I was the sports editor only made matters worse.

I took tennis lessons mainly for revenge. My boyfriend, who was on the team already, made fun of me every time we tried to play for fun. So to spite him, during one of our breaks from our relationship, I asked his older brother to teach me. At the initial team meeting he assumed I was there to talk to him. He was shocked when I said I was there for tryouts. And then I made the team. I think I was almost as surprised as he was. I also think our coach, Conrad Hoff, was somewhat lax in what he required of the players, because I really wasn't all that proficient. Or maybe he just had a roster to fill and was a little short. At any rate, I got in. And after that all my free time was spent at the tennis court practicing.

As you can see from the photo, there was a shortage of female talent. Another girl, Cathy Hansen, had made the team but for some reason isn't in the picture. There were no varsity girls' teams in those days. And I think we were the first girls to make one of the boys' teams at Johnson. Our school district was somewhat liberal and permitted it. Other districts were not so tolerant, and I remember non-conference away matches where all Cathy and I could do was sit on the sidelines with a clipboard and keep track of strokes and note errors.

During my high school days I had my feet firmly planted in several camps. My broad circle of friends was diverse, if hard to integrate. But then so were my interests. I was still discovering who I wanted to be when I grew up. I was experimenting on almost every front, from my hair color to my class selections to my extra-curricular activities.

Mr. Grant convinced me to be his student teacher my junior year at the University of Minnesota. The siblings of many of my friends (as well as my younger sister) were in his classes, and it was a challenge to get them to take me seriously. I enjoyed the time, but it convinced me that one thing I knew I didn't want to do was to teach high school.

Except for my old friend Scott, I've lost track of most of my high school chums. I have reconnected with a few on Facebook, and that has stirred up a lot of old memories. A few have even commented on these blog posts - old names appearing in my activity log that I haven't thought of for decades.

Oh, and to my horror, my mother worked at Johnson when I was there. But that's a story for another day.