I left California when I was in my early thirties. Transplanted myself in the Missouri Ozarks, West Texas, and now Tennessee.
When I abandoned California, I was really surprised to learn that school started in August in many places. I consider August to be the pinnacle of summer. School?? Never!
When I was a kid in Southern California school always started in mid-September, usually around the 15th. September in Southern Cal is almost always the hottest month of the year. Blisteringly hot.
I vividly remember the September when I started seventh grade. I was only eleven years old (I began first grade at the age of four - - at Rutgers Prep, the posh private school in New Jersey).
My seventh grade school was Dale Junior High in Anaheim, California. The first day that school started there was a horrific heat wave. The brutal desert Santa Ana winds blew in and the temperature soared to 115 degrees (Fahrenheit). It stayed that way for nearly a week.
Dale Junior High as it looks today.
There were absolutely no trees around when I attended school there - only a few palm trees across the street.
Back then in ancient times, nobody catered to kids. Despite the searing heat, the schools never shut down. I had to walk over two miles (one way) to school. No buses on my route. No rides.
The heat was so intense that we really didn't have any constructive classes. There was no air-conditioning. Our teachers would open the doors and all the windows and turn out the lights. We'd swelter in a dark classroom, using wet paper towels to try to keep cool.
I think walking home was the worst part. I was so desperately dehydrated that I nearly passed out. If you think 100 degrees is hot, you should experience 115 on a long walk when you're eleven years old.
Come to think of it - during all my school years, I never rode the bus. I always walked - from second grade through my senior year.
Change of subject, sort of
I also never ate in the school cafeteria, not once. I always brought my lunch. In second grade I had a "farmer" lunch pail. It was shaped like a barn. Later I progressed to a Flintstones lunch box (heaven help us). After that, my mind's a blank. I think I brought all subsequent lunches in a brown paper bag.
A rather unflattering photo of me, probably age six, in Glendora, California - showing off my new barnyard lunch pail (was my hair really that light?).
I didn't look like a child when I was six. I resembled a CEO or something. The children at Rutgers Prep in NJ were dressed meticulously. In California it was more casual.....
....but Dale Junior High had a strict dress code when I was there.
Years later, when I was a student piano teacher in behalf of Cypress College, two of my young pupils were brothers who attended Dale Junior High. The crime in that school was so rampant that their mother removed them from Dale JH and placed them in a Catholic school.
Nowadays anything goes. Kids show up in schools with tattoos, nose rings, tattered jeans - - and that's just the girls.
Civil society has diminished into absolute trash.
Jon 💚 yearning for the old days
Afterthought
Ever since I (erroneously) announced that my blog would be discontinued, readership dwindled. The general consensus was that I'd croak and be done with.
My blog post reruns (like this one) seem to inspire even more of a mass exodus.
But I plan to remain, eternally bewitching you with my mesmeric magic.
I can't resist.
