Fast Times at MUHS

I often say I was a ‘teenager’ for just one year, the 1960-61 school year.  That was my second run at the junior year of high school,  following the one in which I had dropped out in November after a fairly serious mule wreck and missing too much to catch up.

Once I got back up to speed I had become the head wrangler for my dad’s developing horse and mule business in which I was basically a major partner. Those months of doing an adult’s work and dealing with a lot of them as a semi-equal did change me. Still, when I went back to school the next fall, I fell into a total rebellious mode and skirted on the edge of many kinds of trouble. No booze or drugs but trying hard for the sex and rock n roll bit!

I simply could not get interested in ‘boys’ anymore. They seemed so juvenile and goofy, crude but also shy, in short b-o-r-i-n-g!! I was ready to go on a full fledged hunt for “Romance” (yes, that is romance with a capital R) to support what had become a genuine addiction fueled by pop and operetta music, novels and TV westerns. While I was out riding (training and ‘socializing’ many horses and mules) those several months, often alone, I had crossed paths with a lot of what I now call “the young and restless.” These were blue collar guys in the 20-30 age range who drove trucks, worked construction and similar things. Most were married and bored with the barefoot and pregnant “little woman” at home who was no longer the cute sexy chick they had married, generally in haste. Ooops! Yes, that is not a recipe for happily ever after, but how did I know?

All I really intended to do as flirt and talk a bit, perhaps gain a little of the masculine admiration and appreciation which I felt I lacked but needed. And really, that was all that ever happened. Still I did quite a few things that my parents, especially my dad, were dismayed and angered by. And of course I caught heck which simply threw more gas on the blaze of my rebellion.

For example, I cut off a pair of nearly new jeans to make shorts. Oh man, that was a huge sin! First I had wasted a perfectly good pair of work pants and second I had done it to try to look flashy and cute to male eyes!! Horrors! I  heard about that for days. Then I tended to hang out in spare moments at the Y-Not drive in up the hill, a place patronized by the aforementioned young and restless for lunch, snacks and such. It even had a jukebox on which I played the local hit by a local musician, Alvie Self, on whom I developed a kind of crush. I can still kind of hum "Nancy" all these years later.

Never met the guy although I knew all of his brothers; they were a wild lot like the Coleman boys and a few other local big families. I did not date through high school—no proms or sock hops or even many games. I was not allowed to go out with anyone I was willing to be seen with and was very rarely asked by any of my school mates who were believed to be ‘suitable.’ I do not know if I was deemed too weird or was simply intimidating, which I had no idea I could be, but that's now moot.

I never could quite understand the whys of  the boys versus men thing. In truth, I knew several girls who “got into trouble” while dating some of those 'nice' high school boys and one friend who went off one evening with her current teenage crush and a few of his buds and had to jump from the car and run for her chastity if not her life, probably to escape a gang rape!! Safe? Yeah, right! But then maybe I would not have been allowed to go off in a car with one--or more--since I never asked.

None of my flirtations actually went as far as a real date or even a tryst. I knew and I am sure most of the guys knew that I was still seventeen and definitely jail bait. That spring near the end of the year I turned eighteen and rather abruptly left most such silliness behind.  Oh, I still waved and occasionally chatted with various men, but it was no longer a big thrill.

I resurrected my briefly forgotten vow that I would be valedictorian when I graduated to best my long-term crush. He held a special place with me from sixth grade through my own graduation and even a bit past and had graduated in 1959 as co-salutatorian. So that next year I studied, worked hard at home, still at least a half-time cowboy girl, and minded my P’s and Q’s pretty well. I really did not expect I would make that goal but surprisingly I did. Not that it made any difference in my life in the long run although it might have been an added brownie point or two when I finally started college a few years later and was able to get scholarships and grants to pay my way.

For me fast times at Mingus Union was a very brief and somewhat odd time. I read my journals from those days and laugh, cringe and somewhat sympathize. So long ago and far away—it feels like reading one of those teenager novels of those days or a bit later with all the angst and roller-coaster emotions which in my case were compounded or amplified by my family’s ‘different’ lifestyle and my parent’s absurdly strict rules. Somehow I did survive and in time found that romance, perhaps not the prince charming I had imagined or the wonderful fairy tale vision but good, real and deep and authentic which in the end are better and more lasting.

Mingus-at-Clarkdale, 8th-10th grd

MUHS-Jerome; art bldg, May 1962