An American Youth -Part 10

A letter to my sons

My 6th grade class=property of author

I am an American who lived and worked in Bahrain for twenty-five years and both of my sons were born there. I sent the eldest to boarding school in the UK when he was eleven. The younger spent two years in Edinburgh from twelve to fourteen and then was back in Bahrain until he left for Los Angeles when he was sixteen. Since neither of them grew up in the United States I wrote them this extended letter so they might have some idea as to what it was like to grow up in the US.

Out of the thirty one pupils in my 6th grade class pictured above, I can remember the names of nineteen of them after after fifty years. I am the second from right, bottom row. I have no idea why I am wearing a bow tie.

Sixth grade was definitely different. We were starting to grow up a bit and social dynamics started to change that year. We had our first male teacher, a Mr. McGraw. He was pretty good and generally didn’t take any nonsense off the boys. I remember one day I was cutting up in class a bit and he threw a chalkboard eraser at me. He hit the guy sitting next to me Andy Miller (second from right, fourth row). Andy said, “Hey you hit the wrong guy”. Mr. McGraw just smiled and said “No, I don’t think so”. Andy was always cutting up and was one of the core members of our boys’ gang.

We built a fort in his backyard that year by digging down about two feet and then fixing up a lot of plywood we had scrounged from somewhere. Andy used to spend a lot of time in it as did some animals. He ended up with ringworm and a circular bald patch on the side of his head. None of the rest of us got it and the fort was dismantled. We were all pretty amused at his discomfiture.

There was a frat house across the street from Andy’s house. One time we were able to scrounge some girly magazines from the trash of some of the frat houses which we kept stashed in a crawl space under the porch of this particular fraternity.

I ran against Andy for class president that year. I made a very serious speech, most of it lifted from the Boy Scout pledge. Andy made a really jokey speech about how he couldn’t promise to put coke in the water fountains or such like things that appealed to the class. Needless to say he slaughtered me by something like 21 to 7. It was a humiliating experience and an early lesson in how popularity works. After the vote I fled to the boy’s room to try to collect myself. I was consoled by Alejo Vasquez (top row 3rd from right) who turned out to be one of the strongest (of my few) supporters.

One side of Mr. McGraw’s no-nonsense attitude came out one day on the basketball court. There was a boy in my class named Al Bright (far right, third row) who was a bit unbalanced. I had known him since being in the Cub Scouts and his mother had been our den mother. During the game there was an incident, and Al aggressively shoved another boy. Mr. McGraw immediately stepped in and grabbed Al by the arm pulled him to one side and hissed in his ear “I’m gonna leather your ass boy”.

Al didn’t seem that intimidated by this and kept repeating the phrase from time to time during the course of the year.

Another change that started to occur that year was our attitude towards girls. For the last 4 years or so girls didn’t really figure in our world at all except as an occasional nuisance or object to taunt. But at this time, we started to notice and take an interest in girls.

My earliest success with a young lady- Property of Author

As I mentioned earlier, I had talked a bold girl named Kay Sunday (far right, second row) into going into the storm sewer with me.

One of the reasons that prompted me to get her to go into the storm sewer was that we had had a conversation about “it”. I asked her if she had ever done “it”. The answer for both of us was of course no but it was a subject that was starting to occupy our minds.

Kay planned to have a camp out in her backyard one time with a couple of girlfriends and Wayne and I arranged with her to crash it. We had big dreams of making out with the girls but of course it never happened and her parents wouldn’t let 12 year old girls sleep outside, even in their own backyard.

My neighbor Stan Richbourg had an older sister Cynthia. He used to amuse me and himself by grabbing her tit and saying “How about a milkshake?” It always cracked us up and annoyed her no end.

The most titillating event of the year occurred when one day after school I was walking through the play ground and came across two girls from the neighborhood, Toni and Robin. They were both about two years older than I was. They were sitting on the swings and Toni was in an extremely relaxed and happy mood. She kept saying “It takes two to tango and two to you know what”. She had had sex for the first time the night before and had been telling Robin all about it. She dropped a lot of broad hints to me as well about the experience and I can tell you I was all ears.

A new girl started school that year, Alison Gardiner (middle, top row). She had beautiful olive brown skin and we used to hang around the playground after school on a number of occasions talking. I developed a massive crush on her which went on for over a year.

Socially I had my feet in two worlds. I had the boy’s gang with all the sports, the bicycles, the rough and tumble, camping and play but I also had another social life as well with the nerds. I was always a bright kid and read voraciously and devoured information of any and all kind.

Besides history as I’ve mentioned I used to simply read the Encyclopedia. My parents bought the World Book, and I spent many hours devouring articles about anything and everything therein.

My favorite books at this time though were the Hardy Boys. I read every single one in print and was thrilled by the adventures of Frank and Joe. I loved the genre so much that I even read a few Nancy Drew books as well once I ran out of Hardy Boys. Unfortunately, Nancy didn’t really do it for me. I also tried the Tom Swift books which were interesting but more my father’s generation. They seemed a bit old fashioned to me as they focused on “exciting’ inventions such as motorcycles, airships, submarines and an electric runabout.

In the brainy crowd I had two good friends Alfred Birnbaum and Steven Dinwiddie (far left, top row). They were both more or less social outcasts, but I had a good time with them. Alfred was frighteningly bright and extremely creative. We were both taken with the new Batman series and he even made a top hat of which the top popped up like one of the villains in the show.

One of Alfred and my favorite pastimes was to draw maps of cities. We’d make up cities and draw in roads, highways, parks and other features. We also used to play Avalon Hill games. Our favorite was 1914. It had hundreds of pieces and like the war itself, went on interminably with no resolution. I don’t know why we played it. We also had a growing collection of Airfix soldiers and setup dioramas in his backyard, but more of that later.

Steve and I had an on again off again friendship. We had been given chemistry sets and worked various experiments in his basement. My mother gave us a fetal pig to dissect once which we did with interest although I’d say we mainly butchered it.

One time we had a big, ritualized fight outside the school with on lookers. It didn’t go too well as we were both pretty lame at fighting although he did manage to kick me in the stomach which hurt rather a lot. This incident aside, my mother preferred it when I played with Alfred or Steve rather than Wayne. She always said that I took on the personality of whoever I had been playing with, and she liked these boys better.

Steve’s father was a very interesting man. He ran a school called Edgemead in Upper Marlboro which was for troubled teens. I don’t have any real information about the school and my memory in this instance may be faulty but I believe it was almost like a halfway house between a prison and the loony bin. I have the impression that it had kids in it who had done some pretty extreme things like having killed their parents or siblings. Dr. Dinwiddie was a child psychologist and a good one from what I could see from my perspective of being a child myself.

Domestic violence was something that I did not experience. My parents always had a good and very stable relationship. But I do remember that a cousin of Andy Miller’s mother shot and killed her husband. We all felt very sorry for the boy and whenever I saw him for years after I always thought he had a haunted look about him.

Deaths like these, though occasional, touched and rocked our world. One of my younger classmates Bill Hobbins lost his father in an air crash when Bill was about nine years old. He changed significantly afterwards and became a real bully and very aggressive towards everyone. He was strong and we were afraid of him. I barely avoided fights he tried to start with me on a couple of occasions.

In any case Dr Dinwiddie decided to take Steve and I hunting. I can’t remember for what or why. We went somewhere in Virginia. Besides Steve and myself we were accompanied by Steve’s older brother and a friend of his. Dr Dinwiddie had obtained a World War II surplus weapons carrier from somewhere. This was a small all-terrain vehicle with a flat bed and rails that only came up about 8 inches or so above the flat bed. Steve’s brother who was 19 or so was driving. Dr. Dinwiddie was in the passenger seat and Steve, I and the friend were sitting on the flat bed of the vehicle.

an M274 Mule similar to the carrier we were on-pinterest.com

We hadn’t gotten very far down a small road when the dog started jumping onto the driver's lap and almost simultaneously a box of bullets broke open and started rolling about the flat bed. Steve’s brother was trying to push the dog off him and grab the bullets at the same time and lost control of the vehicle. We went into a ditch by the side of the road. Steve, I and the friend were thrown clear. I remember flying through the air and landing on the far bank of the ditch, surprised but otherwise unhurt.

Unfortunately, the weapons carrier came down on Dr Dinwiddie’s leg shattering it and pinning him beneath the vehicle. Steve’s brother and friend put their feet on the vehicle and tried to push it up to take some of the weight off Dr Dinwiddie. He was in excruciating pain. They told Steve and I to run for help.

We ran hell for leather back up the road for I don’t know how long till we came to a gas station or store. I don’t remember anything until the ambulance arrived or how we got home after that. I don’t know in how many places Dr Dinwiddie’s leg was broken but the bone was crushed and shattered. I know he had to have various metal pins put in the leg to hold it together. Steve’s brother felt terrible about losing control. Steve and I were pretty shaken up by this accident. Dr Dinwiddie seemed to recover alright if not physically but certainly mentally. He was a strong, resourceful and intelligent man and well worth knowing.

… To Be Continued

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Glenn M Stewart

Pugilist, polemicist, Oxford Arabist, financial mastermind, international man of mystery, film producer, playwright, part-time-poet, full-time provocateur…