by Gwen McMath
I can think of no better way to begin drawing a picture with my words of my high school years than to borrow the beginning of one of my favorite Beatles songs that says:
There are places I remember
all my life though some have changed,
Some forever not for better,
Some have gone and some remain.
All these places have their moments
Of lovers and friends I still can recall,
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I loved them all.
The major place here was Grand Prairie High School in Grand Prairie, Texas. In the three years I went to school there(from ages 16-18), I learned many things, and very few of them academic. The high school itself was very progressive for a Texas school of that era. We had one of the first football bowls for a high school called the Gopher Bowl (our mascot) and we had a beautiful theatre for performing arts which each year produced musicals such as Lil Abner, Peter Pan, and Brigadoon. At the time I went there it was the only high school in town, so our graduation class was very large. Our teachers really cared about their students and tried to prepare us for life, not just academics. I know that their influence helped me to become a good teacher later on in my life.
I have really tried to be honest with my retelling of my life in high school. You may wonder why there are not very many good things retold about me. It’s really very simple, I didn’t do very many things that were good for anyone but myself during this time. I would want readers to realize that I made many mistakes as a younger person. Some of them of course, could be attributed to being a normal teenager but I feel like these were years that I followed God from afar and I could have been a lot happier if I had nurtured my personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I see that so many of today’s teenagers have their minds on helping others and I think this is wonderful, I would recommend it for all young people. So don’t live the way I did at this time, live better, and practice service to others to keep yourself from being so self-centered.
The era of the sixties when I went to high school was still pretty status quo. If you looked at my high school annual you would see most the girls still dressed in dresses, and the guys in shirts and ties, and jackets for special occasions. Girls wore hose to school every day with their dresses, and guys wore their dress shoes with white socks! Girls were not just overburdened with wearing hose, but our hairstyles cost us way too much time. We had the sky high, ratted up hair of that time and it was a process to maintain. I remember sleeping in rollers nearly every night of my life and if we weren’t sleeping in rollers we were trying to sleep in a distorted way so our hair wouldn’t mess up. One of the biggest fights I ever got into with my sister was over the hair rollers. For some reason we only had one set of hair rollers between us, so one night when she went out, I rolled my hair with the rollers and went to sleep. My sister awakened me by telling me it was her turn to have the rollers and she preceded to start pulling the rollers out of my hair! Ye-ow! Something inside of me clicked and after finding a hairbrush on the dresser to defend myself with, I preceded to beat her with it. Of course, this woke up my Father who was angered because we woke him up, and he preceded to whack on us. Fashion had made us all raving maniacs!
I know that one of the biggest mistakes I made during my high school years was to develop my outside appearance and neglect my intellect and personality. The price of looking good on the outside was never too high while it left me totally self- centered and unaware of anyone’s problems but my own. We were a largely affluent group of students, and many of the boys and a few girls had their own cars. There was still a double standard for boys and girls, guys could go and do whatever they pleased whenever they wanted to, and girls usually stayed at home on weekends if they didn’t have a date. The girls’ boyfriends went out with other guys and wanted their girlfriends to stay home while they went out. Girls could go out riding around on their own occasionally, but we did not have the freedom the guys did. We did leave the majority of these outdated customs behind before I left high school with the help of the new women’s liberation movement.
I said that my high school teachers helped me to become a effective teacher later on, which is true, but at the time of high school I was at my lowest in a lot of areas, and how I treated my teachers was at the top of the list. I had an older brother and sister who had gone to high school before me, and both of them had been very good students, so when I started high school most of my teachers would tell me how nice it was to have me in class because they had my brother or sister in class before me. I would always tell them to watch out because I was a lot different than my brother or sister, which they found to be true very quickly. I had some teachers I liked, the rest I tormented. I especially liked our attendance clerk, Ms. Whitte. She took care of all the absences at school. I worked for her in her office and she was as tough as a boot. She had literally heard every excuse of why you weren’t in school that existed but she would still occasionally let the girls who worked for her in the office skip school if we had a good excuse like getting our hair done or shopping for a prom dress. My mother had always been pretty lenient with us about going to school as long as we kept our grades up. Fridays were the day my mom always went to the grocery store, ran errands, and got her hair done so it was pretty easy for my sister and I to talk her into letting us stay home to go with her. When I began to be able to skip classes without my mother knowing because some of my girlfriends had cars, it wasn’t unusual for us to pass my mother on Main Street and she never noticed me even if I was in the lane next to her! We took attendance every period in every class so if you weren’t there you were caught. What made the system not work well is that we could drive cars to school and we had an open campus, which meant we could leave school every day for lunch. Nearly everyone went to the Dairy Queen where you could get a hamburger, drink and Hershey bar for fifty cents. But after everyone sat around and talked at lunch it seemed we could always find a place to go after lunch that would be more fun than going back to school.
Most of the rest of the teachers I liked were in the field of literature, english, and typing. I know I made no lasting impression on these teachers, in fact, they would probably be surprised I ever made it out of college, let alone became a teacher. I had a great journalism teacher named Ms. Sullivan who made me want to become a journalist and journalism was my first major in college but it was one of many. I loved my algebra teacher Mr. Flewharty who was a basketball coach. He promised to pass me with a C- if I would come to all the basketball games. I religiously went to every one. I was a student assistant to another coach, Mr. Burch. He was so good looking which made me the envy of all my girlfriends. I graded all of his papers, put grades in his grade book, and ran off all his papers, and yes, I always kept copies of his tests to share with the cute boys in his classes. This job gave me the ability to steal blank report cards for myself so I could put down whatever grades I wanted or without any missing classes. I could just forge my parents name on the real report cards I had to turn in. Though I wasn’t much into academics, I did enjoy being in choir again. I mentioned before we had a wonderful performing arts center and terrific choir director Tom Keel, who was a great motivator. I was in an all girl choir called the Stardusters and loved it because we got to dress up in formal wear to perform.
Now for the teachers I tormented. At the top of the list was Mr. McCollum, my sophomore biology teacher. I don’t know why we picked him to torment except that he was older and the picture of the absent-minded professor. Every time he would sit his glasses down in class, we would hide them. His class was split, part of the class, then lunch, then back to his class, so we would always go back to his class before him and lock the door from the inside and put something in the keyhole so he couldn’t get back in. One particular day I had some chap stick and thought it would be clever to smear it all over his stool that he always sat on. When he sat on it and realized what had happened, he cried. I had driven him crazy. I felt so ashamed but I never let anyone see my shame, I just hardened myself even more. Ms. Wear my senior English teacher was the typical, sarcastic, hard-nosed english teacher and we loved to torment her also. We would never prepare for her class and would just roll our eyes at all her attempts to teach us. Now I wish I had listened to her, but alas, my attitude was that I was smarter than any adult. I had two years of Spanish with the same teacher whom I didn’t like and by the second year when we began to speak no English in class I was totally lost. The class met at the end of the day and that made it doubly boring. I had made some new friends in that class, Susie and Pat. We made up this plan to skip her class, and I can’t even remember what we did instead of going to class. The next day when we came back we got caught, all except me for some reason, and I of course, never admitted to being involved. My two friends got their parents called and an F for the six weeks. They are probably still mad at me about it.
The summer before starting high school was an exceptional one for me. At this time in Texas you could get your drivers license at fourteen if your family needed you to drive for them. This was a very loose law so many of the boys began to get cars at fourteen and this afforded us the chance to car date. Big mistake, none of us were really ready for this. I had a boyfriend that summer who’s dad had bought him an older car that had been painted a beautiful candy apple red. We spent the summer innocently planning what our high school years would bring and enjoying each other’s company. I guess you could say he was my first serious boyfriend and what had helped this relationship is that we had been good friends for a few years before dating. Being friends before having a physical relationship was a good policy to carry all through my dating years.
A new thing to come out of that summer was skateboarding. This of course filtered down to Texas from California and it turned into so much fun. We had a humongous parking lot across the street from the high school that slanted and we would start off on the back of a car to get speed, then let go, and barrel down the parking lot. There was very little sport to it but quite a bit of daredevil. We used no protective gear, wore shorts and ended up getting skinned all over, some kids even had broken bones, but it was one of the few things our class did together that was innocent fun.
When I started my sophomore year things began to change. The most popular kids were free to stay out late at night and generally do whatever they wanted, at least that is how it looked to me. Drinking and sex came into the picture and I began to become one of those girls that weren’t worth the effort to date because I wasn’t interested in sexual relationships yet. Let me be clear about my self-delusion here because I was proud of myself for being a virgin and I looked down on other girls who weren’t. I somehow thought there were degrees to being “bad” and that as long as I remained a virgin I wasn’t really a” bad girl”. I didn’t know that there weren’t any degrees of sin, that everyone sinned, and that only the consequences of sin made situations in life more difficult. I had always enjoyed boy’s company over girls so I became a great friend of many boys, but a date of few. My former boyfriend from the summer fixed me up with a date to the Down’s Drive In (outside theatre) with a guy I wanted to date named Jim. I wrestled with him in the back seat for a while and then during the intermission he went off and got in another car and left with someone else! I was so humiliated! My former boyfriend took his date home and then took me home, he was very kind to me but it was still traumatic to my ego. It was, however, a prime example of how most of us were only concerned about our own needs and not the feelings of others.
The biggest event of my sophomore year in occurred that summer when my sister got married. She had started dating Phil Hart in the seventh grade and had never dated anyone else, so in July after she graduated in May she married him. My sister had a good job coming out of high school and Phil had a good job on the freight docks so they could support themselves and manage to get married. The wedding was quite an occasion because Phil was Catholic and we were Methodist. At that time if you were Catholic and married outside your faith, you could not be married in the Catholic Church. I don’t know why they didn’t choose getting married in the Methodist Church but they got married at our house. It was so tiny I know we couldn’t have fit over forty people in there. We took out all the furniture and put up folding chairs. I was my sister’s maid of honor as Phil’s brother Stan was his best man. Her colors were light blue and white and it turned out to be a lovely wedding. True to my usual self at this time I joked about how glad I was to get rid of my sister and I allowed myself no sentimentality of her leaving. How different I was than my own daughters who cried for days when my oldest daughter got married. We just were not an affectionate family and because of it I never knew my own feelings about things. Losing my sister to marriage left me the only sibling left at home. My parents watched what I did more closely after she married which I didn’t like at all!
If losing my sister to marriage wasn’t enough that summer, I also had my first summer job and I hated it. I had to go to work at Woolworth’s which was a pretty cheap dime store and I felt it was very beneath me but my father made all of us work when we got to be sixteen. I didn’t have a driver’s license either so that made it even worse, to have a job I didn’t like, and to have to be driven to it by my parents.
My junior year of high school was not much different than the year before except I changed jobs. My father made me go into a school program called Distributive Education which let you out of school in the afternoons which was good, but you had to go to work every day. I got a job at a loan company in downtown Dallas and I worked Monday through Fridays from three to six o’clock. At least I got a ride with a boy at school and my parents didn’t have to take me. This did keep me out of a lot of trouble because I couldn’t run around in the afternoons and I was too tired to do much of anything after I got off work in the evenings. It did alienate me more from the wealthier kids whose parents didn’t make them work. I will have to admit that having money was a good by-product of working.
By my junior year I found myself becoming a little restless with my life. I haven’t talked a lot about dating but I did date quite a bit. I looked at the varsity football picture in my annual and picked out at least twelve guys that I had dated, and four more on the varsity basketball team. I remember one serious boyfriend during this period named Bill. Looking back on these serious relationships I realized they were serious because we became friends first and had a lot of things in common. I had girlfriends that their parents liked their boyfriends and took them places with their family. They even talked with them when they came over to pick them up for dates. My father was never friendly to any of my boyfriends and about the only time they talked to my dad was when I came home late from a date and my dad would open the door in his underwear and yell at me to get in the house and the guy to go home!
I was not alone in my restlessness, I had girlfriends that had begun to get tired of the guys in our school and were ready to venture out of our town to see what kind of guys were in other cities around us. One of the places we would frequent was Pal’s Drive Inn in Arlington, Texas. It was like the movie American Graffiti at its best. Cars would parade through the parking lot all night, and we would pull up next to new guys and talk with them and give them our phone numbers. It was nice to date someone you hadn’t known for twelve years and who didn’t know your whole life history yet.
I worked hard all that summer at the loan company and maybe even learned a few social skills by working around adults. Then, before I knew it, summer had passed, and finally, my senior year had begun! I was all geared up for it except for one thing—my brother-in-law Phil had still not completed his high school education after an extra year at Garland High School. He was back at my high school and we were classmates! At that time it was not unusual for students to spend more than three years in high school because there were no GED options. He had a reputation of being a juvenile delinquent and I was embarrassed that he was back at my school. I certainly don’t know why because I was worse than he ever was, I just hadn’t been caught as he had! He did give me a ride to school every day and back which was better than riding the bus, but it did have its drawbacks. One morning as we were driving to school Phil cut a guy off in his car while he was changing lanes. The guy yelled at him, and that is all it took. Phil started driving as fast as he could while looking under the seat for something. When I asked him what he was looking for he said a coke bottle to bash the guy’s head in! All I could think of was my sister was going to kill me if he got into a fight because I had promised her I would try to help keep him out of trouble. Luckily the guy in the other car was faster than Phil and he got away from us before Phil could get him. Did I mention than Phil was very small and short and had “little man syndrome” to the hilt? I was certainly grateful to get to school safely that morning.
Another incident happened a few weeks later. It was in the early afternoon when all the students that worked were leaving school. There was a painter who was painting doors on the outside of the school. He was bent down painting the bottom part of a door because the top part was glass. Well, Phil came ambling down the hall unaware of the painter and hit the door to the outside very hard as he was going through it and in the process knocked the painter about ten feet down some stairs and knocked over his paint. Both guys were surprised and came up swinging. They fought each other all over the front lawn and kids were hanging out the windows to get a better look! I was so embarrassed when everyone began to yell at me and tell me it was my brother in law Phil. Phil and the painter ended up in the office with Phil apologizing profusely when he figured out what he had done. This was a good thing about Phil, when he did something wrong he owned up to it, you couldn’t help but like him, and he had a great many friends. One of his friends was one of the biggest guys in the school and right after school started that year he stole my history book and wouldn’t give it back. I didn’t have a book for most of the school year when he came up to me one day and said, “Are you Phil Hart’s sister-in-law?” I said yes and he gave me back my history book and never bothered me again.
It was during my senior year that I finally got my driver’s license. I had made a new friend named JoNell who had a boyfriend that went to North Dallas High School. She told us girls that we should go with her and check out the boys at the drugstore that was across the street from their high school where they all hung out. I made up some story to tell my parents of why I needed the car, and off we went to Dallas to check out the guys. It turned out to be providential but was also another example of my deviousness. JoNell’s boyfriend Richard introduced several of us to all of his friends. They were all to become lifetime friends of mine. They were Randy, Joe and Charley. Two out of three of them were very handsome. Charley was handsome but had coke bottle glasses, wore banana boat boots, and was short. On the way home after meeting them, I ran into the back of a man’s car after the car behind me ran into the back of me. My car didn’t have a lot of damage so I drove it home and made up some story about how I wrecked the car while in Grand Prairie instead of Dallas. My idea was to lie first and see if I could get away with it, and then to tell the truth if my parents didn’t buy the lie. Well as luck would have it I ended up telling my dad the truth after I lied, and I was grounded for quite a while.
When I finally got ungrounded I started dating Joe from North Dallas High. When I accepted a date with him I had not seen his car which was a new Ford Mustang with personalized license plates that read “Joe Jr”. That phrase took a long time to live down at my high school, the guys called me Joe Jr. all the rest of the year. I dated Joe pretty seriously for the rest of my senior year, he even took me to my senior prom. There were so many senior activities during the end of the year that we drifted apart, he went to his events and I went to mine. He was dating another girl to his activities. Being the kind of get even person that I was, I wanted to get back at Joe for dating someone else even though I was beginning to look toward college and all that it would bring and not really concerned too much about Joe as much as I was about my ego. While we were dating I remembered him saying to me that he didn’t care who I dated but that he didn’t ever want me to date Charley, also from North Dallas High (the one with the coke bottle glasses). Well, I had a great plan for revenge. Can you guess what it was? But then, that is the beginning of another story so it will have to wait until I prepare to go on to college.
Note: To those of you who read this story and who went to my high school, I would love to read your memories of high school and I will incorporate them into this story if you would like. Just e-mail me your memories at gtmcmath@yahoo.com and I will be delighted to read them and include them if you wish.