I attended Curtis School at 32 E. 115th during the 1966-67 school year.

I had walked to Nansen, my elementary school and going to Curtis was the first time I used public transportation. I'd walk the three blocks up to 123rd Street and catch the CTA bus that ran along 123rd and up State Street. The school was a block west of State. It had formerly been an elementary school but by the time I attended it had been converted in to a 9th grade feeder school for Fenger High, with all the freshman students attending Curtis and then transferring to Fenger for grades 10-12.

New Friends - It's finally cool to be a smart kid.

In elementary school I spent nine years with the same kids from working-class families in a social dynamic dictated by size and athletic ability for the boys and appearance for the girls. You didn't score many points for being smart, and to paraphrase Groucho Marx if you qualified for the smart club it wasn't one you really wanted to join because it wasn't "cool". Being wimpy and smart put me at the bottom of the elementary school social hierarchy.

The social dynamic changed in high school because four years over the horizon loomed the prospect of employment or college. While at the time few of us considered the Darwinian implications, the classes you were selected for in high school predestined which path your future life would take. The Chicago Public School had started using computer scored standardized testing when I was in the 4th grade - the ones where you fill in the ovals on the answer sheet with a #2 pencil - and your fate in high school and later life rested in large part on those test scores. The smarter kids would be put in math and science classes and would wind-up being the first or second generation in their family to attend college and have a white collar jobs, while others took drafting, shop, home economics and typing would wind up working in the same trades and factories as their fathers had.

I'd never been a very good student in elementary school because I'd been bored and daydreaming most of the time or hanging out with the troublemakers in an attempt to be cool. My parents had to literally bail me out of Nansen elementary when on the last day of class in the 8th grade we decided it would be cool to cover the classroom with graffiti and I had the poor judgement to autograph the globe. My elementary school diploma was exchanged for a check to cover the cost of a new one. But my test scores were "off-the-hook" in reading, comprehension and science. Math not so much, which is ironic since my dad was a chemical engineer (first in his family to graduate from college) who moonlighted teaching Calculus at night school. So in high school at Curtis I entered the land of the nerds on the academic track and for most of my classes I'd be in a new peer group in which it was cool to be smart. Admittedly it was still way cooler to be on the football team or have a hot car and a hot looking girl friend... but at least for the first time I had a peer good and a chance of finding a girl in it who would go out with me as I crossed into that other new frontier, dating.

First Romance

High School was a confusing time for the male of the species because the females no longer responded to the adolescent mating rituals of pulling their hair or teasing them to get their attention. In short, we were a pretty clueless bunch. We'd done our research reading Playboy and had wealth of theoretical knowledge, but no way to apply it.

My first high school relationship started by inviting a girl in one of my classes to attend a football game. It seemed like pretty safe thing and something she wouldn't need parental approval for, so she accepted. The suggestion of the football game was, in retrospect, was a brilliant one because by halftime we were snuggled together under a blanked and by the forth quarter holding hands. By the end of the season we were going steady. Things never progressed beyond the 50-yard line, but at least I was finally on the playing field!

Teachers: Some memorable and some I'd rather forget

In elementary school students were was stuck in one classroom all day the same teacher. With high school came the new experience of moving around to different classes and dealing with different teachers, some more enlightened than others.

Mr. Tate's Mustang and the Freshman Ski Trip

Freshman biology was taught by Mr. Tate, who was a younger than most and way cooler than the other teachers. He drove a 1964 red mustang convertible with a white top. If memory serves it had a serial number in the 500s, one of the first Mustang's built. Every kid there lusted over that car.

He also organized a ski trip for the freshman students to Iron Mountain in the upper peninsula of Michigan. I went on the trip. We rode a chartered bus up there and in the morning when it was time to go from the place where we staying to the ski resort it was 22 degrees BELOW ZERO. The driver, Al, had turned off the bus and couldn't start it so people from the resort ferried us in there 4x4s in small groups.

The rental gear consisted long wooden skis which extended to the palm of an outstretched arm - the norm for skis at the time - with cable bindings which fit around the toe of leather boots. The long slats were nearly impossible to turn and when you tried the cable would pop off the hook on the side of the skis and you'd fall down. Most, including myself, had never skied before, but after a couple runs down the bunny hill we headed for the chair lift. By then it had warmed up to a balmy 10 below, so frostbite started to set in the five minute ride to the top. Once on the top all that anyone cared about was getting back down ASAP. I never learned how to ski, it was go like a bat of of Hell, crash, get up, repeat, a dozen or so times until the bottom of the hill was reached. Once at the bottom we'd run inside and finding a spot near the roaring fire in the lodge. When the socks stopped steaming we'd bundle up and do it again.

Torture in Gym Class

Not all the teachers at Curtis were as young or as much fun as Mr. Tate. There was a P.E. teacher, old as dirt and whose name I have forgotten, loved to demonstrate his talent at sinking free-throws from the foul line of the basketball court using the old-fashioned between-the-legs two-handed method. To his credit he never missed. But he also had a sadistic streak. He His implement of torture was a 12" section of broom handle with a heavy cast iron window sash weight hanging from a piece of clothes line. As penalty for any infraction you'd be required to hold it out at arms length and roll up the line around the peg with your wrists. You'd start to feel the "burn" the first time and after the third or forth it was torture.

Friends and Foes of a Different Color

The South Side had long been segregated racially and ethnically by invisible boundaries. The older white neighborhoods in the Roseland and West Pullman had Italian, Polish, Lithuanian and Irish enclaves. If you went into any of the small businesses near where I lived you might easily mistake it for a shop in Warsaw because most of the shop keepers and residents were first generation immigrants. My neighborhood south of 124th. Street was a post-war suburban style collection of tract houses with occupied a variety of ethic background, but were few if any black families. I don't remember having any non-white classmates in elementary school.

The high school district overlapped both traditional white and black neighborhoods and at Curtis I interacted with black classmates for the first time. Unfortunately some didn't make a very good first impression. Getting accosted in the bathrooms and shaken down for money was a daily occurrence and you learned not carry much money and keep bus fare in your sock. One day exiting the back door at the end of school to catch my bus on State Street I was jumped by a group of ten black students who were waiting outside, not for me specifically, but for the first white kid who came out. I got met with a fist to the face which broke my nose and scratched cornea. I just hit the ground and tried to cover my head to prevent any more damage.

I recently read about a Fenger Student who had been killed after being jumped in much the same way. In my case things have been much worse if the brother of one of my elementary school classmates who was waiting in his car to pick her up hadn't seen what was happening and reacted. He opened his truck, grabbed the jack and waded into the crowd swinging. The cops got involved and there was a line-up at the police station. I don't remember the outcome, but I didn't get bothered again during the rest of my time in high school, in part because I got better at avoiding situations where I was vunerable.

Such were the life and times at Curtis in 1967 before I moved on to Fenger for the remainder of my sojourn in high school...