A while back, I waxed poetic about Mrs. Warner, the brilliant fifth-grade teacher who gave me a nudge down the path of writing fiction. She was a huge influence on young master Jack, and no doubt about it. But she wasn’t all there was to school; many trials and tribulations were left to be endured.
Back in my day, we had junior high school in lieu of the modern day’s middle school, and its grades were seven through nine. Sixth grade had gone fairly well, aside from the setback of breaking my left wrist during the summer before ~ jumping from tree to tree ~ and showing up there in a full arm cast. As an aside, the folks who have called me a ‘squirrel’ were perhaps not as far off as I’d like to admit!
But with all that behind me, I arrived in seventh grade at Richard Henry Dana Junior High School, still in Point Loma, and still standing today.
It was there that a watershed event in my young life occurred. I had an elective open, any class I wanted, and I chose mechanical drawing, drafting to use the common term, basically the science of drawing blueprints. The teacher was Harold Whitby, the first male teacher I had ever had. I had an aptitude for it and excelled at every new lesson thrown at me. I was beginning to think that school was finally becoming interesting and that I was going achieve great success, and then came the final exam. It consisted of a description written on the blackboard which we, the students, had to turn into a 3-view drawing. I was, I believe, the second student to finish, and placed my work on his desk. Next day, grades were to be announced, and the dirty bastard stood in front of the class and stated that two students, one other girl and myself, had “obviously” cheated, and would fail the entire course.
I don’t know what motivated him to do that. Perhaps he drew our names from a hat to meet a quota, or maybe he didn’t want me screwing up the curve. Don’t know, don’t care. That was the last time I ever trusted a teacher. I was thirteen, and thirteen-year-olds didn’t accuse teachers of lying. I had no parental support, so that was that. That was the day I learned that I could become a smart-mouthed troublemaker and fail, or I could work my ass off and fail anyway. Guess what I did.
I absorbed enough material through osmosis to score well enough on tests to get by with Cs and Ds, and that was good enough for me. I never wasted one more precious moment on homework nor raised my hand in class, because it had been demonstrated quite clearly what all that would lead to. I settled on coasting through school, enjoying my childhood, and embracing the military as my future career. In a town full of sailors and marines, that wasn’t a difficult conclusion to reach. I was even able to start it a year early, as my grandma, having had her fill of my shenanigans, packed me off to live with my mother in Monterey and attend twelfth grade there.
It was not to be. Had I stayed with grandma, I have no doubt that I would have been forced to attend another useless year of school, but mom, as eager to be rid of me as everyone else, signed the papers for me to enlist within days of my 17th birthday. On the one hand, that meant that I was free of school at last. On the other hand, it was 1965, President Johnson was getting ready to ramp up our involvement in Viet Nam, and everybody knew it. Whatever was a boy to do?
Well, that will be the subject of the next chapter, won’t it? You know the end; I’m still here, but how did that come about? Stay tuned. You won’t want to miss this tale of evasion!
Flights of Fancy 
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