School Days: Friends & Girlfriends

The years before I went to school seemed one long summer vacation. Our neighborhood was one of those built up rapidly after World War II to provide housing for returning war veterans and their growing families. There were lots of young parents and children, and there were many opportunities for informal socializing, especially on long summer evenings. And in south Texas, the summers were long and hot and air conditioning was still years away. Televisions were also a rarity, and the heat frequently drove children and their parents out of their houses and into the yards where neighbors gathered to talk while their children played. Sometimes families joined other families for outdoor eating, or just for casual conversation and glasses of iced tea or a cold beer. The neighborhood kids were outdoors late into the evenings playing elaborate games of tag or hide and seek, running wild from yard to yard. Sometimes when we tired of playing we sat quietly listening to the conversations of our parents, as they told stories and talked of things they never discussed in the presence of their children.

My first and closest friend in the neighborhood was the girl next door. Her name was Mary, but everyone called her Skeeter. The story was she had been a tiny baby, and her Daddy gave her that nickname. She grew up pretty quickly though, and by the time I was six and she was still only five, she was already a little bigger than I was. Of course, I was a pretty skinny and sickly kid. Skeeter and I were great friends and playmates thoughout our childhood and into our teens. She was always what we called a Tomboy, and enjoyed playing with the neighborhood boys, but that may have been because there were so few neighborhood girls her age. We played cowboys and Indians and other childhood games, and on rainy days we sometimes visited each other and played indoors with games of cards or piles of coloring books or sometimes cutting paper dolls from magazines and catalogs. The difference in gender was not entirely lost on us, even at that age, but the bonds of friendship were stronger than the tug of biology. I suppose you could say Skeeter was my first girlfriend, but in some ways we were too close for that, we just knew each other too well.

Because my sixth birthday came in January, my mother decided to let me wait until the next Septermber when I was nearly seven to begin school. In those days some kids started at midterm, but my Mom thought I’d always be out of sync with the other kids, and I was in no hurry to go to school anyway, since all of my friends were a year or more younger than I. So I began as the oldest kid in my first-grade class and, for the first time in my life, found myself among a group of strangers. My only preparation for schoolwork had been a certain amount of abc’s and counting on fingers. Most of my preschool time had been spent playing with the other, mostly younger, kids in the neighborhood. But perhaps owing to my slightly advanced age, or all of the adult attention I had always received as the first born son of my generation, I found that I thrived both in the classroom and in the schoolyard. From the first day, I never seemed to have any difficulty with schoolwork, and I loved reading and writing, although my penmanship always left something to be desired.

But the real surprise, I say this now although at the time I took it completely for granted, was the way I assumed the role of leader among my peers. I was almost invariably the captain of the team or the leader of the class or the class representative to the student council. I suspect I might have been obnoxious and despised by my classmates, but if that was so it never registered with me. I don’t know the extent to which my teachers may have pushed me forward among my peers. I did realize that I was a favorite and, despite my lack of "self-control," a tendency to talk too much and at inappropriate times, I was a sort of teacher's pet. But I compensated by entering into all the playground activities, especially games and sports, with enthusiasm. Probably because I was a little older, I was quick and well coordinated and good at games. And I soon formed close bonds with the other boys who liked to play ball and run and ride bikes. Before long I found myself surrounded with a group of friends whom I enjoyed playing with as much as I had enjoyed the company of my neighborhood friends. I can still recall the pains of parting I felt when two of those boys with whom I had been especially close moved away. One young man, my first best friend, moved away to Milwaukee, and for a time afterward we carried on an elaborate correspondence about the fate of the Milwaukee Braves. They became my favorite team and I collected the baseball cards for all the players.

By the time I was in the second grade, I began to notice the girls as well as the boys. And before long I found myself enjoying the company of girls, or some of them. Like the boys, they would sometimes invite their friends to birthday parties, and we would have cake and ice cream and play parlor games, often pairing the boys and the girls in little rituals that might require holding hands or the most discreet and chaste forms of touching, as in blind man’s bluff. Of course, there was also a lot of giggling and blushing and always the presence of parents smiling and watching over us. But it wasn’t very long before I began to feel the tug of attraction, the desire to walk home holding hands and carrying some little girl’s books. One of the earliest of these attractions was for a young lady whom I would know all the way through school. Her name was Margaret, always that never Margie or Peggy or Maggie. I made her a little ring out of a string of tiny pearl-like beads. My heart was smitten, but I wasn’t sure what to do. I gave her my little gift, and she accepted it with grace, and we waved at one another during recess and walked home together a few times, but romance among the young fades very quickly. Later when she was a cheerleader in high school she would no doubt have been mortified to let anyone know that I had been her first boyfriend.

And so despite my early experiences with Skeeter and Margaret, I remained pretty much a boy’s boy, preferring sports to parties and dancing. At every opportunity I was outside playing games and riding my bicycle and hanging out with my friends. As I remember it, it seems almost too idyllic to be true, but it was the 1950s and we lived in a quiet working class neighborhood where everyone seemed to know everyone else. Parents thought nothing of letting their children play outside late into summer evenings, or ride their bicycles off to friends’ houses blocks away. It was also during the era of neighborhood schools, when all of the children in a given part of the city attended the same schools and formed large networks of friends and classmates. Television was in its infancy and the only sort of indoor games we played were board games like Checkers or Parcheesi or Monopoly, or card games like Old Maid, Crazy 8s or Fish or Hearts. But those were only for days when we couldn’t go outside, and growing up in Texas, we played outside year round. Summers we played baseball and winters we played football, and other times we played war.

For someone who has grown up to become a committed pacifist, I dedicated a vast amount of my childhood to the arts of war. I collected and built plastic and wooden models of ships and planes, and I bought vast numbers of little plastic soldiers, as well as plastic jeeps, tanks, and trucks. These we often took with us to school so that during recess we could reenact famous battles of World War II and Korea. Our recreational reading was the literature of war, books like God is My Co-Pilot and Samurai. And when we went to the movies on Saturdays, we watched westerns and World War II epics like To Hell and Back with Audie Murphy. When we tired of miniature battles, we staged our own mock warfare, whether in the costumes of cowboys and Indians or more modern day soldiers, whether our weapons were the toy replicas we all coveted as birthday and Christmas presents (I recall one year when the so-called burp gun was so popular that every kid I knew had one, until the plastic handles broke apart or the mechanism that made the firing sound ceased working), or nothing more than sticks and baseball bats imagined as swords or rifles or canons or bazookas.

As we grew a little older and wilder, my parents decided to begin channeling some of our energy into more organized activities. First I, and then my brothers, began participating in the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, and YMCA baseball, and eventually music lessons. But even with these additional activities, we still found plenty of time for disorganized sports, games of baseball and football played in the yards and streets. On any given day after school or during the long summer vacations, large groups of kids would form, more or less spontaneously, and organize their own activities. Someone would contribute a ball and bat; someone else would bring along some additional equipment. Nearly everyone had a glove of some sort, or could borrow a friend’s or a brother’s. Then we would chose captains and choose up sides, always trying to get the best players for our own team, while still insuring that everyone got to play. And for the most part all of this was done without direct adult supervision. Someone always knew a place where we could play, frequently the schoolyard or a nearby playground or vacant lot. Someone always knew the rules of the game, what was considered out of bounds, what was a home run or ground rule double. Football was played with a ball only, no one wore helmets or pads, lest they hurt those who didn’t have on any equipment. And yet we seldom played touch, instead tackling one another with all the ferocity of the players we watched on television. Miraculously, I don’t recall that anyone ever suffered more than a few scrapes or bruises. But then we were only school kids, with resilient bones, and not yet big enough to do great harm to one another.

When I went to junior high school, grades seven through nine in those days before the notion of middle school came along, life began to change, as inevitably it must. Along with all of my friends, I tried out for the football team, and discovered almost immediately that I wasn’t the stuff that schoolboy athletes are made of. Principally, I was too small. I don’t recall what I actually weighed at that time, but it was well under 90 pounds. I didn’t reach 100 until just before graduating from high school, and even then it was not much over. While some of my friends had already experienced a considerable growth spurt, I was still a skinny little kid, and not a very good candidate even for the B team. Still, I went out. I was given some very old equipment: shoulder pads much too large for me, an old helmet that seemed to be made of hardened cardboard, some hip pads, an old jersey but no regulation pants. At first we just played in pads and gym shorts. We learned some elementary blocking schemes and the T formation. I was assigned the position of full back. At the time I thought I should have been a half back, given my size, but maybe the coach knew what he was doing. My friend Jimmy, who owned his own professional style helmet, complete with face mask, was quarterback, a position he played all the way through high school, and Dennis, another friend, was on the line, but also sometimes substituted for me in the backfield. My one moment of glory came when Dennis opened a nice hole in the line, Jimmy handed me the ball, and I ran off down the field for about thirty or forty yards before, weighted down with the heavy equipment I was wearing, I was tackled from behind by a tenacious kid playing defense. I had slowed down, thinking the play was over, and he ran right into me. The coach and all the other players got a good laugh out of it.

I faithfully went to practices, and eagerly learned the rudiments of organized school boy football. I stuck with it despite my lack of size and the growing fear that I was going to be seriously hurt by some of the larger players. Eventually, the time arrived for our first scrimmage with another school’s B team. By then the coach had moved me from offense to defense, assigning me to the position of defensive half-back. During the scrimmage after every play I rotated in and out with another boy, who was a bit more experienced and a good deal larger. The coach offered a critique of my play, pointing out when I did well and when I was out of position. I was beginning to pick it up, when suddenly their fullback, a really good sized kid, came running full speed through a gap in the line. I positioned myself squarely in his path, and when he came my way I lunged at his churning legs wrapped my hands around them and felt him stumble over my right shoulder. He hit the ground hard, taking me along with him, but he went down. The coach came over, reached down and lifted me up off the ground by grabbing my shoulder pads, gave me a sharp whack on my butt, and said, "Good play, Hall." Everyone, including myself afterward, was impressed that the coach knew my name. Meanwhile, I was still seeing stars from the collision, and have no further recollections of what happened that day. I do know that the next week I dropped out of football, never to play in organized school boy sports again.

I wasn’t alone in abandoning dreams of athletic glory. Several of my friends seemed to reach the same conclusion at about the same time. For the first time since going away to school, I could see new lines of separation appearing among my friends. Some were becoming what we would eventually call jocks, and some were becoming brains, or nerds, or geeks. That first year in junior high school I was separated out from the rest of the students and put into a college track, where I was given a full load of academic classes, accelerated courses and special electives, especially in areas related to science and engineering. At first I wasn’t that fond of mathematics, but I liked science and mechanical drawing, and I felt very much at home with the brainy kids, as I had earlier with the athletic kids. In fact, there were two or three who were able to stay in both groups. They were naturally bright students and gifted athletes as well. Sadly, many of the other kids who were involved in school sports, steadily drifted away from academics. I could certainly sympathize. Sports took up an incredible amount of after school time. But I could also see that no one, even among the teachers or coaches, expected them to excel in academics once they were committed to sports.

Just about this same time, the other thing that began to attract more of my attention was the female part of the student body. Of course, some of my contemporaries were way ahead of me in this, and only too willing to instruct me in what it is that girls want. I don’t know where they acquired all of their advanced knowledge, but I do know that not all of it came from personal experience. Some had older siblings and some were just a little more advanced physically and sexually than others, and all were willing to share information, accurate or not. As girls became more of a topic for boys, and presumably boys for girls, a good deal more pairing off began to take place. (It’s interesting, looking back on that time, to realize that several of those pairs lasted throughout high school and even resulted in marriages, and in at least one case, long and successful marriages. But as I’ve already said, we lived in what amounted to a small village more than a big city, where families had known one another for several generations.) And for the first time we began to discuss the subject of "dating."

I don’t know when "dating" officially begins, or when it’s supposed to begin, but for us it seemed to have something to do with dances. The school, or at least school clubs and organizations, like the student council, sponsored several dances or "sock hops" during the school year, often around holidays, like Halloween or Thanksgiving, or at the end of semesters. They were called sock hops, because they were usually held in the gym, and everyone was required to take off their shoes so as not to ruin the floor. There was a minimal admission charge, and even that was designed to encourage pairing off, for economic if not for romantic reasons, since couples were charged fifty cents and singles, or stags, had to pay thirty-five cents. Sometimes a group of guys or girls would go stag, just to avoid the complications and obligations of taking someone of the opposite sex, but economic incentives can be very strong, even among the young, and very early on we learned about the date of convenience. Once I asked one of my classmates who also happened to attend my church and Sunday school if she would like to go with me to the school dance. I had known her for years and felt comfortable explaining very directly my intentions and my motives. She thoroughly agreed and immediately offered to chip in a quarter toward the cost of the dance, thus saving us each a dime. But when my mother heard about this arrangement, she shamed me into calling the deal off, so I offered to pay for both of us. Afterwards, I was glad I had done the "right thing." We won the door prize, which was a small cash award, and since I'd paid for the tickets, Ginny said I should keep the whole thing. Well, you can imagine my mother's reaction when she got wind of this. She made me give half the money to Ginny when I saw her at Sunday school. Soon after that I think Ginny completely lost any interest she might have had in me, although I continued to be close friends with the rest of her family and later studied architectural drawing informally with her father, who designed and directed the building of our church's new Christian education building.

After this rather awkward introduction to dating, I soon learned to enjoy asking various young ladies out to dances, and eventually to movies. Dancing was fun, despite the fact that I had no idea what I was doing. My wife can confirm that I never really learned how to dance, although I can move around on the dance floor, more or less in time to the music. On occasions she has attempted to improve my technique, but I have always been a poor pupil. And while I can play a couple of musical instruments, at least in an amateur fashion, my sense of rhythm does not extend to dancing. However, this was no impediment to attending sock hops, where there was a good deal of jumping around to the fast tunes, and alternately standing around to the slow ones, with your arms clasping some young woman against your chest and cheek as tightly as she would permit. In those days girls who wanted good dance partners often resorted to dancing with one another. Nevertheless, school dances and a good deal of hand holding were the main romantic activities for most of us, until we reached high school, where we began to pick up a few more pointers from the more sexually advanced of our classmates.

Some of my most memorable early encounters with girls came at summer church camps. This might seem counterintuitive to anyone who never attended one, but despite the almost constant adult supervision, there were many opportunities for more or less innocent pairings. One favorite activity was swimming, which in the heat of Texas summers, was a necessary and daily part of summer camp routines. Once in the pool boys and girls enjoyed a good deal of splashing and teasing and innocent groping amidst the horseplay. And the swim suits, although not so revealing as today's, were sufficiently suggestive for our young minds. One favorite sport was a form of combat between pairs of boys and girls, with the girls mounted on the boys' shoulders. Being a little undersized, I had to be selective in my choice of partners, but still managed to hold my own in these contests. And while any romantic aspects to such sport were never openly discussed, it was a pretty good way to meet and get to know the girls. Later there might be opportunities for holding hands around a campfire or a quiet walk around the lake in the evening. I recall one occasion in particular when I was on such a walk with a young lady from my church named Penny. The daughter of my Sunday school teacher, she was a little bit older than I. After we completed our circuit of the lake on a warm summer night, the moon shining across the surface of the water, she stopped and looked me in the eyes and after remarking on the romantic setting and telling me what a lovely time she was having, she said with a smile and a twinkle in her eyes, "but don't get any ideas, I've already got a boyfriend."

Of course, nothing helped dating like a car, and by the time I started high school I was already on my second automobile. I may have been slow to learn about sex, but I was among the first to master the mysteries of the internal combustion engine. From an early age, cars were my passion, and by the time I reached fourteen, the age at which a young person who had parental approval and who had passed a state-approved driver’s education program could apply for a learner’s permit, I had both a license and a car. My first car was a black 1949 flathead V-8 Ford four-door sedan. I would have preferred a two-door or a coupe, but this was perfectly fine so far as I was concerned. I don’t think I’d had it for more than a few weeks before I drove into the tree next to our driveway. My mother was sitting at my side telling me to slow down or I wouldn’t make it, but I had to learn that lesson the hard way. I was devastated. I don’t think I had ever felt so foolish and so crushed. I vowed never to drive again, something I quickly forgot, and insisted that the car be repaired immediately. I had spent most of my savings, I think it was $75, on the purchase of the car. My Mom and Dad helped me get it repaired, at a cost of slightly under a hundred dollars. With a new fender and hood, it looked great, and I completely reupholstered the interior, using red denim for the door panels and headliner, and new black and white vinyl seat covers. It was a beauty so far as I was concerned, but it never ran dependably. It was nickel and diming us to death, as they used to say. I had to rebuild the carburetor, replace the brakes, buy a new fuel pump, etc.

When my mother went to work, she offered to go in with me on a newer car, which I could drive to school if I would take her to work in the mornings and pick her up in the evenings. This sounded too good to be true, but I quickly agreed. Not only would I get a newer car, but I would have an excuse to drive it everyday. It was the summer before I was to start high school, and my mother after many years as a housewife and stay at home Mom had decided that it would be a big boost to the family’s finances and to her morale to return to work. She got a job working at USAA, United Services Automobile Association, a large insurance company for officers in the armed services that had its national offices in San Antonio. It was a good drive from our house to the office building on the corner of Broadway and Hildebrand, a little under five miles. It probably took me about half an hour to drive there and back. My Mom insisted we get a good dependable and practical car. Otherwise, she was willing to let me have my choice.

I went looking for one of my favorites, which were the same as just about every other boy’s favorites. It was the summer of 1961 and my budget was sufficient to get something as recent as a 1956 or 1957 model. This was especially exciting, since the family car was a 1953 Chevrolet. It was a sport coupe, but 53 Chevys had these old inline six cylinder engines, which were incredibly reliable, but not very powerful or exciting. The small V8s didn’t come along until 1955. So on my short list were 1955 or 1956 or (if possible) 1957 Chevy V8s. Alternatively, I would accept a Ford from the same years. We looked at several cars, but very few that impressed me, until we came across a frost blue metallic 1957 Ford Fairlane with a Thunderbird V8 engine. I knew that the car had been repainted. Frost blue was not a Ford color, certainly not for 1957. And my parents were worried about the repainting. They very correctly were wondering what it might be covering up. So we took the car to our mechanic, and after he pronounced it sound, my parents agreed to buy it.

I was beside myself with excitement over the new car. I drove it over to visit all my friends, who exhibited sufficient envy to convince me that even though it was another four-door sedan, it was definitely cool. From that time and throughout high school, cars took over from sports as the focus of nearly all of our out of school activities, as each friend eventually acquired a car of his own or gained greater access to the family car. After school we would drive around, visiting one another, sometimes stopping off at Jay's, the local drive-in, to get a burger and fries or onion rings or just a coke. On weekends we would cruise all the local strips, racing our engines, shouting greetings to friends and challenges to others with lesser cars. There was very little actual racing, although there was some of that as well. One of my friends inherited the family's 1952 Chevy two-door. It had the stock straight six, but he added a racing camshaft and improved the carburetion, and on weekends we would take it out to the local dragstrip and race it against other stock cars in its class. We frequently won, bringing home some very impressive trophies. But the real thrill was being in the pit area with our own racing car and rubbing shoulders with all the genuine hot rodders. The smells of burning rubber, gasoline, and dragster fuel, and the incredible noise of the racing engines were an intoxicating mixture for kids our age.

And in this world of cars, I was confident that my frost blue metallic 57 Ford was at least a contender among all the cars cruising the streets of San Antonio. Once again I improved the car's interior, this time with blue and white vinyl door panels and seat covers and a white headliner. I covered the floorboards with plush carpet and repainted all the interior metal to match the exterior. I also replaced the stock wheelcovers, repainted the wheels black, and added the popular and understated baby moon hubcaps that most kids of that era admired. Then I went to work on the engine, replacing the original two-barrel carburetor with an absurd set up of twin four-barrel Holly carburetors that nearly drowned the engine in gasoline. Later I found a more efficient four-barrel that actually improved performance, even if it didn't look quite as cool under the hood. All in all it was a very clean car, not flashy but definitely cool and appealing to other kids, both boys and girls.

Over the years I owned that car, I became completely identified with it among my high school peers. Kids who had never met me, knew that car. When I began dating my wife-to-be in my senior year, she told me that she described me to her friends, some of whom did not know me by name, as the guy with the frost blue metallic 57 Ford. Then they understood why she would want to date me. And it is true, despite what our parents might have wanted us to believe at the time, that the right car could do wonders for dating. I’m sure I dated many girls who would have had no interest in me otherwise, simply because they were attracted to that car. Of course, I soon learned another hard truth. There was many a girl who after one date, decided that the car alone was not enough to offset some of my personality flaws. I was a nice enough kid, but not someone who had a way with girls. In fact, there was a fairly long list of young women who once they got to know me developed a strong emotional aversion to me and my car. In some cases this extended to the entire family, so that when the frost blue metallic 57 Ford pulled up in the driveway or in the front of the house, the young lady’s father would appear in the front doorway and suggest that I go away, that Shirley, or Sandy, or Edie didn’t want to see me anymore.

I did much better dating girls from church, but many of them were several years younger, and while we had some good times playing miniature golf and going roller skating, there was just too great a gap in our ages. Not that I was a total failure with girls my own age. I had some fairly steady and even long-term girl friends, but there seemed to be some sort of law at work that the girls who liked me just weren’t the girls I wanted to like me. In some respects this was just the usual superficial longing of all high school boys for the love and devotion of the girls everyone else considered desirable. But in other respects, it was the result of getting to know some young women well enough to know that we weren’t meant for one another. I went through an especially awkward phase of courting a young lady who was the best friend and neighbor of my previous girlfriend. When the frost blue metallic 57 Ford began to show up next door, Candy, who had for years been my friend and classmate as well as my girlfriend, was none too happy with either of us, me or her erstwhile friend and neighbor. But in time my ardor cooled, and Candy and I repaired our friendship. Then she did me the favor of telling me what a rat I was when it came to my behavior with young women. Her straight talk did me some good, and came at a time when I was ready to listen. I had to agree that there was a lot of truth in what she said, and it explained why I was always getting in trouble with the girls. It also confirmed something my mother had told me. Girls grow up a lot quicker than boys.

About a year later, while I was still only a senior in high school, love struck for real. I fell head over heals for one of the prettiest and smartest girls in the whole school, the female lead in the senior play in which I myself had a minor supporting role. And even though she was then my best friend's girlfriend, somehow we all survived that romantic entanglement. Soon after that, however, everything changed. In a few months we graduated from high school, and the next fall most of us went away to college, where we developed different interests, made new friends, and began to take more notice of what was happening in the larger world around us. Within two years of graduation, I was married to the young woman who had the lead in the senior play, but that was the beginning of a much longer story, one that would bring commplications far more involved than school days and friends and girlfriends.

© 2005 by Michael L. Hall