CATEGORY: HIGH SCHOOL
PHOTOS: 1&2: GIRLS LOCKER ROOM
3: BETTIE TODD

Moro High School was a very small high school even though the students came from three towns: Kent, Grass Valley and Moro.  I am glad I went to a small high school because I would have been totally freaked out by a large school.  I was freaked enough by Moro High, having spent three recent years in one-room schools with very few students.

As an illustration of how small our high school was, one of my class mates, Dick Oveson, who later became a math professor, said at one of our school reunions, “I like to tell my students that when I graduated from high school, I got the second highest grades in my class, and I wasn’t even in the top ten percent.  If they can’t figure that out, they’re out of the class!”

My high school years were and still are a blur of un-remembered misty visions.  I remember feeling awkward and ill at ease with the person I was becoming against my will.  I hated growing up.  I hated getting breasts, and, of all things, menstruating!–so messy–such a burden.  I had loved being a kid and I wanted to keep on being a kid all my life.  I almost succeeded, since I was catastrophically immature for such a very long time.  I still haven’t quite made it.  I wanted to ride horses and be in the rodeo instead of taking Home Economics, and learning to type.  We were told that girls had to learn Home Economics because they would get married and be housewives.  And they needed to learn to type if they ever wanted to get a job.  I didn’t know myself or like myself as a woman in the making.  So I solved this problem by hating my mother.  That was convenient.  It was one up from hating myself.

One thing I remember was my being the instigator for painting the girls locker room to resemble an under sea Neptune’s locker.  The walls, ceiling and showers were all lagoon blue with waving seaweed, tropical fish and mermaids in the shower stalls. The floor and the bottom of the walls were painted the color of sand.   All the girls helped do the painting.  We found pictures of tropical fish in the National Geographic Magazine.  We also filled in the cracks where the boys in shop class were used to watching us in the showers through a wall that was one layer of boards nailed to widely spaced studs.  The guys who built it must have left cracks between the boards on purpose.  Shop class was always over-booked.

ANOTHER VIEW OF THE GIRL’S LOCKER ROOM

I was good at sports: volley ball, basket ball and archery.  Those were the only sports we had.  We played competitive sports with other towns: Wasco and Rufus.

I remember getting good grades in English and History.  Many years later, when I started college, I found that I had gotten through all four years of high school without taking any math at all.  How I ever graduated I’ll never know, since at least one year of math is required for graduation.  Maybe it was because the principal during my senior year, Ken Young, liked me, and I think the only reason he liked me is that I was good at leather carving, an extracurricular class he taught.  In order to get into college, I had to take what was called “bone head math.”  It was for students who had flunked out of math in high school because no one had heard of anyone who had a high school diploma that hadn’t taken math.  Bone Head Math started out with algebra and I found I loved it.  I got an A.

I also wanted to leave school early in my senior year and Mr. Young was willing to let me quit in March.  I asked him for this special favor, telling him I would work extra hard to do assignments until the end of the year.  I explained my reason.  It was because I knew I would have to go to Portland and get a job and I didn’t want to have to compete with other graduating students in June.  I never was good at typing and was afraid I would not be able to get any kind of office job.  As it turned out, I easily got a job as a long distance telephone operator.

I remember going to high school dances, but I was too tall for most high school boys to dance with.  Five foot nine was tall for a girl at that time.  The only high school boy who ever asked me to dance was Bill Flatt.  He was six foot two.  He was a good dancer and he made me realize that I was a good dancer too.  I could follow him with ease.  I could tell that he liked me and I regretted that he was going steady with someone else.  It is a good thing that he never asked me for a date because I wouldn’t have known how to act.  My education in social graces was about on a par with Gene Tierney in Tobacco Road.

My best friend in high school was Bettie Todd.  She lived out of town on an Arabian horse ranch.  Her father was the care taker.  I often went home with Bettie to spend the night.  We walked to and from her house, about three or four miles.  Her parents were very nice to me.  I loved to go there to see the horses, but the house she lived in was cold and drafty.  There was no heat at all upstairs in her bedroom.

BETTIE TODD

She graduated a year before I did.  She was the only girl in a class of eight boys, so when the seniors had their “senior sneak,” (a weekend away from home) Ray Jewel, the principal, said Bettie could choose a friend to go with her.  She chose me.  We all went to Suttle Lake and stayed in the lodge.  It was a beautiful log lodge, but the accommodations were minimal.  As I recall there were only a few bedrooms, and just one bathroom.  The lock on the bathroom door was broken.  Mr. Jewel told us to sing when we were in the bathroom.  I often thought how funny it would have been if I had been able to sing like Jeanette MacDonald, and was sitting on the toilet singing opera.  I was too shy to sing, but luckily no one ever opened the door while I was in there.  That lodge burned down shortly after we left.  It must have been because of all that eighteen year old masculine energy, and the suppressed tension of two shy girls not wishing to either sing or be caught with their pants down in the bathroom.