A Return to the Past
by Lewis A. Leader

xxxx

xxxxAt 2:03 on a Tuesday afternoon in March, the shrill sound of bells punctures the silence of the halls at John Burroughs, and hundreds of young students spill out from classrooms like water from a fast-opening tap, which will close minutes later. They seem so much younger and more vulnerable than I imagine we did nearly four decades ago, not just because they are 6th through 8th graders, "middle schoolers," while we were 7th through 9th graders and junior high school students. They are children, though we didn't seem to be back then.

xxxxTheir hues reflect the diversity of the city. They speak about 20 languages and some 300 of them are bilingual. J.B. is a "magnet" school now, meaning many of its brighter students are bused in from throughout Los Angeles. They are different from me in many ways. Not one of them is thinking about strontium 90, Sandy Koufax, Gina Blumenfeld or the Drifters' latest hit.

xxxxNone of these youngsters stops at any of the lockers -- our lockers -- that still line the halls. It is three days after our reunion dinner, and I am making a return visit to J.B. Assistant Principal Mr. Davidson -- during a 60-minute tour he never asks me to call him by his first name of Lester, and I never do -- informs me that the lockers have not been used in five years. Worries about weapons and contraband and concerns about students' loitering and being late to class are among the reasons they have been decommissioned. Mr. Davidson wants them removed.

xxxxI cannot imagine attending J.B. without a locker. I choose one close to where mine was, near Room 105, and try my combination -- the "Rosebud" I will likely mutter on my death bed -- 15 (to the right), 33 (once completely around the dial to the left and past 15), 43 (a quick turn to the right). Perhaps I will find a bag of Bell Brand potato chips inside. The door remains shut.

xxxxThis was my special cache for books, lunch, a sweater and, during the baseball season, my Rawlings glove (Hank Bauer model), which I lost in college. But, most importantly, the locker was to store an extra belt. J.B. had an explicit set of rules, including a dress code that required that all boys tuck in their shirt and wear a belt.

xxxxPunishment for failing to comply with these regulations and others ("Where's your hall pass?") was generally meted out swiftly, if not uniformly. One or more swats was likely administered by John Hunt, boys vice principal, the same John Hunt, who, now retired, had two days earlier during a Sunday afternoon assembly in a soulless auditorium repeated his mantra of discipline and homework. These were the keys to our success, he told us 37 years after we left. After that assembly, another former staff member and I chatted briefly under the pull-up bars near the handball courts. "You can't lay a hand on them nowadays," he told me.

xxxxxThe school appears much the same as it did on that day when we listened in rapt attention to the news of John Glenn's orbiting of Earth as it was broadcast on the school intercom. J.B. is a favorite of moviemakers because it "looks" like a genuine American school with its red brick facade and thick verdant lawns. When air conditioning was installed, the outside walls were spared by placing the units through the ceilings so as not to mar its exterior appearance.

xxxxxMr. Davidson and I walk to the second floor up the wide staircase near the main entrance on McCadden Place. ``I'm going to take you some place where you've never been," he says, unlocking a door near the library. We climb a seldom-used dusty wooden staircase to a musty third-floor landing. The ghost movie "Casper" was filmed here, he says, and in the gloom we gingerly pass two abandoned Norman Rockwell prints, an old classroom chair and a naked cot with its mattress folded in half. I never knew J.B. had a third floor.

xxxxWe step onto a graveled roof. I stare down at what used to be the lunch quad, but the benches, covered with the dark paint that we would peel back with our fingernails, are gone. Buildings erected after we graduated, but lacking distinction and already old and worn, clutter the grounds. It looks like a prison.

xxxxI point to a low roof over a claustrophic area that once housed a popcorn machine -- 5 cents for each paper bagful. Jay Jaffe, proudly holding chalk in hand, manned a portable blackboard on that small roof and updated us during recess and lunch on the course of the 1959 World Series between the Dodgers and the White Sox. We won.
xxxxMr. Davidson and I walk back outside. We head below ground, entering a long-abandoned basement classroom (wheelchair inaccessible) and adjoining forgotten bathrooms, their dormant stalls separated by marble walls, their floors covered with papers. Outside again, between infrequent interruption from Mr. Davidson's walkie-talkie, we slide past the industrial shops. But J.B.'s tightly crafted curriculum of drafting, wood shop, metal shop, print shop, electric shop -- for boys only -- has been discontinued. I made a book stand, an electric coil and an ashtray -- an ashtray! xxxxIn Mr. Langsner's print shop, I spilled my intricate case of hundreds of tiny letters, becoming distraught but managing to hold back tears, and ensuring myself of no better than a "C."

xxxxWe also took handicrafts from Miss Acheson, whom some of us mocked sotto voce with the sobriquet of "Itchy Achee," because of her tremor, while we made little remembered items out of soft leather.

xxxxToday, the shops have other uses, although metal shop -- where I bent, tightly grabbed my ankles and drew my only swat from Mr. Foreman for the crime of eating during the period just before lunch -- is now a repository for discarded odds and ends.

xxxxMr. Davidson and I enter the building fronting 6th Street, east of McCadden. I pause at Room 123, home of the delicate Mrs. Lepska Verzeano, who with warmth and encouragement helped make math so much fun. It was many years later that I learned that she had been married to the controversial American author Henry Miller, which only increased my fascination with her.

xxxxMr. Davidson leads me upstairs, where we enter what was the room of Mr. Amster, who in the B9 taught us U.S. history, amusingly calling pop quizzes "funs" and full-blown tests "entertainments." He treated his students like the adults they only later became. It was also in this classroom where frequent substitute teacher Mr. Wong, with his slicked-back hair, once ordered one of our many Susans to clean up, with a week's worth of paper towels, after another Susan had gotten sick after lunch.

xxxxAt the east end of the second floor, where I first studied journalism, Mr. Davidson and I step briefly into a narrow, rectangular classroom, where the students, bemused by their visitors, interrupt what they are doing. I reflect back upon how often my teacher in this misshapen area, Mrs. Berardi, made it painfully and repeatedly clear to me she would not tolerate my penchant for chatting with Neal Howard and Jeff Knight.

xxxxWhere the 6th Street and McCadden Place buildings intersect, I stop on the second floor between neighboring classrooms that were ruled by two of the school's matriarchs, both of whom taught English and social studies -- Mrs. Dulaney and Mrs. Hezel.

xxxxWithin Mrs. Dulaney's domain, I pondered the meaning of Georges Seurat's painting "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," which dominated the front wall, memorized countless facts and figures about the nations of the world, and marveled at the nascent brilliance of classmates such as the thoughtful David Meyer, with whom I also shared homeroom, and the Audrey Hepburn-like Pam Humphreys.

xxxxAcross the hall, Mrs. Hezel helped us differentiate between the Incas and the Aztecs and rewarded us with tiny red, blue and white (or were they gold?) stars that she affixed to a chart to record the difficulty of the books we read. Cathy Rauch and Marian Wolfe (and Mrs. Hezel) favored Irving Stone's works on Jesse Benton Fremont and Rachel Jackson, the wives of famous Americans, while I settled on Duane Decker's oeuvres about the mythical Blue Sox baseball team, including "Good Field, No Hit," and "The Catcher from Double-A," neither of which earned the highest star.

xxxxNow in the stillness of a weekday afternoon, I recall how busy this particular spot outside the two classrooms was, especially during the six minutes we had between classes, and I envision the scurrying of classmates, some gone forever. Down the hall heading toward the auditorium, I pause again, this time outside the classroom of Miss Shade, an inspiring, demanding and sometimes unforgiving teacher of English and Latin. Within those four walls, Eric Henrikson, years ahead of most of his classmates, chose, as his poem something controversial and deep -- Whitman's epic "Leaves of Grass,'' if my memory is true. The poignancy deepens. Eric went on to Yale and to Harvard Law School, became a highly regarded and dedicated attorney, and was murdered by hoodlums outside his law office in Oakland on October 30, 1989, a few days after the birth of his second child.

xxxxWalking toward Wilshire Boulevard, Mr. Davison and I visit the athletic fields, where team captain Howard Swancy almost chose me for the A9 softball team -- solely because of my ability to play the outfield, prowess overshadowed by my ineptitude at batting.

xxxxOver the past 37 years I have literally often dreamed of those fields and their many diamonds, remembering the home run -- a single that scooted past many arms and legs -- that I hit on father-and-son night in the 7th grade, something that my dad, who died in 1993, loved to reflect upon.

xxxxThe concrete fields, birthplace of countless skinned knees and elbows, were also the origin of the "pain slap," a bizarre ritual. Perhaps invented when one testosterone-dominated youth grew tired of Carl Lieberman's insistence on never wearing a T-shirt regardless of how cold it was, the pain slap was administered with an open hand upon the victim's bare back. After flattening one's palm, and extending the fingers to their outer limits, the properly done blow was delivered with speed and accuracy between the shoulder blades. Its bite was immediate and long-lasting, lessened only in part when the victim became the aggressor, although the red imprint remained for hours.

xxxxMr. Davidson and I enter the boys' gym. It was here, during the height of America's crazed fascination with bomb shelters, where burly P.E. teacher Mr. Maher impassively warned us that, in the event of nuclear war, the most athletically fit would have the best chance of surviving the ensuing chaos. But it was the same Mr. Maher who praised those of us who had pitched in to buy a watch as a going-away present for a quiet blonde girl, Sandy Myers, who was transferring to another school, a mitzvah orchestrated by Abbey Klein.

xxxxOutside the gym, near the tennis courts -- now used for volleyball -- I had arrived early on my first day in the B7 and been asked to become part of a two-on-two basketball game by a small man of indeterminate age who hustled throughout the contest. A few minutes later, inside the auditorium he introduced himself to his newest students as Crawford Peek, the principal.

xxxxI have now been wandering the grounds of J.B. for nearly an hour, lost but, at times, found. If I want to avoid getting stuck in the 3 p.m. crush of parents picking up their youngsters on McCadden Place, I must leave. I exit as I arrived, past the attendance office and down the wide steps near the flagpole. But, unlike years ago, I don't walk toward Wilshire Boulevard for the westbound 83 bus that regularly carried me past Carnation ice cream, through the Miracle Mile, beyond The May Co. and to my stop at Sweetzer Avenue. Avoiding all the double-parked vehicles, I get into my car and leave J.B. behind, probably for the last time.

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