Junior High

When I finished the 6th grade at Edwards Elementary in 1959, I went to James Bowie Junior High School for the 7th, 8th and 9th. Bowie was a newer school on Cleveland Street – the same street that ran beside Chester Slay’s house. There were two other elementary schools who fed Bowie so I met some new classmates and made some new friends.

The sign says French Elementary, but it was Bowie Junior High when I went there. The multicolored windows to the right of the entrance were library windows.

Chester and Dennis Epps were friends from Edwards. My new friends were James Cole, Brad Norton and Patrick White. Notice that I did not think of girls at this point in my life as particular friends, they were just acquaintances.

My entry to the 7th grade was marked by fear of hazing. I am so pain adverse that I worried that the 8th and 9th graders would do degrading or hurtful things to me. As is usual, the fear was worse than the reality.

This may have been the first year for advanced classes in the Beaumont Independent School District. I mention this because all of my friends were bright kids in the advanced classes. Patrick White (later Sullivan) played a cello in orchestra and James Cole Brad Norton and I were in band. I played trumpet.

Brad, Patrick and James

I absolutely hated PE. I was not motivated towards sports so PE was just running and doing situps and pushups and I was miserable at all of it. Luckily in the 8th and 9th grades I was excused from PE because I was in marching band.

I was heavy into science and math and was not particularly excited by history, English or social studies. I recall that we had a reading class that was acceptable except for the spelling tests.

I spent a lot of time in the library with my friends. We loved science fiction and read Heinlein and Asimov and other science fiction writers. This was before the space program got kicked into high gear and we did not know much about the moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury. The science fiction writers could generate colonies on the smaller planets and write really engaging stories. I recall one by Heinlein, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel about a kid who found a used spacesuit and ended up on the moon. Totally infeasible by my knowledge today, but great when I was 13 years old.

It is kinda sad to me that now we know enough about the moon and inner planet that all of this classic science fiction is so technically flawed as to be unreadable.

My junior high years coincided with the space race between the US and the USSR. Our principal liked the idea of our being tuned in to the space race so we had an assembly in the auditorium to watch rocker launches on TV.

This auditorium probably seated 500 and the TV on the stage was probably a 17 inch black and white. Fortunately, the band sat in chairs up front to play music for the assembly so we could see the TV. We watched some failures and some successes.

I recall that at one assembly we had to put on a skit about current affairs. James Cole wore fatigues and a fatigue cap and a fake beard and played Fidel Castro. I wore a fake bald head and beat a shoe on the table impersonating Nikita Khrushchev. I think Chester or Patrick played Eisenhower.

Our civics teacher was Mr. McMillan. He convinced me to shine my shoes before going on a job interview. He drove a Renault Dauphine.

Mr. Hamilton taught 7th grade math. Our 8th and 9th grade math teacher got us into Number Sense and Slide Rule Competition at the UIL contests.

I was ‘in love’ with Janis Gray, but she never knew it.

We had sock hops in the gymnasium. Edgar and Johnny Winter {google them} had a band and played for assemblies and for dances. Both went on to highly successful music careers. I tutored Edgar in math.

I recall refusing to turn in my spelling book at the end of one year and paying the fine instead. I then destroyed the spelling book – pretty juvenile. I guess I did poorly on spelling tests.

My junior high years pretty much paralleled my working at the Tyrrell Library.

Band was prominent in my life. Started band in the 5th grade and I cannot, for the life of me, recall the band director at Edwards Elementary. I had a cornet at the time that seemed to always have a dent in the bell pipe.

Putting the case on my bicycle handlebars put the instrument at risk, but I was too proud to walk to school.

For the three years of Junior High School at Bowie, our director was Phil Schwartz. He played cello in the Beaumont Symphony. He was a hard worker and made band fun.

Because we marched, I was exempt from PE and that delighted me.

Mr Schwartz told me that I would be a good Methodist as he worked with me on a solo piece. He said that I was very methodical in eliminating one error at a time as I worked through the piece.

All in all, I was a mediocre player.