Allan Junior High School, 1947-1949
Friday, January 16th, 2009(Written 10-2-98)
In the 7th and 8th grades I went to Allan Jr. High School in Austin. It sat atop a hill and was a big square red-brick building with a basement and three upper stories. Half of the students were Anglos and half Latin American. It was a good school, though we had some inter-racial fights once in a while, often with knives. But, I had a lot of Latin friends as well as Anglos. For the most part everyone got along pretty well.
Some important steps in my life came at Allan Jr. High. I took wood shop for six weeks, & metal shop for six weeks. In those classes I learned a lot about tools and how to use them safely. A lot of practical knowledge from that class has helped me in being my own “handy man” at home.
Another six week class was Cooking. That was really a fun class. We sometimes paired up with a girl to be a “family.” We learned table manners, how to set a proper table and learned proper respect for the girls. It was one of the most useful classes I ever had. We learned some nifty recipes that I still use. But, one time when we cooked peanut butter cookies, my partner and I decided to double the recipe. Then we decided to split up because there was an extra oven. Therefore, we had quadrupled the recipe. The teacher didn’t realize what we had done until class was almost over and she was really put out at us because she was being nice that day and let each pair of cooks double the recipe. My partner and I had each ended up with eight times the dough for one recipe and the teacher made us stay there until all our cookies were done. We missed our next class and had a lot of dishes to wash. But, she let us keep our cookies. She was really a nice lady, as well as being a good teacher.
Then we had typing for six weeks. I loved typing. Boy! We really had some good teachers in that school! I learned to type 67 words per minute in six weeks, and that’s about how fast I type to this day. I learned to read what I typed, and got through some wonderful literature in that class.
We had Spanish for six weeks. After two other six-week courses, we came back for another six weeks of Spanish. That’s all the foreign language I ever had all the way through college. Just twelve weeks. I was in love with my pretty Spanish teacher, Miss Villanueava. She was an excellent teacher, though quite young, and fresh out of college. I learned a lot of Spanish in a short time, and it has served me very well over the years.
I sang in the Boys’ Chorus for two years. That was really positive experience. We had an excellent conductor and we sang only very good music, including Ten Thousand Men, Battle Hymn of the Republic, and The Holy City. That teacher stuck to music that we would know and appreciate for the rest of our lives. Good music! One might be surprised at how seriously that whole class took to our music. There were about 85 of us. Some had soprano voices, some voices were changing, and we had some fully developed basses. I sang alto. We made some beautiful sounds that I can still hear in my mind fifty years later.
Though I had Beginning Band in the sixth grade at West Columbia for half a year (starting two days before the Christmas break), I caught up with the other clarinet players who started at the beginning of the year. Then, I had to be in the Beginning Band again in the 7th grade at Allan Jr. High, because the Beginning Band there consisted of only 7th graders. I had already gone through all the books we used that year. One of the best things that ever happened to me was to go through Beginning Band twice! By the time that was behind me, I was really solid in the basics of playing the clarinet and in reading music, and I was a leader in Band that year and from then on. Band was my favorite class from the 6th grade all the way through Graduate School.
At Allan Jr. High I was put into a special class for advanced math students. There were 32 of us. Half a dozen of us in that class were way ahead of the others. After doing our daily work, the teacher had special problems for us to work. To us it was a game. I was in the top three math students in the entire 7th and 8th grades,–about 550-600 in each grade. Both years our little class stuck together, and we had the same teacher both years. She was a real genius of a teacher, not only in math, but in handling her students.
My English teacher was a real “Dud.” She was the only under-achieving teacher I had during my two years there, and I had her in both the seventh and eighth grades. I learned a lot about how not to teach while in her classes, and I don’t think my knowledge of our language was enhanced much in either grammar nor in literature. I think that my age was just right to learn to read better about that time, but saw little lasting improvement. I’m not making the excuses of a poor student; she was really not a good teacher, and should not have been there.
In PE because we learned the rules and went through the motions of playing all the major sports and some minor ones, competing with other teams in the class. That was another of my favorite classes. I didn’t like boxing, though. Whatever sport we were playing I was almost always one of the worst on our team. I was terribly awkward, both then and now. Years later, the game I played best was basketball. I couldn’t run then, and I can’t run now. I never could run well.
We had 48 Home Rooms in that school. During election year, each Home Room took the identity of one of the 48 states. We learned a lot about how the American political system works.
That year our family stood in line for hours to get on The Freedom Train, which carried some of our country’s most sacred documents. That’s one of the highlights of my life. Also, Harry Truman came through town on a campaign whistle stop, and that’s about what it was. He came out on the back porch of the caboose, waved his hat and the train moved on. I was a bit disappointed, because he looked just like his pictures.
A third highlight of that political year was attending the Democratic Caucus with Dad, Grandad Durden, and step-uncle Albert Durden. I think Jim was with us, too. Albert had run for the Democratic nomination for governor “way back when” against Coke Stevenson, and got splattered with political mud. Well, anyhow, at this convention were people that I recognized from pictures in the papers: Mayon Tom Miller, John Ben Shepherd, Sam Rayburn, Lyndon Johnson, and others. The platform was loaded with big-name Democrats. I recall as the evening drew to a close that I turned to Dad and said, “See that tall man up there next to Sam Rayburn? Some day he’s going to be our President.” That man was Lyndon Johnson. He wasn’t even a senator yet! That came with that year’s election.
Some of the friends I gained in Jr. High remain friends now, fifty years later. Jeannie knows some of them, too. Especially Burt Schulle. He and I were born on the same day in 1935. Also, Burt and I went to Austin High together in the 12th grade, and worked together at H.E.B. Sometimes we would spend the night at each other’s homes. His parents were some of my favorite people.
In 1968 Jeannie and I took a 29-day vacation. She was pregnant with Kelly Jo, and we spent most nights camping in a tent. We had a Volkswagon bug. I took the back seat out so we would have more room for camping gear, clothes, and for our food boxes, etc. I had a piece of plywood where the back seat should have been. It was longer than the car was wide, so I put hinges on it. I could take the passenger’s side front seat out and put it in the back, swapping the hinged boards for the front seat. It made a bed 7’2″ long so sometimes Jeannie could rest while I drove. We went to Palo Duro Canyon, Carlsbad, The Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, Flagstaff, Las Vegas, Morro Beach, Sequoia Park, San Francisco, Stockton, Salt Lake City, and back home to Austin.
In Flagstaff we called Burt Schulle and his family, hoping to visit with them. But he was a forest ranger up on the mountain. We chatted by phone, but he said for us not to try to come up the mountain to visit, because the snow was still ten feet deep, though it was August. Another year we visited him and his family at Clovis, New Mexico. He was still a forest ranger, but was then in charge of the prairie around Clovis. I can’t recall his wife’s name, but I knew her family when I was still in high school and while I was at Southwestern, especially her sister Mary Beth!
I have a lot of good memories of Allan Junior High School, the students and teachers and the many extra-ordinary experiences I had there.
Years later the building succumbed to arson. But, for me, many good memories remain.