The 9th grade preliminaries ran a little long in the last article so, here’s a few more thoughts to finish off the intro.
Sports – School and Intramural. Sports opportunities were plentiful and included all the sports except baseball. The pictures are interesting in that the school teams were assembled on the basis of ability, while the intramurals were a collection of friends. The football team was covered in another article.
Harassment. If there was any significant amount of it going on, I don’t recall
it. Of course, since I was nearing 6’
tall and my friends were football players, it’s possible that whatever
potential problems may have existed were avoided before they began. Big Sam Scott's 2004 memoir mentions a MJH "Vigilante" squad to deal with bullies about this time but, since his son, Sampson III, was a good friend, I don't recall hearing a thing about it.
Meadowlark Newspaper. It’s too bad that MJH didn’t put a yearbook together like they did at Handley. We might have then had a better photo record of those years. I’m not too sure what criteria was established for choosing a newspaper staff at either Meadowbrook or Eastern Hills, but do recall it being an elective that required an application for the limited spots available. It seemed to attract some of our more ambitious students and their work in producing the publications served as perhaps the most complete record of daily life around the schools that may now exist. A cursory review of a graciously shared 1960 HJH yearbook shows no reference to a HJH newspaper at that school.
There was some spillover of the Meadowlark staff to the Tartan at EH, but not as much as I would have thought. At Meadowbrook, it appears to have been something of a popular class for the more aspiring youngsters, while at Eastern Hills, it appears to have been those who might have been more serious writers. On the other hand, with Dillard aboard, anything was possible, and Bob Dillard went on to be a West Texas newspaperman.
Perot & sex ed. Meadowbrook Junior High in the 1950s was a sort of nursery for future stars. Springing from its innards and roaring out the doors each afternoon was a stream of future hi-potential youngsters. Poly received its product until 1959, when the new Eastern Hills High School opened and took over the finishing job.
Just within the scope of this blog’s focus, I’ve identified future doctors, dentists, engineers, lawyers, judges, members of Congress, investment bankers, commercial developers, Navy and airline pilots, screen writers, Pulitzer Prize winners, mayors, professors, principals, teachers, flight attendants, nurses, artists, writers, businessmen and owners, contractors, D.C. lobbyists, and accountants; many of them scattered throughout the USA and the world.
As producers of thousands of children and now, grandchildren, many of them got their start right within the walls of the East Side’s Meadowbrook Junior High School. While, to my knowledge, none…or very few of them got their start reproductive starts during those years…some of them soon would.
And to help ready those future stars and others, MJH had just the ticket…an 8th grade course euphemistically called, Health & Safety. And just the teacher…a banty hen sized lady by the name of Bette Perot. Yep, Ross’s older sister. She ruled her classes with an iron hand and the demeanor that Ross later made famous during his flirtation with the Presidency…they were like two peas in a pod. I recall very little of the class, other than it was substantially clinical in nature…lots of drawings and name the parts, etc. Somewhere around here, I still have a notebook from that class; the only thing of real interest was a record Miss Perot had everyone jot down…their height and weight at the start of the (8th grade) year and another record at year's end. I had only gained about 2-lbs but, by the end of the year I was something like 6” taller.
Anyway, Ross is 5’5”. Bette is shorter than that and we encountered her several years before Ross left his IBM sales job to start EDS.
2 comments:
How cool is that! Ross Perot's sister taught at Meadowbrook! Another missed opportunity! I never would have made that connection. Now, I have to see if I can find my old report card. I could have improved my grade by using more graphs in my class presentations,
Oh yes, including attractive graphs and sketches with your submittals always tended to bump the grade up. At the very least they helped mask shortcomings in your prose.
I showed offspring how to use the technique in college but, to call them "exhibits" and attach them to the end of the paper. Offspring made fine use of the approach and was often the only one in class to do so...also often the only one in class to make mostly "A" on those submittals.
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