Having wheels available and the charter to get on with dating was only a preliminary hurdle we had to overcome. Now what? Where the heck do we go and what are we going to do? Of course, there were school sponsored dances and individual club sponsored gatherings, but they were infrequent and always seemed like an office party to me. Why socialize with people you spend so much of your daily life with, a significant percentage of whom you scarcely know and a few that you flat don’t like?
The house parties seem to
have quickly faded as the rush to find some boy/girl friends ramped up; their
function as mixers no longer serving their purpose once pairings increasingly
emerged and solidified. The time was at
hand to start fogging up some car windows.
Along with the realization
that we were going to need some money for expenses, came the realization that
in order to make a date somewhat interesting, we were going to need to tap into
some creativity. Our 1961 East Side really lacked much variety for entertainment…a couple of drive-in
movie theaters and hamburger stands.
The Gateway Theater was there but, we had been going to the
Gateway movies since we were kids…these early dates needed to be something more
special than the old Gateway.
There were a couple of
drive-in movie theaters but, by the time we got our hands on the steering wheels, they were showing “B”
films and some of them perhaps passing for raunchy in those days. Bowling was always there but, it wasn’t very
conducive to quiet conversation and maybe some snuggling. We weren’t yet sophisticated nor well-heeled
enough to try dinner dates, although the wonderful Italian Inn stood ready
on East Lancaster, should we need it.
The Italian Inn was started by Janis Smith’s (EH ‘64, if she
hadn’t moved to Highland
Park HS) dad, Sid and his partner, Armand Jones. It had a terrific atmosphere for our early
romantic ambitions…private booths with doors on them! But, we weren’t yet old enough to order the
Chianti.
Now, these early dates really
called for some quick o.j.t. …you know the kind, which way to tilt your head on the approach to
avoid bumping noses, how to keep from clicking your teeth
together…stuff like that. Then there was
the arm around her shoulders ordeal that called for struggling with some
serious muscle fatigue while holding it still so as not to risk screwing
something up …etc. Of course, these were
minor adjustments that once mastered, faded into fond memory.
Since young boys/men are naturally
curious creatures, once their curiosities are satisfied, their focus and inquisitiveness tends to quickly wander on. If our girls had
only known, it might have behooved them to simply accept the curious attention,
secure in the knowledge that his mind would very soon shift to something
else. But no, we were all treated to
that amusing female affliction…the twitching shoulder often accompanied by the
forearm deflection or swat. It was actually
kind of fun to make a feint just to see her reflexive defenses deploy….sort of
a Pavlovian thing.
As a bashful lad, unsure of how
his own properties and features were seen by our lovely girls, my approach to
the wonderful opportunity was a measured one.
Close observation of Gay and her pals at MJH had shown that when “the
girls” liked someone, they tended to act like playful puppies…lots of laughs,
playful punches, and in Gay’s case, an insufferable infatuation with that
damned Roby. Glenn Brandon
and Charlie Rigby were favorites; so was Paul Tate and Bobby
Dillard…their common threads were outgoing personalities and they were smart. I had the smart part down pretty well but, an
outgoing personality wasn’t my thing. Recently, Girl
#3 described me as an ironic wit, thoughtful, and intelligent…sounds
good to me….I’ll take it. She also described our dates as, “egghead
dates” which, well for heaven’s sake…I thought of them as sophisticated. Hmm…they probably were sophisticated and on reflection, despite appearances to the contrary, she
wasn’t…not yet.
As Carl (’64) brilliantly
observed in his Teen Canteen piece, seeing our distaff counterparts mature
into increasingly serious potential romantic interests was something that
snuck up on us. Gone were the “sugar and
spice and everything nice” days…and here was, well, we weren’t too sure what
but, we knew we needed to find out. The
Harry Potter cast shown below as they made their same transition in public view
is very illustrative of the phenomena.
Wow!
Very soon we started having
to face the sad fact that a lot of our girls were going steady or otherwise
engaged with someone that we may not have known or even noticed. Not only had the ’61 and ’62 class “gulls”
swooped in during our Sophomore year of wheelless purgatory, gulls from other
schools had been picking them off, too! What
a miserable situation! But, I’m told by
several former classmates that taking themselves out of the game too early came back to bite them later, when they were
Seniors, the older gulls had moved on, and us ’63 boys had become otherwise involved.
A light review of our CLAN mug
shots from those years suggest a few things; one, our girls were probably right
in looking to the gulls when they could…our ’63 crop of boys was
seriously deficient in budding Redford or O’Neal prototypes and, our ’63 beauties
were numerous, outnumbering the few of us devilishly handsome types by perhaps 6:1. Doubt me?
Compare a picture of Dianne Hardin or Carolyn Almond or Cheryl
Reeder as CLAN Sophomores and with most of the dozens of
Sophomore boys in our class and you'll see what I mean.
Asking a girl out on a date was
another psychological hurdle to overcome.
There was the direct approach, perhaps over a lunch table or in the
hallway but, those were fraught with potential problems…the potential for embarrassment,
having an audience for what was fundamentally an ad hoc private matter, and the
risk of screwing things up with her nearby girlfriend if she were your fall-back
position. Of course, there
was always that infernal telephone.
I don’t recall how I made my
approaches to Girls #1 & 2 but, Girl #3 remains clear in memory…a simple,
painfully brief, “ya wanna” was probably the extent of it since I didn’t
have much expectation of success; she, still being the reigning goddess of the
old MJH lunchroom table that had reconvened at EHHS. But, I had a wonderful advantage…she was
pinned to a table in the hallway tending to some club fund-raising activity and
had nowhere to escape. Flustered
and unable to run away, she quickly looked one-way, then the other and said, “can
I get back to you?”
“Sure,” I said….heck, it wasn’t
a “no,” now was it? And, she had bought
herself a few moments to think it over. This
being a nothing ventured, nothing gained situation, I was neither anxious nor complacent
since there was nothing to be lost in the venture!
An hour or two later came the
Western Union response shown above, and Gus had effectively ended his sampling
of our abundance of beautiful EHHS girls, sent Steve Means into a deep
funk, and judging from some of their sporadic wistful hallway glances over the
next couple of years, may have even tuned up the “Meadowbrook Ladies” a bit,. The telephone was never again a menace…she
kept saying, “Yes, I’d love to.”
Now, having bagged our 8th grade MJH lunchroom table’s unanimous choice as it’s foremost goddess, quickly came the quandary of what to do with her. This was certainly uncharted waters and young
Gus was but a pollywog in them. Fortunately,
Dad had a couple of nice, fairly new cars that he readily made available to me for
the cost of the gas to run them so, I wasn’t faced with having to make do with
a jalopy. One of my recent
correspondents mentioned that his banger was so rough that his sister refused
to ride in it…and by extension, etc.
What other lads had to contend with, I really don’t know since we had
essentially stopped sharing social intelligence with one another….this was yet
another competition between us and a serious one, at that.
Finding interesting things to
do on the early 1960s East
Side was a challenge…there
wasn’t much. Oh sure, you had the
periodic dances at school or one of the rec centers but, never having had the
time to pay much attention to learning how to look cool whilst dancing, I never took time to learn or, with the sports, never really had the time…I
think she was the same way as she kept her plate full with lots of extracurricular
activities. You could double-date to one of the hamburger stands, then to a drive-in movie, and grub through the movie but, I had judged the reigning goddess of the MJH/EHHS lunch table gang to be classier than that. Although double-dates could be a great aid in keeping conversation lively, Girl #3 and I never needed any assistance with that, at least none that I recall.
Our time in history was
within an interesting period of transition in the music industry. We were evolving from “swing” which we sort
of morphed into “rock n’ roll” with “bop, bunny hops, hokey pokies, strolls,” and
when Motown entered the scene, it seemed that a “new” dance was invented just
to go with each new song release. There was no way in hell I was going to keep up with all that stuff; but, close dancing remained a consistent and pleasant standby...you just got a little closer as you got a little older.
Be that as it may, a happy
transformation occurred in the boys’ favor about the same time we started exercising those new drivers' licenses…we got a new
supply of girls as the ‘64s came aboard for their Sophomore year.
Just by the numbers, the situation was obvious…where we had had about 150 of
our ’63 girls available, the arriving ‘64s roughly doubled that number to
300!! Once again, things were looking
up.
Movies were an old standby that had been serving most communities around the country since they were
invented in the early part of the century. Since I had judged the Gateway as not “uptown”
enough for Girl #3, that left the downtown Ft. Worth theaters that had been around essentially unchanged, since
the very early days of downtown and for something more modern, we had the
newer Ridglea theater on the West
Side that usually screened first-run films. Dallas had its own well established “theater row” on Elm St. but, I don’t recall our going that far to see a
movie. And all of those theaters were much
fancier than our old East Side Gateway.
A job in the local
neighborhood threw off enough to cover expenses and even enough to bump our
dates a bit more "uptown"…the live stage musicals at Casa Mañana and
occasionally, the Dallas State Fair Music
Hall....the Egghead dates.
But, there was something else
afoot during these years…the thing that most likely set in my head the notion
of EHHS being an odd social culture.
Ever since starting this blog and canvassing others about their
recollections, I’ve been impressed and amused by the responses from some of our
top former classmates.
“An in-crowd? Yes, definitely.”
“I was a good girl.” (ed. note: yes, I'm sure you were.)
“I dated a lot and never paid
attention to it but, yes it was there.”
“I sort of regret it.”
“Snobs” “Snobby”
“I was a goody two-shoes.”
“I wasn’t near the level of that
crowd to have any knowledge of it.”
“I left there after
graduation and never looked back.”
“The Meadowbrook Ladies.”
…and a number of others responding
along those lines. Interesting that
their thoughts and recollections fairly closely matched my own, which I had for
nearly a half-century put off to Bible Belt religions, parochialism, and a
fairly common adolescent thoughtlessness.
But, there was more to it than that.
If Carole Stallcup
hadn’t erupted in the hall all those years ago, it’s very likely that I wouldn’t
have had any knowledge of them…Thaelis, that is. And it wasn’t until making some inquires in
the past few years that I even knew Delphi existed. Both of them, I think actually skewed our EH
social life to some degree and I’ll tell their story after a couple of
introductory pieces that must be inserted here, to better explain them.
Until then,
Next, The Cattle and
Oil Barons
