Jorn's highschool years

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1966-1970: Maple Grove Jr-Sr High School, Bemus Point, NY

Disclaimer: This page consists of 95% non-nutritive filler.

Once during summer vacation I was dancing around on top of these arches while my girlfriend Kathy took 8mm movies... but then the vice-principal drove up and busted us.

My family moved from Yellow Springs, Ohio to Bemus Point, New York in 1966. Yellow Springs was very hip because of the presence of Antioch College, but the 60s hippie revolution had barely been visible even in YSO when we moved. (Actually, Robert Anton Wilson was in town then, and claims he was out in the cornfields tripping on peyote by then... but I didn't notice.)
Bemus Point had a bit of an artists' colony subculture (influence of Chautauqua Lake and the Chautauqua Institution, plus a heritage of religious fringe groups like the Spiritualists at Lilydale (memorialised [lyrics] by homey [qv] band 10,000 Maniacs))... but (like the USA in general) high school culture was mostly about sports and getting drunk.
A vast majority of the students seemed to be named Johnson, Carlson, Samuelson, Danielson, Swanson, Lawson or Anderson. Where Yellow Springs had had almost no bullying, Maple Grove's delinquent element was probably a majority of the boys (8th grade hormones made this a lot worse, of course).
The physical side rarely went as far as punches, but there were lots of slaps and pokes and shoves and malicious insults. (Others will probably remember it differently-- I was even more hypersensitive then!)
That first year we were all just learning to dance-- it was the era of the Frug and the Swim. The first time our music teacher had us bring in our own music for dancing, I vividly remember one of the delinquents pointing at me and saying, "Look, he's doing an op dance." (Op referred to the special ed kids, I forget why.) Another new girl in our class did a shimmy like Elvis's go-go girls so they called her 'Bonnie the Worm'.
I was amazed to go to their afterschool dances in later years and see some of the same guys actually dancing well, adding it to their coolness routine.
The high school itself was way out in the boonies, an area with lots of small farms, and we lived nearby it and kept a few horses for a while. (Our phone was on a party line, making me even less likely to call up girls.) The isolation led to lots of reading and many hobbies.
My family subscribed to the New Yorker, the Village Voice, Esquire, and New York magazine, and we usually got the NY Times on Sunday, so I was pretty well-informed about cosmopolitan cultural trends. The whole family went to see Andy Warhol (or his simulacrum) at the local community college, showing a bit of his film called "****". We also went to the local art house for 2001, Easy Rider, Barbarella, Bonnie and Clyde, Bergman and Fellini. We'd occasionally trek up to Buffalo's Albright-Knox art gallery for its outstanding pop art exhibits, including a mirrored room that smelled of dirty socks, where the guard was rumored to peek up ladies' skirts.
My big sister brought home a steady stream of hip books from the Jamestown library, introducing me to James Joyce among many other lifelong favorites.
I loved Springbok jigsaw puzzles, and Stephen Sondheim's British-style crosswords in NYmag. For the latter, I acquired a huge reference library-- thesauruses, various dictionaries, on old Britannica, etc-- which I (literally!) wallowed in. I actually won their New Year's Competition for January 1970-- $30 in free books from Brentano's in NYC, and my name in a magazine for the first time.
I read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, and was staggered when the first fellow student I asked reported (quite innocently) a dream where she was sliding down a log (!) into a pond with some boys (!!), but was worried about getting splinters (!!!).
I liked Tolkien and Vonnegut and Catch 22 and The Tin Drum and Donald E Westlake, and Asimov's nonfiction. I went thru a major phase of reading up on astrology, dowsing, reincarnation, etc.
The Beatles were my main music, but my sister introduced Donovan, Cat Stevens, Blind Faith, the Band, Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane. The Woodstock soundtrack was one of my faves. (The excitement of slitting the cellophane and pulling out the paper sleeve of a new LP has no correlate for CDs.) A Warner Records (?) anthology series called The Big Ball (and others) introduced me to Zappa, the Fugs, Van Dyke Parks, Randy Newman, and many many other artists.
I visited my sister at college during the first Earth Day (May 1 1970) where she introduced me to the Incredible String Band, the Firesign Theatre, the National Lampoon, and the poet Wallace Stevens.
TV shows I liked included the Avengers, the Smothers Brothers, Laugh-In, and David Steinberg's music and comedy show whose name escapes me at the moment (Music Scene, probably).
We had a super-8 movie camera and my sister and I got editing equipment and made fun short movies, though we never really got the hang of making good splices. There was also a continual flow of other art materials that we explored.
I had a brief, expensive passion for model rocketry, but I got discouraged when I could hardly ever get a successful flight. I built a shortwave radio from Heathkit, and did several other of their soldering projects. I tried and failed to master Morse code.
Our pets included a giant tomcat called Yellow Dog, Siamese cats named Griff and Mabel, a hen called Harold, a poodle with a broken back named Pawky, and a setter named Gwyneth who had to be put down after she bit a big piece out of the high school football star's leg (his father was fixing some broken appliance at our place).
My social group, as far as I had one, centered around the Natwicks (Sara and Peter) and the Hetzels (Tom, Jim, and Nancy). Sara's boyfriend Ceorl was in a psychedelic cover band, and we had a moderate number of adventures at concerts, dances, skinny dipping, etc. I saw the ads for Woodstock and expected a major fiasco (heh).
Sara and Ceorl welded a heavy sculpture of a couple in a (highly stylised) sexual embrace and snuck it into the HS lobby, where it lasted a few hours before being censored as a safety hazard.
I got into a pattern of doing science and math courses in a half-year, and then testing out via the NY State Regents exams.
Maple Grove's sports teams were called the Red Dragons, and our required gym suits were red and white. Gym was my hell on earth, and to protest the uniform I dyed mine purple. ("It was an accident, honest!") I guess the sight of thirty boys lined up in red and white, with one glaring oddball, must have left a vivid impresion, because the Senior Class Will included "Jorn leaves his gym uniform to Mr Lewellen" (the gym teacher). Once in math class (where I was two or three years younger than everyone else) a troublemaker snuck my gym towel out from under my seat, and passed it around so everyone could sign it. What a nightmare!
Somehow the seniors had wangled a private lounge out of the old fallout shelter in the school's basement, with a jukebox (Badfinger was huge when I shifted from junior to senior status in January 1970). I never felt quite at ease with this year-older class, but they tolerated me reading on the couch there.
Mr Begert the metal shop teacher (still listed in their faculty-- wow!) tried to get a bunch of us interested in building a geodesic dome-- I forget what happened with that. I later did help build one at Antioch.
Mrs Lewellen was the Latin teacher and I used to torment her by turning in my homework either embossed by typewriter on aluminum foil, felt-tipped onto an inflated balloon or a slab of concrete, or any other extreme media I could imagine. There was a Pre-Raphaelite Pandora depicted in the textbook that I cut out before anonymously turning it in at the end of the year. And Jim Hetzel and I got low marks for our French project, which consisted largely of discreet cutouts from his dad's Playboy pictorial on the girls of Paris.
I often indulged the immodest thrill of turning in my completed tests long before anyone else, usually evoking groans of envy.
The only drugs I remember hearing about was a single case where a girl freaked out on horse tranquilizers or something equally desperate, and later said how the school nurse had looked like an evil witch. (The girl was sweet, but had a delinquent boyfriend whose name she carved into her arm later. Even the cheerleaders sometimes dated the delinquents.)
Via AltaVista search:
Our hipster English teacher, Basil Hamblin, is now head of Sage Ridge School [pic]. He taught us Hesse and Kafka and Faulkner, and brought poet Audre Lorde for a day. His wife later wrote a book on mime.
The principal was Fred J Gerber (codename 'Derf') who seemed ancient in 1966, but is still posting to the Web [qv]. Colgate class of '27 must make him about 94.
The son of the guy who draws Marmaduke was in my class for a while.
I don't expect this Pierre Chagnon was the one who got expelled (?) for swearing in his final starring performance as "The Man Who Came To Dinner"... but then again, who knows? Our hometown supermodel, Ricki Olson, was in a commercial with Disney's teen star Kurt Russell (decades before John Carpenter made him cool).

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