Good to be King
By King Harris
“Darn.” That’s one of the many words I remember muttering as a kid describing how I always felt on the first day of school when the big, yellow, school bus rounded the bend on Mountain Home Road to pick me up.
I reluctantly hopped aboard, spotting an empty seat so I could privately ponder, as we lumbered along to Woodside Elementary whether the third grade would be any better than the second or the first, and to think about other things I’d rather be doing for the next nine months. Things like building forts out of hay bales, playing with salamanders in the creek, or screaming down steep driveways on my 4-wheeled Flexible Flyer.
I knew my days of freedom were officially behind me as soon I sat down in Mr. Headly’s third grade class to write what I knew was going to be our first and most predictable assignment of the year, as it was the year before, a task that kids like me always found ironically painful — “How I spent my summer vacation.”
It’s not that I didn’t like going to school; after all, I had lots of friends there (except for Cheryl Adams who once bit me on the arm), many of whom I still keep in touch with to this day. And I eagerly engaged in all the extra-curricular activities, especially sports.
Studies, however, were a different ballgame. School in that context was less than cool. Of course had I really done my homework (real drag), I’m sure the scores on any one of my quizzes, tests, or exams (total drag) would have been more desirable or at least acceptable, and I might have avoided the communal dread of being called on in class (drag net) and alleviated any anxiety of presenting my parents with the preverbal report card (ultimate drag).
[pullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”#0066FF” class=”” size=””]So it’s not surprising that I was considered by more than a few teachers to be a student who needed what my father often referred to as a “swift kick in the butt.”[/pullquote]Which is why many of them would remark to my parents — either in person or by way of an “advisory note” (another drag), “Mr. and Mrs. Harris, your son we feel is very bright, but he could be so much more than merely an adequate student if only he were to apply himself.”
It was a curse that would continually prompt my parents to seek out stricter schools in the belief that I might be motivated by something just short of a military academy. They found the perfect institution for my next three years in the private, Ford Country Day School, a converted Tudor mansion in the nearby Los Altos Hills.
Ford Country was operated at the time in the mid-‘50s by a seriously stern and sometimes abusive married couple whose idea of a disciplinary education was enforced by an occasional slap upside the head, or the launch of some kind of missile — a shoe, eraser, or the closest utensil — across the room at any boy or girl in the fourth to the sixth grade believed to be recalcitrant.
I could duck the Fords, but not the teachers, who over the next three years made sure I had the education needed to graduate, so I could advance to my parent’s next school of choice, Menlo Boys’ School, where I attended and survived seventh and eighth grades, despite numerous challenges.
The first was the headmaster, a gargantuan ex-Marine named, Otto Dietrich, who, with hands as big as catcher’s mitts and a parade-ground voice that caused earthquakes, was far more intimidating and frightening than the Fords ever hoped to be.
The second was odd behavior of the various teachers, many of whom for one thing smoked in the classroom, a habit not disclosed in the curriculum but one without doubt influential to unsuspecting students, particularly those anywhere in the vicinity of Mr. Hodsen, a history teacher with an amazing capacity of being able to exhale an entire but smoky discourse on the Italian Renaissance, after inhaling a Lucky Strike.
Mr. Moon was my algebra teacher and a former WWII flyer who loved hearing us groan every time he drew a diagram of Pearl Harbor on the blackboard, which indicated we were about to be hit with a surprise test.
Our French class was frustrating because Mr. Biennerup stuttered every time he got excited. Mr. McClusky, who taught English Lit., assumed that every eighth grader should be able to understand and translate Shakespeare, a belief all of us could not possibly share.
The third was the even bolder behavior of even the best of students, wise-cracking pranksters almost every one of them (expect oddly enough for a very quiet Bobby Wier who rebelled by later founding the Grateful Dead), whose desire to spitball a class remained mostly a dream should Otto appear with a lesson or two most of us would just soon avoid.
Suffice it to say, I graduated Menlo with more blessings than honors, but at least I made it to high school.
Make that high “schools” — three of them. Mom and Dad weren’t through with me yet.
