A trip back to the early years we never knew we had so good…
Finding Self at our Early Baby Boomer, 50 and 55th Beverly Hills (Ca.) Class of 1968 High School Reunions: Part II
(Draft chapter to Memoir in progress with working title, “Journal of An Ocean Lover”.)
I’ve been thinking about our slice in time, particularly the one we were incubated in during our formative years through high school. For us Baby Boomers I’m talking about the 1950s through graduation in 1968 when we were “set free” to find ourselves in a very different world we began with.
I can reflect on this now in my “retirement years” as often as I like. Not that I harp on the past. I contemplate now and then about our place in time to find peace and a better sense of place and purpose, something I’m finally finding in my late 60s.
Our 50th and 55th Beverly Hills High School reunions are journeys back to shared experiences with classmates. No one else who lived through that period understands what it was like. Our time will always be unique just to us. We are the generation that began in stability and security growing up in the first American suburbs where we roamed on our own undeterred without fear until dark.
Not that anyone or group can be defined by an era, or that an era can be defined. The political and social history of the first two decades of life is not a Life Magazine assessment that puts its finger on the pulse of an era. It hardly touches the truth of our personal stories. Yet a general narrative of an era can serve as background, the drumbeat of a time, much like the sounds of Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and The Doors to name a few groups and single artists who reflected as well as impacted the trajectory and arc of our lives.
The early suburb was our playground. There was something particularly acute in what was our ground zero, Beverly Hills, Ca. In our time, Beverly Hills was actually a small town. It was manageable. It had a bike shop named Hans Ohrt, two clothing stores for boys and young men — Rudnick’s and Birdsall’s — where you could order little league, swim club and cub scout equipment and uniforms or get outfitted for summer camp. There were two toy stores, a magic shop, an ice creme parlor, a pet store, a J.J. Newberry’s, a corner soda fountain called Whalen’s Drug Store, and a drive-in restaurant named Dolores’. Yes, they were a bit upscale from your typical middle class town. But Beverly Hills in the 1950s and 60s wasn’t like the parody of itself it is today.
In Beverly Hills, the four grammar schools feed into one high school — Beverly. Many of us attending one of these grammar schools from kindergarten to eighth grade were friends from a very early age entering high school. Our bonded experiences at a very impressionable age are very strong.
You may wonder how does one arrive at Beverly Hills in the 1950s? Growing up I never asked. It was our life and I wasn’t interested in the life my parents lived before I was born or how they ended up there. But it did help me later in life after escaping the Golden Ghetto as someone once called it to find that not everyone lived this way.
Our Dad, a first generation Jew from the Bronx carved out our little niche by first succeeding in academics as a youth and young man. He liked to brag he was second in his class at NYU Law School. He landed in Los Angeles after the War with our Mom, also from the Bronx, after arriving in California by way of the U.S. Artillery. After his discharge from Fort Ord in Monterey, they migrated to Los Angeles where Dad joined a law firm. They bought our home in Beverly Hills in 1949 for $35,000. It was a true Bronx to Beverly Hills success story. Our parents lived in the same ranch house at 610 North Rodeo Drive for more than 50 years.
Dad’s plans for my older sister Danna and me was looking pretty good in those early years. That’s when and where, if you were fortunate enough to attend Beverly Hills schools, the public education was good. (I’m sure it still is). We learned to read and write and do math under unquestionably good conditions. We had excellent teachers whose dedication was a given. Our parents got involved and supported the teachers. Opportunities for success followed a clear path. Our schools were exceptional we were told. Our diplomas carried weight. And so it was not surprising that a very high percentage of us went on to college. It’s almost like — at least that’s the way it felt — you had to screw it up bad not to get admitted to schools like UCLA, Berkeley, Stanford, even Harvard, Yale, Brandeis and Smith. But that’s not how it ended up for me, nor for my sister, nor a good number of us with different stories who also ended up in public school in Beverly Hills. It was not all homogeneous as it looked however much we wished it to be. Diverse not in race or color to be clear. Beverly Hills was, as the percentages we heard back then, 80 percent Jewish. Diverse in the sense of family functionality. But, of course, relatively speaking, we had it good.
The media and tv content was our mirror. It was a time when a dad was supposed to be like Ward Cleaver, and a mom like Mrs. Ward Cleaver. We compared our families to this tv family and others. We were never going to share our secrets and shadows that didn’t live up to them because we didn’t believe we had any. We did, of course, but we buried them sight unseen.
Our “perfect” world we projected shattered when our Camelot King was murdered in 1963. We heard the news at lunch in Eighth Grade. We were in shock before we knew what trauma was. Yes, violence was unleashed and began roiling outside as we held to our American Dream. The Watts, Detroit and other urban riots that revealed the nation’s fault lines unfolded like a dream. The Vietnam War quietly started as a special operation and escalated gradually into all out war. The military draft waited silently to pluck us from our youth. In our senior year, the assassination of Martin Luther King was followed shortly by the murder of John’s brother Robert, his blood spilling on the kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel down Wilshire Boulevard a few miles away.
It all happened outside our bubble. They say the world is a stage and we the players on it. One feels reality if they choose to live it. I won’t speak for the rest of my classmates, but I certainly wasn’t ready to give up my innocence let alone contemplate how all this violence would eventually affect us all. It all seemed unreal from inside our gated community. I was still roaming within it, half child, half grown-up, trying to figure out who I was. On one hand I was content in the sense of safety and protection of our privileged childhood, extending it as long as I could. On the other, the realities of an insane world matched the growing angst within me and the realities of our family secrets.
Over the years I’ve kept in touch with a few grammar and high school friends. We meet from time to time. Their aging faces and bodies keep time, providing a reality check to our physical lives. But after a few moments, our physical forms fade and connect to the innocence and joyful energy of our youths. I am back in the old neighborhood. I see David Morse as he always was to me, an adventurer with his bicycle as his ticket to ride, daring to pedal outside our enclave to points beyond — the beach, the canyons and Sunset Strip.
At our latest class reunions we see many classmates we didn’t get to know in grammar and high school. We are students out of a class of more than 500. Although there are many we did not socialize with outside the classroom, study hall, gym or at extra curricular activities, at the reunions we smile and welcome each other, and reminisce about common themes and memories. We have all changed, some more than others.
In high school I felt imprisoned in a teenage mind swimming in thoughts of jealousy and fears, in constant judgment of my peers — the student leaders, the jocks, the thespians, the brainchildren I envied and resented. Our reunions, especially the latter ones into our 60s and 70s help to undo longstanding fantasies created in my head more than 55 years ago. A brutally sarcastic and mischievous classmate who mercilessly teased the teachers remained for decades stereotyped in my mind. But now he is the most compassionate psychotherapist who has taken on the role of a gentle teacher and leader for all of us.
(Coming: When appearances were everything and classmates were celebrities)
Originally published at https://amiasoldieryet.medium.com on July 9, 2023.
