Jr. High School

Me in Jr. High

Jr. High School provided real growing-up lessons for me.  First, not one to wear any makeup, my closest girlfriends caught me in Ms Wiles PE class and darkened my blond eyelashes with black mascara and were very pleased with the results:  "Look, she has eyes!"  The lipstick they added was easily scrubbed off and they did forgive me for that.  I did learn how to apply the eye makeup and agreed it was an asset.
         
Living 'below the RR tracks' some of my best friends were from Mexico.  They soon joined gangs and the girls spent time during class knitting pairs of dice to hang on their boyfriend's rear-view car mirror.  I made sure to remain a good friend and they vowed to protect me which they must have done because I lived  rather uneventful 2-1/2 years before my family moved to the other side of the tracks. Now I attended Emerson Jr High for the last half year where I was pretty popular as the new kid even though some of the kids there had attended Hamilton Grade School.  With the move I fell back in Algebra, and lost my position as class secretary back at Fremont.
         
My first real boyfriend made note that he liked me by printing my name in block letters across the yoke of his blue checkered shirt and also his red checkered shirt.  Bobby passed his silver basketball and chain to me via our mutual friend Dianne.  Bobby and I had only smiled at one another 'til then. Now we became an item, and he was class President.  Our first 'date' was going with his parents to Forest Lawn Cemetery to see the beautiful gardens, monuments of important people interned there and the fine art works. 

I kept the important photos in an album which I had to return to him, along with his basketball, when he fell for a new girl the next year at High School. My heart was broken for at least one whole week, and I might add, I still have the chipped tooth that took place one day when I was running and the silver basketball hit me in the mouth.  Believe me a first love can be painful.