Nostalgia Trip to Junior High Touches Unexpected Feelings

Glory days , well they’ll pass you by, Glory days , in the wink of a young girl’s eye . . . --from “Glory Days” by Bruce Springsteen Rarely do we have the opportunity to examine portions of our lives in precisely divided chunks of time. For the most part, life is a continuum of days that stretch into weeks, months and years without sharply defined beginning and end points. Suddenly we are older, without ever realizing just when it happened.

Recently, however, I attended a ceremony that sliced off two decades of my life, as well as the lives of a few hundred of my peers, into just such a block of time.

The event was the unearthing of a time capsule sunk in 1966 to commemorate the end of the first year of classes at Cerro Villa Junior High School in Villa Park, where I was a member of the original seventh-grade class.

Originally, the plan had been to open the time capsule in 1986, 20 years after it was sealed. But school officials decided instead to open it this year, during the school’s 20-year anniversary.

Cerro Villa was built in 1965 to handle the district’s growing number of junior-high-age students overcrowding nearby Peralta Junior High in Orange. This year, in a twist worthy of Saki, Peralta is being closed because of declining enrollment, and its students will be absorbed next fall by Cerro Villa.

On returning to the campus for the time-capsule ceremony, I had expected to see some familiar faces--both former classmates and the few teachers I knew were still on the faculty. What I didn’t expect was to be touched, in a small but nonetheless profound way, by the proceedings.

I admit this grudgingly, as a longtime member of the “nostalgia ain’t what it used to be” school of skepticism. I’ve always been slightly saddened by people who spend too much time looking over their shoulders at the past, because I believe they are losing the joys of the present and the rewards of anticipating the future.

But I decided to skip an opportunity to attend an advance screening of “Goonies” that afternoon and to retreat, instead, into the past, not knowing what to expect in a close encounter with my own old gang of goonies.

Curious About Memorabilia

At the very least, I thought it would be entertaining to see how the years had weathered the observations, predictions and memorabilia we all had stuffed into the four gallon-sized jars that had been lowered into the concrete pit two decades ago.

Another reason I capitulated to this event, although I skipped my 10-year high school reunion four years before, was that I consider junior high to be a more pivotal time of life than high school, by which time the carefree days of youth are pretty much over. In high school, we were taking college-preparation courses, declaring majors and starting to make career choices.

In junior high, my biggest adjustment had been facing life without recess.

The era itself was also rife with symbolism: a period when the Vietnam War was still popular with the majority of Americans, when the Beatles were still considered to be a flash-in-the-pan fad, when Sandy Koufax was still a special idol to us left-handers among the schoolyard’s would-be baseball stars.

All this was swirling through my mind as I stood in the hot sun while history teacher “Preach” Lyerla (who had taught my older brother, me, my younger sister and now teaches my brother’s 15-year-old son) gave the order for the brass plate covering the time capsule to be removed and the jars exhumed. I vividly recalled standing there in 1966 and thinking, at age 12, that I couldn’t conceive of what the world would be like when the time came for the earth to yield our sunken treasure.

Pure Pop Culture

The first objects out of the mini-tomb were pure pop culture: a 45 r.p.m. of the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and a pair of rectangular, wire-framed “granny” eyeglasses like those popularized in the mid-’60s by Byrds lead singer Roger McGuinn. For any of my former classmates who are now parents, the sight of those glasses no doubt squelched any grounds they might have to object to Madonna’s fashion sensibilities.

Next came a letter containing comments and a few predictions from Cerro Villa’s principal at the time, C. B. (Corky) Courson. Courson, in his letter, had envisioned that when his words were again read by human eyes, short hair and bobby socks would be back in style (“They are! They are!” laughed a woman in front of me), that Mars would be the garden spot of the solar system and that we would all have robots in our homes to handle menial tasks. Well, I thought, one out of three’s not bad.

It struck me that the latter predictions reflected the overwhelmingly positive view of the technology that was rampant in those pre-Three Mile Island days. Space was still, in Capt. James T. Kirk’s words, “the final frontier,” not the next battleground of the escalating arms race.

More items were brought out of the capsule. The biggest laugh-getter was the vice principal’s paddle--autographed by all the students who had become intimately familiar with it. For those receiving their education in our post-corporal-punishment age, suffice it to say that a vice principal’s paddle was not used for Ping-Pong.

Serious Moment

There came a more serious moment, when Lyerla paused to acknowledge that several Cerro Villa alumni had not survived the intervening 19 years. Among them was my older brother, who made it only 10 years beyond Cerro Villa’s first ninth-grade graduating class.

Although I saw none of the handful of friends with whom I had been closest during those years, I did exchange small talk with several old acquaintances. One, I learned, is running an auto repair shop in Orange. Another became a construction contractor. Somehow, I still find it hard to envision the business of the world gradually being assumed by people I used to play handball with during “nutrition break.”

I also had a particularly refreshing conversation with a former classmate who has worked for the last several years in alternative public schools in Santa Cruz, with students classified as discipline problems. “Unfortunately,” she told me, “in regular schools, the message to kids is, ‘Conform or you’re out.’ I’m showing these kids there are ways to make it through without conforming. I did.”

We also shared a laugh over the dress code (“no jeans, no shorts, no tennis shoes”) on a flyer announcing an alumni dance that night at a nearby nightclub. “I thought we went through all that before,” she said, echoing my own deja vu about the many legal battles over dress codes we had witnessed.

Retained Ideals

From our talk, I sensed that, like me, she had held onto many of the ideals of the ‘60s, such as respect for individuality and a healthy skepticism toward “the system,” which I first began to develop while at Cerro Villa.

Just as writing about rock music for the last 10 years has kept me in touch with today’s teen-agers, so her work with youth seemed to have kept her from turning into a “grown-up,” even though we have both grown up.

That human encounter, more than all the memorabilia, gave me a surprisingly uplifted feeling that I have returned to several times in the days since. Nostalgia’s not so bad, I realized, as long as it’s taken in limited, carefully controlled doses.

I even began to think that by 1991, I might consider attending my next high school reunion. Unless, of course, they ask us to observe a dress code.

Staff writer Randy Lewis covers pop music for the Orange County Edition of The Times.