PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC SPACES / LINDA BLANDFORD : By Junior High, Bruised Hopes Need Critical Care

Here is Hancock Park: noble stone residences standing behind greenswards, behind dignity and order, as if privilege’s very whisperings go unchallenged. Here is the cafeteria of John Burroughs Junior High School, set in the midst of Hancock Park: 2,000 gangling, noisy young people: foul-mouthed beyond the ear of authority, threatening, swaggering, racial tensions strung tightly between them. Public school: a rude noise at a polite dinner table.

And here in the midst of John Burroughs Junior High, a “gifted magnet,” 500 students, hard-working or brilliant, or both. Twice blessed: to feel special in the army of infantrymen, to know that theirs is the kingdom of knowledge. When they were small, someone noticed--someone paid attention. Is there sound in the forest if no one hears it? What is it to be gifted, without anyone to draw it out?

But suddenly, junior high, and no one cares. Fifty-four minutes a day in a homeroom, shuffling from class to class, teacher to teacher, as decreed in a computer printout. Sink or swim, survive or drown: the cruel reality of overcrowded schools, scrambling for order like rats in famine. Fear on the bus: the tyranny of muscle. Fear and the growth of an awful, hardening independence. To learn at 12 the lessons of men.

To whom can they look? Where are their role models and heroes? Hanging on banners through the hall, Confucius, Helen Keller, Louis Pasteur, all beyond reach.

But here is Paul Lookinland, principal, “always one who is willing to stick my nose in, and stick my nose between.” Even nearing 60, the Marine clings to him still: a man with a voice like a foghorn, gimlet-eyed. A man unafraid, talking of “the school family,” of acting “like ladies and gentlemen”--and talking fiercely, but not down, confronting casual filth, cruel racial epithets: the small change of growing up in a city. A man unafraid to call them out--to hold fast, to despise prejudice, obscenity, to deal one-on-one, eye to eye.

Blue-eyed, boyish-looking, with an actor son who was one of “The Brady Bunch,” he is the epitome of clean, middle-class life. Look harder: See, too, the young Scots immigrants who gave him life and, unwed, gave him up for adoption. (“I always say I’m a real bastard.”) The natural mother he went to find too late, months after her death. The family who adopted him, with their legacy of kindness, love and hard work. The great-grandmother who sailed from India, and who pulled a handcart across the Great Plains with two small children, and lost one. Hard places, the quiet desperation of the struggle, are no stranger.

Here is Patricia Muecke, who runs the magnet program: a slender, elegant woman, all business, her body poised and guarded. It is as if she knows nothing of the swirling storm, the dreams and hurts in the cafeteria outside.

Her father was raised on an Indian reservation and died of a brain tumor at 33. Her mother raised three children alone, working as a maid, then as a telephone operator. Patricia Muecke was the first of her family to go to college, “whenever I could afford it.” She has raised three children alone and seen her son win a place at Berkeley. Inevitable is not a word she knows; but neither is self-pity.

She sent away once to the Indian reservation for her mother’s and aunt’s school records. Within, she recalls, one of them had written: “I want to be an interior decorator and work in rich white people’s homes.” What hurts have those wary eyes, masked by glasses, observed and absorbed? What miracle has she wrought of herself, and her life?

And upstairs, the renewing of that miracle as, in quiet classrooms, teachers give form to eager minds, to bruised lives that would excel. And when they do, will they move away behind the greenswards, and purse their disapproving lips as chaos wanders the pristine streets? Or will they return to give back, to bear witness, to follow Lookinland and Muecke?