Fred Holtby and University High Are Memories That Don’t Seem to Fade

Karen Michel’s recollection of English teacher Fred Holtby and University High School in the early 1960s brought back floods of memories (“Both Sides Now,” June 27). I was in the Class of 1964, which Holtby described to a classmate of mine a few years ago as “the last class of Jewish intellectuals.” I remember a friend exhorting me to sign up for Holtby’s English class: “He’ll teach you how to read”--and he did. Holtby introduced us to the life of the mind, leaving an indelible imprint.

Even Holtby’s weirdness was memorable. He was Kenneth Burke’s No. 1 acolyte, he labeled Vivaldi the antidote to Alban Berg and he considered Hermann Hesse God’s gift to literature.

Fred Holtby was God’s gift to secondary education.

Robert Bookman

Beverly Hills

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My daughter recently graduated from Uni High, exactly 30 years after I did. What a surreal feeling, watching her claim her release from high school with the same free, ebullient joy I’d experienced three decades earlier.

What struck me was how much the same everything looked. Sure, the boys had beards and the girls somewhat elaborate hairdos, but they truly appeared no weirder than we did, with our pseudo-hippie hairstyles, Twiggy-inspired makeup and tie-dyed costumes.

Watching the generations pass, bearing dreams and expectations similar to ours, gives one a warm feeling. It’s good to know that the school survives in its regal (if somewhat frayed) glory.

Mona Shafer Edwards

Los Angeles

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The University High School of the early ‘60s was a far cry from the picture painted by Michel. She apparently had little in common with the students I shared those years at Uni with. Hers were not the values and attitudes that characterized either my fellow students or the fine teachers and administrators who dedicated themselves to our education.

The Uni High of the ‘60s that I attended was a vibrant campus where scholastic aptitude, as well as social involvement, were top priorities. I never saw the antiwar demonstrations that Michel refers to, and I disagree that, when she graduated in 1963, the country’s involvement in Vietnam was a little-known fact. Rather, the students at that time were involved in a variety of public-service and charitable activities run by the school.

At the same time, school spirit was extremely high, and the idea of vandalizing or otherwise harming the school was confined to a few “bad apples.”

No, this was not an idyllic world; nor was Uni without problems. It was, however, a time and place where young people took responsibility for their actions and where respect for others was the norm.

Neal Rein

Westlake

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In Michel’s nostalgic grandiloquence about her activist high school days, she spins the same fallacy as many other aging hippies: She believes that her political activism superseded her adolescent rebellion, when, in fact, it was motivated by it. Her reading Saroyan, protesting Vietnam and revealing cleavage were just ways to seem different and a little outrageous. Adolescents today exude apathy for the same reason.

James Toomey

Santa Monica