Middle school blues and scary flashbacks to P.E. class locker room and gym uniforms, Walnut Creek circa 1970s

My son is starting middle school next week as sixth-grader. Part of that is, yes, taking a real PE class, in which you change into uniforms for class.

The mere idea of middle or high school PE class ... specifically, of changing in the locker room, undressing for the first time in a room full of other girls, and feeling all awkward about growing up and bodily changes and all that ... and of changing into school-designated uniforms ...

My son seems to be taking it in stride. Maybe that's because he's a boy, and maybe that's because he's been given a reasonable uniform to change into--a normal T-shirt and running shorts.

But knowing the world he is about to enter is giving me scary flashbacks.

Especially to the uniforms that we girls in Walnut Creek middle and high schools had to wear back in the 1970s ... I still remember those uniforms clearly enough--and with horror--that I was able to sketch one out (see above sketch). Well, I had mine long enough: The uniform we bought in middle school was supposed to last us through high school.

They were "jumpers," or some such thing. One-piece. Bright red with narrow white stripes. They had snaps on the shoulders and snaps in the crotch!

They were made of this weird synthetic fabric that absolutely did not breath when you sweated. I can feel that fabric on me now. Itching and riding up at the most uncomfortable places. And how they would smell at the end of the week, when I would bring it home for my mother to wash!

Meanwhile, not too many of us looked good in them. They had vertical stripes that were meant to be slimming, I guess. But that weird, thin clinging fabric didn't hide any new chest, hip, or tummy bulges you were embarassed about.

Actually, a few girls looked good in them, and the names of those girls come to mind. Yes, they were the "usual suspects"--the cheerleaders, or girls who were on the gymnastics or volleyball teams. There were girls with trim, straight bodies and long tan legs. Hmm, if I had been a boy back then, I would have been having certain kinds of dreams about certain girls wearing those these uniforms.

It's clear that those uniforms were somehow at the center of boys' fascination, considering that a male band member donned one as some kind of homecoming week joke, as you can see in this photo. This photo way, is from my high school class yearbook.

I'm sure there are those who will object to me introducing the topic of sex into a discussion about these uniforms and into a discussion about PE classes at the middle school level. But, c'mon. There was something weirdly, frightenly sexual about it all.

Upon entering my first official PE class as a seventh grader, I remembering feeling all weird about it, changing in the makeshift locker room (a portable at my school's campus) and into those uniforms. The whole process felt like something of a rite of womanly passage that I, a late bloomer, wasn't really ready for.

As we're changing from our school clothes to our uniforms, we're sneaking peeks to see who's got a training bra, and there are whispers about who has started her period. And, this was back in the day when you could use the "I've got my period excuse" to get out of PE.

Not too long ago, I found myself engrossed in re-watching the groundbreaking 1976 horror film Carrie, starring Sissy Spacek. It tells the story of a mousy girl with telekinetic powers, who gets bloody revenge on all the mean kids who have given her a tough time. Of course, the film is also an allegory about a young woman's emerging sexual power. Carrie is being raised a crazy single Christian fundamentalist mother who wants to repress her daughter's budding sexuality; she calls her breasts "dirty pillows" and doesn't prepare her for the advent of menstruation. Carrie's ignorance about the facts of life gets her into trouble in the film's scary opening sequence, set in a high school P.E. class locker room. I don't think I've come across a book or film that truly captures the, yes, sexual anxiety and bodily shame surrounding the American school girls' PE class experience.

Director Brian DePalma, talented auteur and sexual fetishist that he could be, gives us what Sports Illustrated appropriately includes it its Top Five list of horrifying gym-class movie scenes.

Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is responsible for her team's losing a gym-class volleyball game—"We can't win a game with her on the team," somebody yells. Then she's forced to cower in the shower, bleeding from her first period, while her classmates hurl towels and tampons at her. It's not only the most horrifying gym-class scene ever filmed; it's one of the most horrifying scenes of any kind ever filmed.

Remember when? Once upon a time, Walnut Creek looked like this.

I actually don't remember when Walnut Creek looked like this. This photo was taken long before my arrival in town: at Kaiser hospital in a year I won't disclose. Actually, this photo by Ted Gurney shows North Main Street looking north from Mt. Diablo Boulevard in 1952. Hmm, 1952. My parents moved to Walnut Creek a year later.

This photo is part of an interesting exhibition of photos, Then and Now, on display in the City Council chamber at City Hall. The exhibition consists of 25 such historic photos of Walnut Creek, dating back to 1927, that are then juxtaposed with 2008 photos showing the same locations. The new photos were taken by Andy Smith, a senior planner with the City's Community Development Department and an accomplished amateur photographer. He selected the vintage photos and then sought out to capture images of the same place years later in order to show how a community like Walnut Creek changes through time.

Thanks to Brad Rovanpera, the city's public information officer and expert historian, for sharing this photo.

Remember when? "Sparkling new" Northgate High opens in 1974

Dedicated and resourceful reader Mom's Exhausted came across this gem of an old newspaper article. From the July 14, 1974 edition of the Oakland Tribune, it showcases a press tour of the new $6 million Northgate High School.

(By the way, remember when the Oakland Tribune was also a major source for local news, a strong rival to the San Francisco Chronicle and the Contra Costa Times. My, how times have changed, especially with the Chronicle facing severe cutbacks, a sale, and even closure. But that's another story.)

Even though I grew up in Walnut Creek, I lived on the other side of town and didn't attend Northgate High. Also, it's only been in the past couple years that I finally had the opportunity to visit Northgate High, first to visit a friend's classroom, and then to take my son to Sunday basketball practice in the gymnasium.

On my visit to the classroom, I had to check in at the office, which meant I had to go up the ramp to the main office mezzanine, and I was immediately struck by what Principal Dick Hansen described back in 1974 as the "open or all under-one-roof concept."

Back in 1974, the Oakland Tribune writer said the impact of the view from the office mezzanine "makes conventional school suddenly seem dull and old-fashioned." The main section from view of the office included a 9,000-square-foot library, the largest in the Mt. Diablo Unified School District. The library was part of this "open or all under-one-roof concept."

Wasn't that a school architectural trend back in the '70s? To create schools without walls and few interior doors, with these big, open spaces, to promote communal harmony, cooperation, or whatever was the hippie-influenced Zeitgeist of the era?

Certainly, the 184,000-square-foot school was very "modern" for its time, with 75 percent of its indoor space carpeted and 80 percent air-conditioned.

Thanks Mom's Exhausted for sharing this glimpse into the past!

More Northgate alums excited that their school hosted historic Harvey Milk debate

Today, as we honor civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., it seems appropriate to think again about another civil rights leader whose legacy lives on in the cause of another historically marginalized segment of our population.

I’m talking about San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in a major U.S. city who was assassinate in November 1978.

Since I first posted a story, saying that I noticed a Walnut Creek school gymnasium making a cameo appearance in the new Milk biopic, Milk, starring Sean Penn, I’ve received emails from current and former WC residents trying to track down the exact location of that gymnasium.

The only thing I had initially been able to determine is that Milk came to Walnut Creek to debate conservative state Senator John Briggs on Proposition 6, a 1978 measure that would have required public school districts to fire teachers and other employees who are gay or who openly support gay rights. The debate took place in September 1978.

Jonathan Butterworth, a 1998 Northgate graduate who now lives in Seattle, went so far as to spend several hours in the University of Washington library, going through microfiche of old San Francisco Chronicle articles. He sent me images of two articles of Chronicle stories, which I posted here.

Now, Amy, another Northgate alum and current Walnut Creek resident—who describes herself as another "crazy in suburbia" mom—sent me screen shots of the 1984 Academy Award-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (which, by the way, is available for free online viewing on on Hulu.com) The screen shots come from TV coverage of the debate which was broadcast live in the Bay Area, and which were used in the documentary.

Thanks, Amy, for sharing these images and letting me post them.

3 Dead! 40 Injured in Car Vs. Train Accident in WC!

Sorry, I couldn't resist the sensational headline, even if the sensational event happened more than 60 years ago. The Mayor of Claycord, who also posted this on his blog, claycord.com, passed along this image of a newspaper article that ran in a publication known as the Walnut Creek Kernal.



The September 12, 1946 story says that early one morning, three men were riding in a car and with "alcohol in their system," incuding the driver. The driver crashed the car headon into a freight car at a railroad crossing. "The impact derailed an oil car and threw it into the path of a passenger car coming from the opposite direction. The passenger engine was derailed, and jack-knifed the baggage car, turning over the coach and derailing five additional cars." In addition to the three deaths, of the drunk men in the car, and the injuries, the accident tied up traffic on the mainline for several hours.


The moral to this Kernal story is that "alcohol and gasoline don't mix--nor does a car mix well with a speeding train."


Thanks Mayor for this glance back into Walnut Creek--or as the mayor terms it "NutCreek"--history.

More than Just a Housewife: Considering the Contributions of Local Stay-at-Home Moms, Now, and in the Past

TV and movies are having fun these days examining the dark side of the America suburban dream, especially its origins in the 1950s and 1960s.

This was the era that suburban life moved into the forefront or our culture, demographically and culturally. And, shows like Mad Men and the upcoming Revolutionary Road (based on the classic Richard Yates' 1961 novel) pay particular attention to what they see as the quietly miserable lives led by suburban housewives and moms of that era.

Many of these women were bright and had been educated at top colleges but they gave up any aspirations for careers and financial independence to talk to toddlers, iron clothes, and nourish their families with well-balanced dinners (meat, potatoes, and vegetables), served promptly at 6.

It’s fashionable to feel sorry for these women or to sigh at the waste of all their potential, misdirected by societal norms into the supposedly stultifying domestic routine of caring for babies and running a home. Actually, I'm not saying that many women of that generation didn't feel miserable and frustrated. But I wonder if there is also a different, more positive way to look at the lives of women of my mother’s generation and of contemporary women, including those here in Contra Costa and my niece up in Washington state, who are staying at home to their kids. These contemporary women were not expected by society to be housewives—or in today’s parlance--to “off-ramp” and be stay-at-home moms. They have chosen it.

As I write this, a vague memory pops into my head of, when I was a girl, watching an episode of The Donna Reed Show. Remember that show? It ran from 1958 to 1966, was re-run on TV when I was growing up, and starred Academy Award-winning actress Donna Reed as the quintessential post-World War II suburban wife and mom. In one episode, which originally aired in January 1960, the host of a radio show called “Housewives Corner” pays a visit to a market in the hometown of Donna Reed’s character, Donna Stone. The condescending host begins asking the female shoppers such questions as “While baking an upside-down cake, do you recommend standing on your head?”

Ha-ha-ha. What a cutup! Donna Stone, feisty and opinionated behind her Donna Reed veneer of grace and perfect manners, takes offense and goes on the show to defend homemakers like herself as being "more than just a housewife.”

And in giving housewives, or, rather stay-at-home moms, their due, it’s not that I’ve been drinking the Dr. Laura Schlessinger Kool-Aid. I admit that listening to her show was a guilty pleasure (especially for me, given my politics) back when I was staying at home with my son, when he was between the ages of 0 and 3. Dr. Laura praised families that made it work for one parent to stay at home with the kids, instead of “farming” them out to daycare. She actually expressed views that described mothers and fathers as greedy and self-centered for sacrificing their kids’ well-being if they chose to have both parents work--either because mom wanted to feel “fulfilled” or so that the family could earn enough money to buy stuff and attain a certain sense of an affluent American life-style.

I didn’t have any Dr. Laura-esque philosophical ideas about staying home after my son was born. And I don’t intend to get into a debate right now about whether kids fare better-- psychologically, intellectually, socially--with a stay-at-home parent than with being put in daycare. Me being home: That’s just how it worked for me, my husband, and my son. It turns out that I would have been mentally and physically incapable of being away from my son for longer than a few hours. It’s not that I am this self-sacrificing Earth Mom. It’s just that, at that point in my life, I couldn’t multi-task in the way that other women can, some of whom nurture successful careers while raising kids.

Sure, it was sometimes boring to be at home with a baby and then a toddler, the routine of talking, playing, and soothing him, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day. Sure, I felt stifled at times, that I wasn’t living up to my “potential,” that I wasn’t using my brain enough, that any future career ambitions would be permanently stalled.

But I wouldn’t trade those first three years at home with my son for anything. Being with him, the routine we did have and we did enjoy: those were magical times, among some of the best of my life. If I was suddenly given an hour to live, that time I spent with my son would rank at the top of my greatest joys and accomplishments as a human being. I would have continued doing the stay-at-home mom thing longer, had family circumstances not intervened. And, in the end, I enjoyed going back to work.

Last year, I did an interview with my mother about being a ‘50s housewife, here in Contra Costa County. It was an oral history project that I typed up, edited, and gave to my siblings and nieces and nephews for Christmas presents. My mother revealed some of her own private miseries about her life at the time, miseries that might fit into the Mad Men view of suburban housewives quietly growing crazy amid the piles of laundry, kids crying in the background, and the emotionally disengaged husband, expecting a martini and dinner when he arrives home from the office. In my mother’s case—according to her, at least—few of those miseries had to do with being a housewife and at home with three small kids. She says that being a mom was and is her greatest pride and accomplishment.

She talked about how “that’s just the way it was” for most women back then: They stayed home with the kids and ran the households. But like other housewives of the era, my mother got involved in the community once her kids began school. She joined the Diablo Valley chapter of the League of Women Voters that was getting started in the early 1950s. As a student at UC-Berkeley, she had heard that the league was a good organization for socially minded women to join. So she did.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, each member of the league was formally referred to by her husband’s name--as in Mrs. John Smith, rather than Joan Smith. But whether they were Mrs. John Smith or Joan Smith, some of these women were marvels of community organizing and political intellect, according to my mother. If you’re not familiar with the league, you should be. Then and now, the league is a grassroots organization that provides citizen education and advocacy on local, state, and national issues.The Diablo Valley chapter hosts political debates and invites speakers to talk about local issues. Most useful to me is that the league studies candidates and issues that we are asked to vote on--particularly those pesky state propositions that come up every few years and few of us have time to analyze on our own. The league recommends which way to vote and explains how it comes to its conclusions. So, the League of Women voters was, in the 1950s and now, pushing for political dialogue in our community.

Meanwhile, other 1950s and 1960s housewives were volunteering in the schools, campaigning for more parks and open space in our area, and organizing arts and cultural events. Around the time I interviewed my mother, I met another Walnut Creek woman who had been involved in a citywide movement to devote undeveloped hills and valleys around town to parks and open space. She was also instrumental in raising money to get the Lesher Center for the Arts which opened in 1990. Many would say that the arts center transformed Walnut Creek’s downtown.

What I learned from my mother and this woman is that it’s likely that those 1950s and 1960s housewives laid the foundation and set in motion the programs that raised the quality of life here in Walnut Creek and in surrounding suburbs. These days, many stay-at-home moms I know through my son’s school are former professionals who got onto the the Mommy Track and are now using their skills, which they honed in the business world, to raise money for our schools or worthy nonprofits in the area.

I have a full-time job. It’s one that I enjoy and that challenges me, but, to be honest, I often wish I could be there every day to pick up my son from school and be at home when he has a friend over. I'd love to hang out and watch his soccer practices or take him to cool places in the area and do things with him.

We women today have more choices, thanks to those feminists who challenged the status quo in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. But we can’t have it all—no matter that line we were handed by those early, pioneering feminists. There just isn’t enough time in the day to do and have it all.

So even if we still have more choices, we still live with regrets. That’s true for me anyway. How about you?

WC School District Makes Cameo Appearance in "Milk"

What’s referred to as the “Walnut Creek School District” provides the setting for one scene in the new critically acclaimed film biography of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to a major political office in the United States.

Before I tell you how our local school district gets its “closeup,” I’ll just say there are lots of things I could write about this film, including its relevance to issues of today (the ongoing Proposition 8 debate).

I also have strong personal memories of being a straight, teenage girl living in Walnut Creek at the time Milk was elected supervisor in 1977 and of seeing him on TV through the following year, speaking out against Proposition 6, a proposed law that would have made it mandatory to fire gay teachers and any public school employee who supported gay rights.

I also have pretty vivid memories of those horrible 10 days in November 1978—first of when news broke on November 18 about the Jonestown cult mass suicide/massacre, which involved a number of former Bay Area residents—and then of when Milk and Mayor George Moscone were gunned down in San Francisco City Hall on November 27, 1978. Their assailant was a City Hall colleague, Dan White, a disgruntled, anti-gay supervisor who had just resigned his seat. I remember watching TV coverage of then-Board of Supervisors president and now-U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein announcing the deaths of Milk and Moscone and then, that evening, the spontaneous candlelight march from the Castro district to City Hall, which spanned the width of Market Street, and extended a mile and a half long.

Many of these events are covered in Milk, starring Sean Penn as the former camera store owner who became the “Mayor of Castro Street.”

The cameo by the Walnut Creek school district comes during the part of the film that covers Milk’s campaign against the aforementioned Proposition 6. Just some background: Leading up to Proposition 6, there was a wave of anti-gay votes in municipalities around the United States, including a repeal of an anti-discrimination ordinance in Dade County, Florida, led by former beauty queen and orange juice pitchwoman Anita Bryant. Proposition 6 wound up on the California ballot with conservative state Senator John Briggs as the major figurehead behind it. In fact, the measure was known as the Briggs Initiative.

Milk, as depicted by Milk, saw defeating Proposition 6 as a milestone in the fight for equal rights for gays and lesbians.

Briggs and Milk engaged in numerous debates around the state, during which Briggs maintained that homosexual teachers wanted to abuse and turn children gay. Milk responded with statistics compiled by law enforcement that provided evidence that pedophiles identified primarily as heterosexual, and dismissed Briggs' points with one-liner jokes: "If it were true that children mimicked their teachers, you'd sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around.”

Some of those debates took place in school gymnasiums, including one identified as belonging to the Walnut Creek School District, of which I’m a graduate and which my son currently attends. The scene is presented as a “Channel 7” live presentation of the debate between Milk and Briggs. And it is during this scene that Milk makes his joke about how "you’d have a helluva lot more nuns running around” if it was true that children would turn gay just by having an openly gay teacher.

As I said, I remember the Proposition 6 measure being on the ballot, and I remember Milk’s role in speaking out against it and his jubilant demeanor during an interview after learning of its defeat on election night in November 1978. I don’t remember Milk and Briggs coming to Walnut Creek to debate the proposition—not that they didn’t. I just don’t remember.

In the fall of 1978, I was student directing my Walnut Creek high school drama department’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s tender family comedy, Ah, Wilderness! Milk was killed the week we presented that show. Most noteworthy about that show: the student playing O’Neill’s idealized version of a father was a good friend of mine who, in the wake up Milk’s death, would come out openly as gay in our high school. He was harassed by some jocks on campus.

My friend never said so but it’s likely he was taking to heart and putting into action the words that Milk spoke in an electrifying speech he made on the night that Proposition 6 was defeated. In a few weeks, Milk would be dead.

Rob Epstein, who directed the 1984 Academy Award-winning documentary, The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, quoted some of Milk’s speech in a recent column for the Huffington Post, in which he analyzes similarities between this year’s Proposition 8 debate and Milk’s anti-Proposition 6 campaign 30 years earlier:

"...to the gay community all over this state, my message to you is, so far a lot of people joined us and rejected Proposition 6, and we owe them something. We owe them to continue the education campaign that took place. We must destroy the myths once and for all, shatter them. We must continue to speak out, and most importantly, most importantly, every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is you must tell your immediate family, you must tell your relatives, you must tell your friends, if indeed they are your friends, you must tell your neighbors, you must tell the people you work with, you must tell the people in the stores you shop in (thunderous applause), and once they realize that we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all. And once you do, you will feel so much better."

Parkmead Elementary 1971: Do You Know Any of These Kids?

Something that made me smile: A kindergarten class from Parkmead Elementary School in Walnut Creek 1971. A friend passed along a photo he received from another friend. Okay, I did attend Parkmead Elementary around this time, but, no, this is not my class.