No "Middle School" at SPX

If someone in the early 1960s peeked into any classroom of the SPX  grammar school, they would see perfect rows of desks filled with uniformed kids, any one class differing from any other only in the difference of a few inches in the average height of the students. For those eight years, we were pretty much subject to the same rules and expectations as we grew from age six to age thirteen or fourteen. The bigger world was presented to us through a dense filter which seemed to be based on the theory that if something is not discussed it does not exist.

Even as this regimentation and censorship defined our outer world,  our inner worlds were teeming with the natural disorder we encountered as we grew older and inevitably experienced outside the rigidity of the classroom.

Our “middle school years” were not defined inside the school, but outside the school our activities reflected our new interests and curiosities. One thing we needed - which church youth clubs did not provide - was a place to go where we could hang out and socialize unwatched by those who had power over us. A budding wish for privacy and independence. Such places were hard to come by.

I have mentioned in previous entries how we would hang out on street corners or in houses under construction. Certainly there was a lot of time spent playing basketball or just walking around. The  unique thing about those years was that our world was still small, it was still defined mostly by the confines of the parish, so in a way we were very much under the eyes of parents and church authority. But we were wrestling with that urge to have some independence.

One opportunity opened up in the Fall of 1963 when we started gathering after school at what was an oddity in those days, a house where the Mom went to work and therefore wasn’t home for those all-important 3:30-5:00 hours. The house was on one of those streets off the south side of Chili Avenue between Chestnut Dr and Marshall Rd. I don’t remember many details of the afternoons we spent around that house, perhaps there weren’t even that many, but the idea of having somewhere to go where we could just hang around and socialize was very important at the time. The thing that stands out to me now was that it was a place where we could talk to girls.

Soon after we were thrown out into the much bigger and more diverse world of high school. Looking back, we might have been much better prepared for such a change had we been given more of a transition time, more of a middle school experience.