Our 50+1 Drake high school reunion cancelled again

Our 50+1 Drake high school reunion is coming up (we caught the Covid bus for our 50th, and here I thought it was a prime number, but I suck at math. Should we join forces with class of 1971?) As I gaze at the photos of my fellow classmates from so long ago, odd feelings arise. I guess that’s probably true for many of us. Seeing all these stilted senior yearbook pages, I realized how I didn’t relate to most of my classmates. Perhaps it was a fear of being bullied. It seems nobody ever talks about that stuff. The overt and covert cruelty of peer pressure. The jockeying for position on the crumbling social ladder. 

I was so glad that the Summer of Love steamrollered in and the resulting societal breakdown had begun.  I really hated high school. I was also painfully shy, which didn’t help. It was time, and it freed us from the fierce conformity of the 1950s, and early 1960s, which was so constraining. I came from an immigrant family, we didn’t fit into the American suburban culture. And of course, we were poor, so we didn’t, or couldn’t buy into it. A blessing in disguise. I would not trade my untamed childhood years growing up in Forest Knolls for the suburban experience that defines American culture.

Learning woes, continued, no math whiz, I

I was, and still am a disaster in math, unless money is owed, or if I need to frame some art, then I’m sharp as a tack. My math teacher, Archie Williams was one of a handful of positive teachers I had at Drake High School. Did I learn foundations of algebra? No. 

But I held his Olympic medal in my hand and learned about Hitler and racism in America. I loved and adored Archie. I hated how disrespectful the class was. Joey Doyle’s spitwads and Rodney Warnerhoff’s rubber band missiles and lame paper airplanes. A sign of the times. 

I remember Archie, who was also a former Tuskegee pilot, picking up one of those failed paper airplanes scribbled with bad math homework from the floor and turning it into a teaching moment. He refolded the plane, gave it a bent nose, and talked about aerodynamics— lift, force, and thrust. Then let loose the plane that sailed like a hungry gull in the late afternoon classroom. 

Was he also delving into geometry? Probably. Like I said, we got much much more than foundations of algebra with Archie. I wrote about Archie many times. I can’t say the same for my other high school teachers.

“My ab-fab foundations of algebra teacher, the late, great Archie Williams was a real Olympic champion. Archie won the 400-meter race. I got to hold his Olympic gold medal. I sucked at math, but Archie was the kindest, gentlest mentor I ever had. Not his fault that math didn't take. Oh, but the stories he told us, of winning the Olympics, of running with Jesse Owens, and meeting Hitler. At 13, we hardly knew who Hitler was, but we held that same gold medal that Hitler bequeathed to Archie. Archie was a a man who broke world records, and race barriers.” Olympic Pride, American Prejudice 

During the 1990s, I had to take the CBEST test and, as expected, I passed the literature aspect with flying colors. I utterly failed the math portion, but I expected that, no surprise there. So, I began my retro homework in earnest with third grade math workbooks, as that’s where I fell off the learning wagon, the year I learned to read. A year of either, or—not both. I clearly did not operate on the proscribed learning timeline. I was madly marching off to my own drummer. I was gifted at art, something that was of no value within our culture. Education had failed me. Writing would come much later.

Determined to pass the CBEST, I had notions of becoming a certified teacher in those days, I worked my way through those old math workbooks. My head hurt in new places, and I literally cried my way up to the sixth grade level. Then, because I was stuck, I found a woman tutor on Craigslist, who was getting her MA in math and needed a guineapig for her dissertation. She was fascinated by my quirkiness, as I was pretty unschooled, as it were.

She had me approach geometry and algebra problems—unschooled as I was—to see how I would approach them—and she discovered that I was bored with lower math, plus I had a form of math dyslexia as well. Though I didn’t get the answers right, I was approaching the concept of higher math correctly. In fact, she was fascinated by how I was resolving the questions, I was innovative, and quirky, at best. I passed that CBEST test second time around. Not with flying colors. But solid.

Passing the CBEST was a big deal, healing an old wound, as I was a whack job math student. Who knew I had dyslexia in math as well? I’ve been known to add and subtract sums in the same column without even catching the error of my ways. 

Ironic, as the math gene runs in the family—my mother‘s cousin, who grew up in Austin Nevada, was a bona fide math whiz. She disappeared after high school. Government job. We never knew would happen to her until much later. She sent us a postcard from places like Alamogordo, White Sands, Chicago. Decades later, after she had died, we found out she was a mathematician working on the Manhattan Project.

Revised from a Facebook post, from the comments for the same one on learning to read, 1/21.

"Olympic Pride, American Prejudice" documentary includes Archie Williams.

My ab-fab foundations of algebra teacher, the late, great Archie Williams was a real Olympic champion. Archie won the 400-meter race. I got to hold his Olympic gold medal. I sucked at math, but Archie was the kindest, gentlest mentor I ever had. Not his fault that math didn't take. Oh, but the stories he told us, of winning the Olympics, of running with Jesse Owens, and meeting Hitler.

At 13, we hardly knew who Hitler was, but we held that same gold medal that Hitler bequeathed to Archie. Archie was a a man who broke world records, and race barriers.

He was a pioneer on several counts, not just the Olympics. After he injured his leg, he reinvented himself and became one of the first African American fighter pilots, and flight instructor, an engineer, and a computer teacher, when computers were young.

He was one of the few teachers that cared about each of us, it was not just about learning math, or passing the class. I learned to collect multitudes of stories from him. I probably failed math miserably but a much larger life lesson was the answer to the equation.

My friend Ken Bullock wrote: "Archie was a very special guy. He was a family friend, and frequently played golf with my dad. His son, Archie Junior was a good friend of mine as well. Archie was on the podium with Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics, but he had only one gold medal to Jesse's 3, so Jesse got most of the press. Archie wasn't one to feel slighted though. He became a flight instructor, and taught the famous "Red Tails", the Tuskegee Airmen to fly in combat. He was, what almost every student in Drake High School would say, the best teacher and person ever! "

"Olympic Pride, American Prejudice," a documentary set to premiere later this year including Archie Williams.

"Jesse Owens Was Brave. So Were These 17 Other Black Olympians.
Their stories are rarely told.

People often remember the 1936 Olympics in Berlin for track and field legend Jesse Owens taking home four gold medals, essentially triumphing over Adolf Hitler’s hateful ideologies in his own backyard. At the time, Americans considered Owens to be representative of how the mighty U.S.A. was superior to Hitler and Germany.
But Owens was just one of 18 black athletes on the U.S. Olympic team brave enough to attend the games in Nazi Germany. This summer marks the 80th anniversary of those games, and the athletes’ accomplishments are perhaps even more significant all these years later.
"—read the full story and photos  at Huff Post

"Archie Williams went on to become a Tuskegee airman. He was a trained pilot while he was at [the University of California, Berkeley] and he was a mechanical engineering major so he became a Tuskegee airman.

"According to Williams, despite the Nazi racial policies already in effect in Germany in 1936, he and the other African-American athletes were treated very well by ordinary Germans. In fact, they were treated better than they were used to in the United States. As Williams noted, in Germany, "none of us had to ride in the back of the bus." He was, however, well aware of Adolf Hitler's antipathy for blacks and Jews, and found it a bit disturbing when he had what the called the "dubious honor" of standing less than 50 feet from Hitler during the Opening Ceremonies." SB Nation

See more photos of Archie here.

part of my memory was written 3/25/15, but  I never did anything with it.
RIP Harry Roche
Segregation Games (Archie Williams)

RIP Harry Roche

RIP Lagunitas Elementary School teacher and principal, Harry Roche, born January 28, 1923 in San Francisco; died Jan 4 2011 in Roseville, CA. He is survived by wife Lorraine, son Steve, daughter Laura. He was 88. 

Read more here:

Harry Roche, the Coach, who threw chalk and erasers at us when we didn't get the right answer in math or English. I was terrified of him. I didn't dare open my mouth even when I knew the answer—which wasn't very often. Somehow I survived eighth grade and graduated.

Prince Hal was a dark avenging angel. The tennis pro with a wicked eraser throw.  Tall, tan and blond with white eyelashes—Harry was always disappointed in us. My next math teacher was also an athlete but he was benevolence and light. Poor Archie Williams inherited me, a frazzled, dyslexic under-achieving student, in his Foundations of Algebra class at Sir Francis Drake High School in San Anselmo, CA.

After Harry Roche, the Coach, I was a bundle of raw nerves. I was a young horse afraid of the shadow of the wind. Archie may have been an Olympic Gold medalist, but there was no victory gold in it for me. No math ever took root.

But Archie's stories were a lasting legacy. The way he ran the 440 in the Olympics—inspired us. His running mate was Jesse Owens. How they were the first Black men to receive Olympic medals—from Hitler!

I ran headlong from math. I hardly knew who Hitler was, but I knew the cool weight of the gold medal. Kathy Briones and I broke the school girl's track record running the 660 in under 2 minutes. But it was unofficial and so it didn't count, said Miss Scott. She thought we cheated. But we didn't. I couldn't walk for a week afterwards, I was so hamstrung.

Once we were helping Archie clean the chalkboard, we took the big chalk erasers and "wrote" obscenities on the side of the school wall. Archie was cool, he was all for free speech. But he said we needed to remove it because the principal didn't understand such things. 

Dust in the wind.

"Olympic Pride, American Prejudice" documentary includes Archie WIlliams

Segregation Games (Archie Williams)

SEGREGATION GAMES

Our idea of cruising was to take the horses down to the highway on hot summer weekends—especially Saturday afternoons—to catch the tourist traffic coming back from the seashore. Used to be no traffic out here in the valley. But after Ladybird Johnson and her Secret Service came here in ’66, there’s been a steady stream of traffic ever since. Saturday afternoons, you could hardly cross the highway for the traffic. As I said, it was summer, we were all dressed up in halter tops and cut-offs, we’d collect our horses up between our creamy thighs and they’d rear and leap like Pegasuses. You know, like in the MGM movie? Not that I got to see that many movies, we didn’t have a car to get into town. On horseback, we’d race alongside open convertibles the size of boats, full of rich Sleepy Hollow boys all dressed in white tennis sweaters, sunburnt golden and blond, heading back to town. We’d try to catch their eyes in the hopes of tracking them down later on in school. But their girlfriends ran a pretty tight defence, with their dagger eyes. We couldn’t get past ’em.

Where the guys hung out in school was critical. The parking lot was segregated into the hard guys’ and jocks’ turf. Sometimes there were skirmishes when one gang crossed into another’s territory, but they saved the gladiator games for after the football matches. The cheerleader types sat on the jocks’ laps in their souped-up cars parked by the gym, smoking and necking during recess. The hard guys and Spics who hung out by the palm tree, all looked like James Dean, hair greased back, tight T-shirts n’ jeans. Tino was to-die-for-gorgeous, he’d wear these tight black jeans that wrapped ‘round his hips like snakeskin and teeshirts so white, they’d blind you, but those guys never went out to the ocean. Fourth Street was their turf.

You could always tell the greaser chicks, no matter where they hung out, they were always ratting their hair and spraying it until it was stiff as glass, and they were forever rebuilding their eyelashes with Mabeline. The palm tree in the hard guy’s corner always reminded me of the story of Jesus riding into Bethlehem on an ass. Or was it Mary? Once I had to play Joseph dragging my white ass through Marin City, with all these little Black kids who never even saw a donkey before, let alone a skinny white kid dressed in bedsheets in their neighborhood. It was a long way to Bethlehem at the bottom of the hill.

The Higher Functions of Lower Math (Archie Williams)

I have spent the morning weeping over the higher functions of lower math while the medical student Tom, a doctor in waiting, sleeps in the other room. He is neither doctor nor student, yet he would have no trouble passing the math test. He could pass it in his sleep. Maybe I should ask him while he sleeps.

Neil attempted to show me the simple algebraic equations that poor Archie Williams tried to teach me some 25 years ago. He may have been the first black man to win a gold medal for running, but he couldn't teach me the higher functions of simple math.

I admired that golden disk within its five interlocking rings. And the heft of Archie's Olympic medal. Nouns Berlin and Hitler were stored in memory to be extracted at a later date when the larger picture would reveal itself some some 20 years later— when I fell asleep in front of the TV.

Hearing Archie's name mentioned on the TV, I pieced together a string of names that were attached to the story of Berlin, 1936, Jesse Owens and Archie Williams—the underprivileged, the those censored by race and by creed. Under a Nazi Germany, was it Nuremberg? The story took years to piece together. Before internet.

I struggled to become a teacher like Archie, but I failed a practice CBEST test. A test a sixth grader could ace. I couldn't piece together the parts of the whole in order to pass the practice test. I'm failing the higher functions of lower math.



see more on Archie Williams
"Olympic Pride, American Prejudice" documentary includes Archie WIlliams
RIP Harry Roche
Segregation Games (Archie Williams)