There was a double incentive for me
to make good grades at Vancouver High. I
knew that the higher I kept my grade point average, the better chance I would
have in getting a crack at the Annapolis examination when I joined the
Navy. I also had the incentive of
keeping up with my brother Dick. We had
both discovered that our years in those country schools had left us, if
anything, somewhat ahead of our peers.
Just one class ahead of me, old Richard was maintaining aggravatingly
close to a four-point average. Matter of
fact, seemingly with seldom cracking a book at home. In 1938 Richard was to graduate on the honor
roll, twelfth out of a class of 287. My
work was cut out for me.
During
my junior year at VHS, I still had not shed my shyness and reserve from feeling
that I was just an old country boy from the Ozark hills. Particularly in the presence of the rather
new breed of girls that I found in high school, I was almost tongue-tied and
not aggressive. I did start getting
acquainted with a few of the west side girls like friendly and very likeable
Lena Helm, but most of my friends were boys.
The
only achievement I could claim during my junior year, other than a better than
3.5 grade average (which did not please me as I had maintained close to
straight A’s at Bona) was at one of the football rallies. There was to be a contest to see who could
show up as the worst-dressed bum.
That
was duck soup for me. I fished out one
of my old pairs of overalls that were much too short, put on a torn blue work
shirt of Dad’s from the rag bag, left one suspender hanging down, blacke my
face with burnt cork for a beard, donned a beat-up old felt hat, made a bundle
in a red bandanna to carry over my shoulder on a stick, and appropriated one of
Dad’s old corncob pipes. I won hands
down and was awarded a little cartoon certificate at the next Friday school
assembly by Roger Camp, the student body president. Otherwise, during the 1937-38 school year, I
had little claim to fame.
I
did not ignore the “fair sex” entirely.
I had discovered that I had a knack for dancing and often attended the
noon sock hops in the gym and some of the evening dances. I was quite smitten off and on with a variety
of pretty girls but did not yet have the courage to approach most of them. I suppose that I felt that many of them were
“out of my league”, not realizing that I was passably personable and many would
have readily accepted a date. I had dance
or movie dates occasionally, but always sooner or later I would wind up back
drinking Coca Cola or going to a movie with Patty. I privately wished fervently that she were
older so that I could take her to the school dances.
(It
is possible that Pat Cross and I might have developed a more permanent
relationship had I not suffered from an attack of stupidity after a while—but
that is a later part of my story.)
Sometime
during that year the “Gearhart Gang” came into being—those of us drom the west
side that used Mrs. Gearhart’s drugstore as an after-school hangout. The regulars included pert and pretty Ariel
Mansfield who had dropped out of school and lived with her mother in a
storefront next to the drugstore, David Schaeffer from an apartment building a
half block away, another dark-haired girl from the same apartment (I forget her
name), and two or three others, often including brother Dick and an
olive-skinned handsome young fellow named D’arcy DeJuan. I do not recall much about D’arcy but he was
often around with Richard and got so he sort of wandered in and out of our
house like it was a second home. My
mother liked D’arcy and had no objections even when he showed up for a meal
without prior notice.
The
“Gearhart Gang” is difficult to explain.
We rarely chummed around together away from the drugstore except for a
dance once in a great while or maybe a little beer drinking down by the river,
but it was sort of a second family relationship. Recently [1989] I found Ariel with her husband
Buster Davis (who was in my class) at the 50th reunion of the VHS
Class of ’39. In introducing her to
Phyllis, my wife, I was sort of at a loss to explain our relationship since
never once did I date Ariel. Ariel
solved that—in answer to Phyllis’ questions about what the Gearhart Gang did,
Ariel tossed her head and laughed, “We grew up!”
