My elementary school experience was all in one school: Rockridge, Oakland. My recollection is that the main building had two stories, but it may have been only one. Connecting this building to the auditorium was a long covered porch. When I went back there as a junior high or high school student, I was amazed to discover how much lower the ceiling of this porch was than it seemed when I was in the lower grades.

Kindergarten was a fairly new feature of the school curriculum then, and Rockridge was proud to have a whole year of kindergarten. My memories of this year are vague, but I remember there were piles of large building blocks. They were even larger than the mill blocks we burned in our kitchen stove at home after we replaced coal with wood.

I remember also that I played the part of the wolf in "Little Red Riding Hood", with a black papier mache head. There were inevitable jokes about this bit of type casting because of my name.

Instead of going into first grade with the rest of my kindergarten class, I had my first of three experiences with skipping grades. I went into "high first" instead of "low first" the classes being large enough to split in this way.

My academic skills may have been somewhat advanced, but in other ways I was a very normal child. For example, I suffered one day (it must have been during first or second grade) the appalling humiliation of wetting my pants in class, and having to be sent home. My mother was not home when I got there, so I remember hiding in the area next to the fence between our house and the Morgensons'. I was terrified that I would be seen by other children when they came home from school and my everlasting shame would be revealed.

Another disastrous experience was when I opened what I thought was my lunch bag at school at noon, and I discovered it contained some of my mother's discarded silk stockings, which she was saving for some purpose. Imagine the shock of revealing such intimate feminine garb in full view of one's classmates!

The second time I "skipped" was when I went from low third to low fourth, or somewhere in that range. The last time was when I went from high fifth to high sixth. I remember that time more clearly because I had to do a special project to assure this promotion. The project consisted of collecting samples of various kinds of minerals and products coming from California, and mounting them on a big sheet of poster board. I collected some of these by writing to different companies and agencies, and it took quite a bit of time.

As a result of this skipping process, I went into junior high school a year and a half ahead of my age group, and continued that pattern through high school. It had obvious social disadvantages, and made me seem even more incompetent as an athlete than I would have been a year later. But it had the compensation that I took a semester of typing and shorthand after my high school graduation before beginning U. C.

The typing course was probably the most valuable single skill I learned in the whole sweep of my education. It was not only useful in some of my jobs, especially in the ministry; it also made possible enterprises like this one, as well as allowing me to turn in papers which I had typed myself for various school courses, instead of having to hire someone to do the work.

My junior high school was Claremont, at the corner of College and Claremont Aves. (As of this writing, the Rockridge BART station overshadows it). The buildings were woefully inadequate for the enrollment, so the grounds were covered with portable class rooms, cutting down drastically on the playground area. Since I was not much of an athlete, this didn't bother me in one way. But it meant the P. E. classes were even more confusing to me than they might have been.

By the end of my second year of junior high school, our family moved to Berkeley because of my father's new job with the City of Berkeley. This meant that I finished my junior high period at Garfield, west of what was then Grove St. on Hopkins. Grove St. is now Martin Luther King, Jr. Way, and the school is also named for him.

I have no clear memories of my year at Garfield. I cannot think of anything negative the year is just a blank. My grades must have been good as usual, but getting good grades was taken for granted.

Many of my high school memories are covered in the next chapter. So this may be the place for two that were not related to my dramatic efforts.

In connection with my writing efforts, I joined the staff of the student weekly newspaper. This was printed on slick paper by the school printing department. Since the school had a total en rollment of about 3000 students, the circulation was much larger and the whole enterprise on a larger scale than most such publications. My contributions tended to be drastically cut or ommitted, but there was satisfaction in seeing my words in print. My greatest triumph was a front page review of the annual student show (see next chapter). It was printed verbatim, and I preserved the paper by using it as the cover of the yearbook. Reading it many years later, I couldn't help feeling pleased with my youthful attempts at adult journalistic copy.

My only venture into school politics had a more bitter sweet flavor.

Just before my senior year, the high school quarterback Bob McQuarrie surprised me by asking for my help in writing his candidate's speech for student body president. Needless to say, he occupied a position in the student social scene comparable to the traditional role of St. Peter in Heaven, or even a little higher than God Himself in the minds of many students. Berkeley High's "B" football team (not the junior varsity but a separate unit of smaller and/or younger students) had a legendary record of several years without a defeat, and this bolstered the success of the varsity squad.

Bob and I were barely acquainted, since I was definitely not the athletic type, and I cannot recall what prompted him to ask me for help. Flattered, I went home and put together what I assumed would be a rough draft for Bob to polish.

To my astonishment and other very mixed feelings, he gave the speech at the school assembly exactly as I had written it. Since the school assembly speeches were the only campaign efforts allowed at the time, the vote depended largely on reactions to them. As the assembly broke up, I heard students all around me express surprise that McQuarrie had given such a good speech. I was naturally tempted to proclaim my authorship, but I realized that this would have had a boomerang effect on his candidacy. He won by a landslide, and went on to do a creditable job in handling the mainly ceremonial office. He never thanked me or said anything to me again. In retrospect I felt he had not only used me rather shabbily but had shattered my faith in the electoral process. Whenever I hear citizens or commentators rave about a public official's great speech, I wonder who the anonymous author was and most of the time one or more gifted writers did have a big hand in composing it, as we now know. The public generally accepts this, though, whereas the high school student speeches were supposed to be written by the candidates.