middlesex junior high school and darien and gus van sant

On my 54th birthday, three days ago, I wrote an essay on one of my former teachers at Middlesex Junior High School in Darien CT. By thinking about him (Mr. Laube), I was brought back to memories of other teachers, and some students, who contributed to that period of my life. I was born in nearby Stamford in 1952, but lived in Darien until our family moved to the Bay Area in 1967. I didn't know until about a week before we actually moved to CA that we were going to do so. I spent the Summer of 1967 trying to acclimatize myself to Darien High School, where I would be a student in the Fall, by training with the football team and, in general, hanging around the school.

I don't remember anything about the high school except the football coach, a middle-aged man named Victor Crump, if I recall correctly, who used to tell us that his approach to coaching was KISS (I didn't know it at the time, but everyone was saying the same thing. Mindless drones repeat the same acronymn today): "Keep it Simple Stupid." He told us that he was stupid, and that he needed therefore to keep his football plays easy. I probably remember this remark because it was the first time I actually heard someone embrace the concept of stupidity. I would learn over the years that many would employ it, though few would be vocal about their dedication to stupidity.

Ah, Junior High

So, I attended Middlesex Junior High, on Hollow Tree Rd. from 1964-67. I would often walk to school (about 1 1/2 miles--though I assure you I never walked five miles through the snow in the dead of Winter, which was the mythology of my parents' generation). I recall being amazed not only at the size of the place, but of the fact that we had different teachers for every class. I was exposed to some of this the previous year when I attended a one-year sixth grade at "The Annex" in South Darien, but now I was confronted with that daily reality. I rather liked it, since I had different kids in each class, and it gave me more teachers to get to understand and, at times, torment.

Each day began with home room period for about ten or fifteen minutes. My 7th grade home room teacher was an older lady, Miss Reed (I think that was her name) who probably had been teaching for 35 years by the time I arrived. Her closest colleague on the faculty was Miss Olson, of like vintage, whose classroom was next door. Neither of them was particularly attractive, and we students, in our respectful and loving ways, developed nicknames for both. Miss Reed was "Pruneface" and Miss Olson, the shorter of the two, was "Mousie."

I'll never forget one phrase that Miss Reed would often use. Seventh grade students, lest you forget, are walking cases of attention deficit. They have needs that must be attended to right now or else the structure of the universe will be altered. Miss Reed had develped a classic way of handling all the insistent cries of students for attention. It was the simple phrase, "Die in your seats." Some of us would want to use the bathroom, or be excused from our chair, or get a book or countless other things that only 12 year-olds can invent, but her way of keeping order was to tell us to be quiet and die in our seats. As it happened, no one, even those who had seemingly urgent needs, ended up dying.

Gus

Homeroom was memorable for another reason, because we sat in clusters of four students at small tables for those fifteen minutes. Thus, we got to know, and gossip with, three other students if we so chose. The guy sitting next to me was named Gus. He was quite small, and so I called him "Little Gus," and he called me "Big Bill." We greeted each other this way each day through the year. Today he is Gus Van Sant, one of the most creative Hollywood movie directors. As I think of Gus at that time, two things stand out very clearly in my memory. The first is that he had incredibly small, even dainty, wrists around which was the sign of coolness of that era--an ID bracelet. The second, and more to the point, were his penetrating blue eyes. In fact so intense were they, as I recall, that it was as if the pupil had contracted to a mere black pin prick and all there was was a sea of blue. Gus didn't say hardly anything, but I noted that he was always looking intently at the world. Who knows if he was in his own private Idaho at the time, but I think the roots of creativity were certainly already present. When I talked to him briefly later (in the late 1990s) in Portland, he mentioned to me that the biggest influence on him in those days was an English teacher named Mr. Sohn. I never had Mr. Sohn for English (Mousie was my teacher in 8th grade), and never got to know him, but I recall him as a man in a disheveled suit always lugging an enormous briefcase--this was well before the days of "rolling" your bookbag with you.

Conclusion

Instead of developing my creative talents in film-making or related skills, I took a different path in Junior High. The next essay tells of a few teachers I recall.

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