High school memory

I downloaded H. G. Wells' An Outline of History to read, which came with a high school memory.

There were five of us who were tight at Pasadena High School in the mid-1950s. We were nerds, geeks, future scientists of America. We broke into two subgroups: 3 of us liked and played sports, 2 didn't. We were at the top of our class and most academic occasions, particularly in math and science, were a competition among the five of us. We all applied to the same four universities but acceptances made no sense, or none that we could figure out. All of us got accepted by Cal at Berkeley. Thereafter only one accepted us, and each went to this university. M and I were accepted by Cal Tech across town. D and E by Stanford, the only two to go straight through and graduate without interruption. J by MIT.

In high school only M had significant interests beyond math and the sciences. He was always reading something by Upton Sinclair. And for a while, he was reading and carrying around Wells' outline of history, which is the memory that rushed over me as I was downloading the book to my Kindle.

M was something of a tragic figure. His family was the only wealthy Republican one in our group. But his tragic complexity didn't come to light until the summer between our freshman and sophomore years at Cal Tech.

We weren't that close, although we lived around the corner from one another and often played chess. But I played more sandlot sports than chess and M wasn't into that. In the summer in question, M had something like a nervous breakdown. His mother asked me to talk to him one day. He lived in an apartment over their garage and I found him incoherent and a little scary. He also was showing me, to my shock, some gay porno magazines. A few days later he committed suicide.

In retrospect, I think there were two stressful pressures that M couldn't deal with. First, he was gay at a time when you definitely kept in the closet. I assume he was. But perhaps more important, he more than the rest of us got a lot of pressure to succeed from his family, especially his aggressive demanding mother.

Cal Tech was a shock. We went from the top of our high school class to the middle of the incoming freshman class of 100. Different students adjusted in different ways. At Cal Tech I adjusted by becoming a jock: I lettered in football, basketball and track. I was co-captain and quarterback of the football team, as non-competitive as it was (our best game we lost only 52-12; our worst, 85-0 against Whittier in the mud). M apparently had a more difficult time adjusting, especially with his mom on his ass.

At any rate, he committed suicide. Shortly after this I transfered to Berkeley, mainly to get away from home, and one term later I joined the Army, finding myself in the Army Security Agency at a recruiter's whim and soon training to be a Russian Linguist in the Cold War.

I associate the Wells history with my memory of M. It will be an interesting read.