Coming to Colorado: A Young Immigrantâ??s Journey to Become an American Flyer

CHAPTER 12. High School Graduation

High School Graduation CHAPTER 12 { 141 } HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION My junior year at East High School drew to a close. My grades were mostly Cs with an occasional A or D. I continued to take typing. Although I typed sixty-five words a minute, I received a C in the course. At Opportunity School I received an A for typing forty-five words a minute. My teacher, who never once spoke to me during the academic year, didn’t really seem to know who I was, except that I was a boy in a class of all girls. I accepted my grades without comment; I just wanted to pass my courses and graduate. A time or two I wondered if my teachers had any idea how difficult it was for an immigrant boy to master in a year what my American-born classmates had absorbed over a lifetime. I didn’t feel sorry for myself. To the contrary , I was immensely grateful for the opportunity to be back in school again. Yet, an occasional kind word of encouragement would have gone a long way to make my high school experience less of a chore. At East High School I remained mostly a nonentity, passing unnoticed down corridors and through classrooms, like a boy without a face. My friend Dave’s family owned an ironworks on the north side of Denver where the Germans, Italians, and Poles lived. Dave asked me if I would be interested in a summer job. I jumped at the chance to do something other than stocking shelves in the auto parts store where I still worked after school and occasionally on weekends. The pay was $1.75 an hour—big money. I had never been paid more than eighty-five cents before. Dave also found a summer job for Jack, another friend of his who attended East, that is, when he wasn’t skipping class. Dave and Jack were at opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum, and I never quite figured out how the two got together, much less what motivated Dave to sustain their friendship. Jack adored Dave, looking up to him as if he was a demigod. Not particularly motivated, Jack’s chances of graduating from East seemed slim to me. Jack inherited ten thousand dollars from an aunt who died unexpectedly. His parents let him spend the money any way he wished. Ten thousand dollars was the cost of Hedy and Leo’s new house. If I had that much money, I would have paid off their mortgage. But I didn’t have ten thousand dollars; Jack did. He bought a Willy’s Overland Jeep, then spent the remainder of his money frivolously. By the time I graduated { 142 } HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION from East a year later, in 1953, Jack had gone through much of his inheritance and quit school. I viewed my world through the prism of my own needs and values, so I believed Jack had wasted a great opportunity. The three of us, Dave, Jack, and I, met every morning that summer near East High School and rode to work in Jack’s new Willy’s Overland. Dave, who worked in the plant office somewhere, dressed in a white shirt, tie, and slacks, and walked around the plant in his ponderous, Frankenstein-like way each morning and afternoon trying to look important . I had no idea what Dave was looking at or inspecting. He would stop here and there. After watching for a few minutes, he would nod his head approvingly and move on. Jack worked on the assembly line, moving mining car bodies from one work station to another, a dirty job. I worked on the bull gang, an even dirtier job than Jack’s. The bull gang did whatever was required. We mostly unloaded steel plates from railroad flatcars, using an overhead crane. A dangerous job, it was easy to lose a limb, even your life. The foreman was a muscular man in his late twenties, who without fail rolled up his sleeves to reveal his bulging biceps, making certain that all of us took note. His major topic of conversation was his many female conquests. Apparently no woman could resist his charms. At times he would stop work, a steel plate dangling dangerously from the crane, and make us listen to the intimate details of his amorous exploits. In that environment I was...