Cooley High 2

I made a mistake on my last blog. It was 1968, not 1969 that I entered Cooley High. It had been an exciting year because I had a summer job that gave me all kinds of perks and the Detroit Tigers had won the pennant. They were extreme underdogs but won anyway. I grew up with Ernie Harwell's voice coming out of the little red transistor radio.
There was a beautiful church across Hubbell from Cooley. Kids would gather there and smoke cigarettes before and after school. In a study hour class I had, a young man invited me to come there with him. When I told him I didn't smoke, he moved away from my desk and never spoke to me again! I'm fairly certain there was more than regular cigarettes being smoked over there.
I took two art classes that year. My art teacher entered one of my paintings into an art contest, but I never won anything. Competition was fierce with the city of Detroit schools all competing. It was a water color of a Mexican peasant couple. I have no idea whatever happened to that painting.
When the weather was nice I walked to school and saved my bus money. There was a young man who would walk to meet me almost every morning. He was very nice. The problem was that he was black. My parents are old-school with definite ideas about races mixing. Finally the boy asked me out on a date. I wasn't old enough to date (family rule was 16), so I had that excuse, but he asked me if there was anything else. I felt the need to be honest with him, so I told him my parents would flip out if I dated a black boy. He knew I wasn't being mean, but I knew I had hurt his feelings. He still met me a couple of times, but the weather got bad and I took the bus.
Cooley was a closed campus, which meant that once you were in school, you couldn't leave then come back again. We weren't allowed to eat lunch any other place than the lunch room. However, once a year we were allowed outside (it was in the spring) for lunch hour. I went out with two friends, a girl and a boy. I don't remember the girl's name, but the boy's name was Tim. He was tall and very blond. He was kind of goofy, too. We were outside enjoying the weather when all of a sudden Tim grabbed the top of his head. The other girl and I stopped talking and stared at Tim. Then he looked at his hand, said something about a bird then turned and ran into the school. We laughed so hard we had to hold each other up. Tim came out a few minutes later with wet hair.