The Boys of Claremont

Like I said before, we moved to Southern California in the late '50s.  Remember, Pomona because of Romona?  Anyway, we lived in Pomona for just a few months before moving to Claremont, California.  Don't asked me why. I didn't have any siblings with names rhyming with Claremont. Anyway, it turned out to be a good move on my parents part.  Claremont is located on Route 66. It's about 30 miles east of Hollywood and about 15 miles west of Cucamonga.

Claremont is best known for its five elite colleges and a number of schools of Theology.  We did have about every religion represented there.  Most noted were the Quakers who founded Claremont.  Claremont is nestled against the San Gabriel Mountains with Mt. Baldy as it highest peak at a little under 13,000 feet.

Claremont had train tracks running through it, the Santa Fe Railroad to be exact.  You later learned the tracks were also a status dividing demarcation.   You either lived below the tracks; above the tracks, which is old Claremont; or above Route 66 in the foothills. This was new Claremont.  Most of this is where the orange groves once stood, but many had been cut down to build homes.  I guess that's what they call progress?

Anyway, we lived below the tracks.  We arrived in Claremont in mid June.  So I had about  three months to get acclimatized both weather wise and social wise.  I was entering into the last year of what they called "junior high." In the South, I would have been a freshman in high school.  So this "junior high,"  was made up of seventh, eighth and ninth graders.
Remember, I had just finished my eighth year of school with the-nun-from-hell. Our entire graduating class in eight grade consisted of about twenty kids or so.

I remember arriving at school on my first day. When we pulled up to unload, my first thought was "holy shit" there must be a thousand kids in this school. Back then there was no such thing as orientation.  No, you were on your own. No help, just follow the crowd and hope they led you to where you were supposed to go. 

Now Claremont being a college town and progressive, had instituted an new type of school system that year called the "modular system."  It's what they used in a college teaching setting.  Instead of having one teacher for all your subjects, you had one teacher for each subject, plus a home room teacher. 

Well,  I was entering the system blind. No friends, no social network, no previous knowledge of how things worked.  It turned out to be one the most stressful days of my life. I still have nightmares about finding my classroom or forgetting to go to a certain class. I think I got Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from the experience. But I had learned to endure, and made it through the first day with a few mental scares and a bad headache. As the days, weeks and months went by, I began to get the hang of it.

Go to your home room first.  This is where you got the news of the day. You found out if a class had been canceled or changed to a different room.  It was also were you went to socialize and to get to know who's who. Who is the big man on campus? Who were the most popular girls? And most of all, who were the bad asses? We had a whole lot of those.  The term "gang" became part of my vocabulary.  I quickly learned that you had to be part of a group to be protected from the gangs.  Being a loner was a very risky business.

Although I was living below the tracks, I found that I had no trouble being accepted by kids from "Old Claremont" or the foothill folks.  In fact, my best friend was from an "Old Claremont" family and lived above Route 66.

I tended to move in three circles of friends.  I had my friends in the neighborhoods below the tracks, my above the track friends and my foothill friends.  My three circles were  interwoven. Sort of like a color wheel circle or the circles you saw in a statistics class.  I easily moved in and out of the three circles and seemed to be accepted by all.  I guess I just didn't know any better. Where most kids seemed to stick with the kids from the hood, I guess I decided to expand my hood. Like I said, I just didn't know any better.

By the end of ninth grade our group had begun to gel. We were Ken, John, Dan, Steve, Richard, Stan , Phil and me.  This was the core of the group with others entering and leaving. But we pretty well stuck together through high school.  Within the group you had your inner core of friends. These were the ones you could rely on, the ones who had your back and you had theirs. For me that was Ken and Steve.

I think I met Ken in a drafting class.  We seem to hit it off immediately.  We liked the same music, sports and girls.   Even after graduation we went to the same college for the first couple of years. During the summer we were both firefighters with the U.S. Forest Service.  We both entered the military service at the same time during the Vietnam War.  After leaving the service, Ken got married and I moved to Northern California.  We stayed in touch for awhile, but then went our separate ways.  But Ken and I were like brothers and I'm sure when I do catch up with him again, we'll find that the friendship has endured. 

Steve got married after the first year of college, dropped out and became a hippie. We heard he had moved to the desert and was managing a motel or something. We all sort of lost track of him but I'm sure he's still out there doing his own thing.

I have recently made contact with Dan. We are beginning to talk about our Claremont days. Dan is an ex-marine and doesn't let me forget.  He's retired and living with his wife in Laguna Beach, California.  Dan writes stories for a local newspaper and for his nephews. He is also starting to tell the story of  "The Boys of Claremont."

Oh, by the way, I married a Claremont girl who lived below the tracks.