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I love this picture (above), and I love this kid! This was for many years my favorite picture of myself. It was taken during my sixth grade year in Mrs. Murrata's class at Cheremoya Avenue Elementary School. With my mother away in Mexico, as I struggled to fit into the dominance hierarchy of sixth grade, the 1970-1971 academic year was hard. In the summer of 1971, I returned to camp JCA, Barton Flats, in the San Bernadino mountains (photos above right and below)
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As you can see in the photo above, I was (far left) the smallest kid in our platform tent, by a head. I was also socially isolated with nobody relating much to me, and with me not connecting much to anyone else.
I do remember enjoying doing some photography with my "Instamatic" camera, and doing my first dark room work at JCA. My main impression of these faces, today as a father, 30 years later, is how incredibly beautiful we were as children. The other funny thing is the fact that those "adult" counselors standing behind us were just kids too. |
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In that summer the Vietnam war raged, and there was a lottery to decide which Americans would become its victims. I had barely noticed the war before that summer, but suddenly the question of what draft number our counselor would receive was the subject of intense conversation. In the picture to the left, a kid named Ira, and our counselor acted out the potential death of our counselor in Vietnam. Today, that seems very mature to me for 12 year olds, but at the time the idea of acting out feelings in a skit was anathema to me. I didn't trust these kids, and who wanted to express how they felt about anything, for crying out loud? |
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