A High School Ago

At my high school, a rather pompous little thing of around three hundred kids, mostly progeny of the snob set, there were invitational clubs. There was another school not far off,  that most students went to, on the other side of town. Educationally speaking, it was better. The small city had a history of a class system stemming from its industrial roots. It was a nice little town on a hillside over-looking a river that once saw paddle wheel boats plying up and down its shores. Later on these craft became larger ships to sail off with the area's natural resources: jam, tins of fish and boards. Like most old towns on the coast, there were well defined management  and worker sections. They were a sort of ghetto system that nobody talked about. If you came from one side of the street that divided the rich from the poor, you knew it. Everyone knew it. I happened to live on the "good" side, in the gardener's cottage of a once fine mansion that was home to the biggest timber magnate in the city. My dad was a worker but the house price was right so that's where I ended up. My friends at school were all "well off" being the children of the white collared professionals and business folk who made their living off the poorer set. For some reason, however, I fit in and was accepted - to a point. In those days, schools were less regulated than now. Parents pretty much left kids alone to do what they expected them to do - get  ready to go to university and become something. Universities were different too. If you could afford it and make a pass mark, you got in. Whether you stayed there or not, didn't matter. Most of the girls married by the second year and became housewives. The boys at the U tried to find rich girls to support them. It turned out, ironically, that the poorer kids who managed through jobs on weekends and nights, were the ones who stayed in post grad  and became the noveau riche down the line. About that time, the town began to curl up at its edges, perhaps out of shock that its decline could happen. Anyway, the fashionable part of town latterly became a collection of post and beam box houses and little strip malls on the top of the hill. Later, the mansions below were apartmentized and the once popular main street sadly fell into a haven for drug dealers and gambling addicts. The town is now desperately being "revitalized", but it's glory days are forever gone. What memories I have of my young life there, are positive for the most part but school attitudes stayed with me as they do with everyone who went to a high school. The exclusive invitational clubs were cruelly insular. Parents of those invited in, ran them using their own sorority and fraternity experience to bear. Membership was kept small and the boys and girls who sported club sweaters and pins, were revered not only by the students but also by the teachers. Of course, I was not invited. I found other non-invitational clubs and activites that kept me busy and happy. But the knowledge that I would never have been invited in to one unless I wore the right clothes or had the right parents and lived in a mansion, stayed with me.  I could feel the hurt while understanding the system. It was a perfect lesson in reverse tolerance. Noblesse oblige was seen, not heard in my town. But it was okay, because I developed a determination that put me eventually on an equal plane with my peers further down the road of life. Much later, during reunions of the school that no longer exists, I learned that none of my peers knew I was not invited into their clubs. Our indoctrination then, did not allow comparisons, we just lived the times and put up with what it presented. Wouldn't happen today!