Finally Started on 1967/1968 Catamounts 

I was disappointed to not have Volume 12 number 1, the first Catamount I have from 67/68 is number two - dated October 6, 1967.

It's been a long time since I've touched the site - mostly because I've started consulting again, so trying to do a Catamount in an afternoon is no longer possible most of the time.

This has been kind of fun in terms of contact with interesting people - Gayne Barlow (daughter of my 7th grade science teacher at Wilbur Junior High, and in my graduating class) and I have exchanged some emails. My wife found a "biography" of Mr. Barlow that I wrote back in 8th grade (English assignment) that is a hoot to read, and Gayne and her family apparently enjoyed it as well. Since other of Claude Barlow's former students might find this fun, I put it up on the site as well. That particular paper was written when I was in Mrs. Wolfrom's class in 8th grade, also at Wilbur Junior High. (If Wendy Lesser should happen to read this, I believe Mrs. Wolfrom was the teacher whose name you couldn't remember that you wrote about in "The Amateur"./

8th grade English at Wilbur was (for me) an interesting class - Mrs. Wolfrom wanted to teach us using "linguistics" rather than traditional grammer, which I really enjoyed. The teacher the next year (Mrs. Forbush) was of the old school "grammer", but after those two classes, I found I could pretty much analyze and parse anything thrown at me. The exposure to linguistics made it easier later to learn more about computer languages as well. These two teachers were opposites in many ways, but I learned a lot from both of them. Mrs. Wolfrom's class *did* have a - shall we say - "hiccup", which I think was what precipitated events leading to Wendy's comments in "The Amateur" and that was because we had a reading specialist come in periodically that many of the students didn't care for. He was armed with things like SRA reading labs and tachistoscopes (darn - no Wikipedia article on that - it's a device that flashes things like words up for very short periods of time - it was supposed to help us read faster). Anyway, there was a revolt of sorts by the students in our class, and as I recall Wendy was one of the ringleaders... and he went away and didn't ever come back, which probably put Mrs. Wolfrom in an awkward position. I thought the tachistiscope was kind of fun actually.

I also exchanged emails with former Catamount columnist Doug Monica who graduated a year ahead of me. (Doug's mom and my mom were good friends - I think they both worked on the Pete McCloskey campaigns - back in the 70s. I got to drive him (Congressman McCloskey) to the airport once on a messy rainy night back in my college days. His son and I were at UCSB at the same time).

I slso got email from a teacher in Palo Alto who is doing a wonderful site on Palo Alto history. Check it out at http://www.paloaltohistory.com/.

Much of what is covered in this issue of the Catamount that I just put up is covered in former Cubberley English/Journalism teacher Sylvia Williams' book Hassling (hardcover) , or Hassling (paperback) which she wrote in the early 70s. It is out of print, but if you follow the links you might find a used copy.

I've been doing sort of "topic pages" on each edition of the Catamount because hopefully that will help searchers to find things easier - especially since the optical PDFs sometimes garble things up. (Yikes, I'm repeating myself!)
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Visit to Palo Alto 

I was in Palo Alto last weekend, and stopped by Cubberley to have a look at the place... it's amazing how much of it looks the same.

Especially since I've been trying to catalog the ads in the old Catamounts, I also went over to Charleston Center to look around (and pick up an Ice Cream) at the still-well-attended ice cream store (photo from 1967 or so).



I also popped my head in the barber shop to see if Tony was still in there - he is! I remember Tony from one of the Midtown barber shope (I think it was the one by Round Table), and then he moved down and took over the business at Charleston Center. My dad used to ask for him specifically, and Tony always took good care of his hair.

I promised Tony I would upload this photo he helped me set up back in probably 1968 or 1969.



The three teachers had all grown beards over the summer, and I think the story was that Mr. Dale (left) and Mr. Warford (right) were going to keep their beards, and the apprehensive-looking Mr. Putnum (in chair) was going to shave his off. We didn't "have it off" right there in the barbershop, but this was sure fun to set up.

Both the ice cream store and the barber shop were faithful advertisers in the Catamount when I was in high school. The ice cream store looks quite a bit the same - they manufacture their own ice cream, and it's great! I don't know if they make it there onsite, or if they do it elsewhere, but we sure enjoyed ours.


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Catamount from April 21, 1967 

I just noticed this was almost exactly 40 years ago, and probably one of the most eventful times at Cubberley.

Two notorious experiments are outlined
- Ron Jones and the Third Wave (now popularly known as "The Wave", or "Die Welt" due to popularized (and rather revised and enhanced) written and film accounts of what actually happened.
- Idea Forum. An idea for an alternative school within a school.

I wasn't part of the Third Wave - I took the same course "Contemporary World", but it was taught by a different teacher (I had Al Chanteloupe). It was no secret, though, as has been suggested a few places. I, along with a couple of other folks, took a few photos of the classroom in a little-known noctournal break-in to the room (actually we got a janitor to let us in)... But lots of other folks know a lot more about the "Third Wave" than I do, though, so I'll present the document such as it is, and leave most of the comments to others who were there.

"Idea Forum" was a lot of fun. Anybody could run a class, and you could attend any you were interested in. This Catamount edition listed the offerings of the pilot program. Duriing IF, I remember going to a class on Swahili, one on matrices (mathematics), and one on how to get rich in the stock market (Thanks, Mr. Farmer... which I didn't(get rich, that is)). The great photo of Sallie Neall (she was a really nice girl - in lots of my classes and a good friend) in a sandwich board shows the enthusiasm with which this idea was embraced by many of us.

This one also mentions the famous Cubberley "Buffalo Springfield / Sopwith Camel" concert. Apparently at Deena Bonn Sports Night, there was a performance by "The California Girls", which I'm not sure has anything to do with the band by that name today. I did notice in an earlier version of the Catamount that Addie Clement (who used to live on Carlson Circle) was one of the members back then.

There's a photo of Bill Perry (taken by Yours Truly) who did the artwork for the Springfield/Camel concert, and there's a miniature version of the original psychedelic poster on the bottom of page 2.

Doug Monica's account of the San Francisco Mobilization to protest the Viet Nam conflict is gripping first-hand history.




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Catamount March 3, 1967 

I just got Volume 11, No. 10 up on the website. I'm trying to put some useful text into the "headlines" page I do for each edition to make things show up in search engines... (so in case someone googles around looking for information about something related, they will hopefully find my content). It's kind of hard to read all the articles and summarize, though. Still experimenting with this.

There is what appears to be a rather dumb mistake regarding an exchange student on page 3 - the headline reads "Americans Amaze German Exchanger"... and in the article, it says "...Carlo Putz, Cubberley's AFS exchange student from Reckange, *Luxembourg*. I remember Carlo slightly - to the best of my recollection, I thought he was from Germany myself. Undoubtedly he was German-speaking which probably confused things to people not familiar with European geography.

This reminds me of something that happened to me later in life. I made a visit with a mission-board representative to Liberia in West Africa. When meeting with one of the national Christian leaders over there, he asked us the question... "What did your friends say when you said you were coming to Liberia?". I had one that sent him into one of the biggest laughs I've ever heard - someone had told me I had better "watch out for Gaddafi". (One of my friends didn't know the difference between Libya and Liberia).

There's a photo of Neil Howe reading a journalism book. I made the connection to what Neil does today from an HP Labs seminar he gave several years ago, where he mentioned that he went through the Palo Alto schools.




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Catamount - February 3, 1967 

I'm missing Volume 11, #8 which must have come out about 2 weeks after the New Years holiday. If anyone will send me a scan of it (or anything else related), I'll try to post it...

I DID get Volume 11, #9 up on the website yesterday.

I don't remember the Indian science teacher at all.

I DO remember Mr. Chad Osborne singing protest and folk songs. He really had some talent - he would sing in a sort of a raspy Barry McGuire style. Scott LeGear's photo is excellent.

There's a thread through this issue and the last about "granny dresses". Apparently Tani Barlow had been wearing one of these, and it looked too much like sleepwear, so she got in trouble. I didn't know Tani, she must have been older than me. I knew her younger sister, Gayne (I'll have to check that spelling) - the Barlows gave interesting names to all their girls.

Gotta mention more about their dad though. Mr. Barlow was a teacher at the Junior High (Wilbur Junior High, now Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School). He was my seventh-grade science teacher, and has got to be one of the most interesting people I ever knew, and helped me develop my interest in science and computers. I know that he did experiments in class where he didn't know for sure what would happen. I remember he was using those little plastic water rockets to help us learn how to collect and graph data... some sort of spring balance arrangement measured the peak thrust, and he would vary the amount of water and the number of "pumps" on the little air pump that came with them. Much to the delight of our class, one of the rockets escaped the apparatus and shattered a light bulb in a ceiling fixture. I remember that he had slightly wild hair (sort of like the professor in "Back to the Future", but not quite so extreme). He wore a stained white lab coat and smoked a pipe (after school, not during class). You really felt like you were 'doing' science in his room. It was always fun and informative. Back before the PC was even a concept, he had his students coding ecological information onto Hollerith cards and was trying to have us trace cause and effect of varying populations on the overall ecosystem. I don't think we ever got any 'results', but we certainly thought about how things could interact, and learned quite a bit about computers in the process.

Doug Monica (his mom was good friends with my mom) wrote a very thoughtful piece in this edition about the similarities and relationships between the "toughs" and the "long hairs".

Page 4 has a lengthy article about the 'Executors' Car club... plus a column by Bob Warford (who was part of the 'tough' crowd, and one of the Executors). Bob's column was always fun - he would pick up on funny stuff that happened around the school. I know he got censored more than once (in particular about a certain faculty member's hairpiece that somehow ended up in the sawdust in the wood shop). This article mentions that they had a newsletter "The Executor" - if anyone has any of these they would like to scan and send me I'll put 'em on the website.

Page 5 has a piece about one of my best friends at Cubberley, Terry Smith, who, after a $5 "introductory" flying lesson, decided to work toward his pilot's license even before he could drive. I remember going over to the baylands (on bicycles) and watching him do 'touch landings' at the Palo Alto airport. It doesn't come out in the article, but Terry was one of the funniest people I ever knew and also a wonderful friend. When he needed lunch money he would say something like "Hello old buddy, old pal, old GENEROUS friend". I would always happily loan him some lunch money if I had it, and he meticulously paid it back. He also got himself messed up once in Junior high when he was animatedly talking by his locker about the "Fuller Brush Lady", referring to our English teacher, Mrs. Forbush. I remember she overheard him once (or he *thought* she did), and we got lots of chuckles out of that over the next few years. Terry and I used to do 'experiments' with our bikes at Mitchell Park - we would start at the top of the hill following a particular route to see how far we could go just on a coast, and then later with a certain number of "pedal pushes". Then we went back with 3-in-one oil and lubricated everything in sight to see if we could make it go further. Gee, Mr. Barlow could've used *that* to have us graph data too(!)

There is another great Scott LeGear photo on the back page of the wrestling team. I remember that the mother of one of the wrestlers (Tom Tamplin) worked with my dad at Lockheed. My dad had asked me if I could get some photos of him wrestling for his mom, so I opted for some sports assignments with the wrestling team. In the process, I learned an appreciation for the sport and all the work the guys put into it.

In this edition there was also an obituary for a teacher, Miss Shirley Woodcox, who died an untimely death at age 40. When we were in High School 40 seemed so *old*.



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