Before middle schools we had junior high schools, grades 7-9. In Olympia there were two junior high schools, Washington and Jefferson. I started out in Washington but partway through my academic journey there they built a new junior high to absorb us Boomers. It was called Reeves Junior High. It was named in honor of Mr. Reeves, my grade school principal at Roosevelt Elementary. He was a nice man who lived a block away from me.
Reeves was the school for the tough, working class kids. It was not an easy place to learn from the classroom due to the anarchy. All of our lessons came from elsewhere.
The school newspaper was called
The Blue & Gold (school colors) and was run off on a mimeograph. I have a scattered few issues from the first year. Many of my cartoons failed to reproduce to the point where they could not be read, but I found a few I could post here.
It was at Reeves that I first learned the power of cartooning in politics. The Olympia Mayor, Tom Allen, wanted to turn the downtown Sylvester Park into a parking garage. Even though I was a teenager, I met with him to state why this was wrong, and he treated me like a teenager. That is to say, I was brushed off and ridiculed by him as an "environmentalist." (The term "treehugger" had not been invented yet and The Evergreen State College had not surfaced in Oly at this time, so we were still living in an extension of the 1950s in Olympia). So I drew a bunch of cartoons about "Tommy Treecut" for the
Blue and Gold. The principal, Ted Wynstra, called my parents to complain, saying Tom Allen was a friend of his, and my Mother responded by saying, so what? The kid has a right to free expression.
Yes! As I have stated before in this blog, I was very fortunate in the parental department.
And Tom Allen was later nailed in some scandal involving self-interest in the construction of the public library and left office under a deserved dark cloud.
Anyway, part of digging into that mimeo gel to produce those cartoons meant I had to sit in the school office area. I quickly noticed that the central microphone for the school announcements was in the same room, as well as the stack of notices waiting to be read. So I started writing bogus notices and slipping them into the stack. I wonder how many people showed up for fake meetings?
Ain't I a stinker?
So, here are some of the cartoons I drew during that era, 1969-1970:
Norman, the Wonder Prune was regular character I used
Remember, the Moon landing was new thing in 1969!
This cover was drawn by our art teacher, "Snuffy" Jenkins.
He died fairly young, only a few years after he drew this.
He was a squat, square, straight-talking guy who loved teaching.
This was the kind of Cold War paranoia nonsense we Boomers could not get away from, even in a junior high newspaper!
