juniorhigh

Junior High School in Utah
This was posted to an online group on August 23, 2004.

--- Sue97062@a... wrote:
> Yes, as Kathleen as told you, I will now have three of my children living in Utah -- which accounts for 9
> grandchildren, and more to come. I haven't even begun to process the grief that this is really (down deep) causing me.
***snip***
> I can almost NOT BEAR to think about all those grandchildren being raised in that judgmental, paranoid,
> exclusionary culture.
> Sue

Sue (and the rest of y'alls),

     I lived in Utah twice, once when I was in the 3rd and 4th grade from 1967-69, and again when I was in the 7th-9th grades from 1971-74. The first time was in North Ogden; the second time was on Hill Air Force Base (my dad was a 20-year Air Force pilot).

     Other than that I spent the rest of my growing up years living on Air Force bases around the country, (mostly in Alaska), and so I have
something to compare Utah with as far as how it was to grow up there as opposed to other places in the US.

     I wish I could say something that would in some way alleviate the grief you are feeling about having your grandchildren growing up in
Utah, and in some way I may be able to.

     When I was in Utah as a grade school kid the school system in Utah was actually pretty good for me and my siblings who attended grade
school there. Mormons make pretty decent grade school teachers, I believe. I think that perhaps one of the best teachers I ever had was my 3rd grade teacher who read to us "The Hobbit", "Where the Red Fern Grows", and other books while we put our heads down on our desks
for "story time" every day. There were kids learning how to play the violin in our grade school, and other very excellent cultural activities occurred, such as visiting the Hansen Planetarium, the Hogel Zoo, etc. Grade school was pretty good.

     But when I was living in Utah during my Junior High School days, things were very different. The school system was on the outside
fairly decent, and there were some actually quite decent teachers, also. But it wasn't the school system that was the problem. By the
time I had entered my early teens the social situation around me began to become a lot more important (as it does for almost everyone), and it was what was going on outside of the school curriculum that was troublesome for me. School itself was actually still quite decent, as far as that went. I was in my school's Select Boys' Choir taught by a woman who sang for the MoTabs (Mormon Tabernacle Choir), I had an excellent science teacher, and I had a decent English teacher as well.

     But the thing that really was screwed up was the social situation. Basically what happened while we were in Utah is that I "went bad". It was the only option for someone like me. The people who lived on the Air Force Base went to school in Layton but went to church in Clearfield, which meant that the friends I had in school were different from the ones I had on Sundays and during the summers when I had more contact with the church kids than the school kids.

     The friends I had at school were a pretty decent lot. They were usually involved in things and were smart and fun. I was on the school's newspaper staff, among other things (I was the water boy for the football team!). The crowd at school that I hung out with was what would be considered by society's standards the "successful" students (they applied themselves and were smart and active).

     But it was the crowd that I associated with at church that was the problem. Only about 25% of the teenagers in my ward (and we had a LOT of teens in that ward - over 100) were nice clean-cut kids. Perhaps it was because it was Clearfield, which is a pretty blue- collar town, but the kids I hung out with at church were troublemakers.

     There were about 8 of us who were the same age (starting with being in the Deacons' Quorum and then later the Teachers' Quorum together) who would always hang out with each other. We would have died for each other we were so close. It sort of reminded me of that Stephen King movie "Stand By Me".

     During the school year I'd see my church buddies every Sunday for most of the day (we'd sit together on the Deacon's Bench for the whole meeting - this was before they made Deacons sit with their families after the sacrament was done), and then we'd be together for MIA in our Scout meetings. Sometimes we'd do things together on other days as well. During summers when school was out we'd basically hang out all the time together, going on campouts with the Scouts, etc.

     Gradually we began to experiment with various "evil" things. It started off by shoplifting, smoking cigarettes, etc. We would lie to our parents and tell them that we were sleeping over at the other boy's house and we'd then stay out all night long rousing through the town. We learned how to pick the lock on the Church's kitchen door so we could gain entrance into the Church whenever we wished, and we found out a way to get into the attic where we could gain access to the Church's steeple tower where there was a little room with a trap door that was located in the tower with slatted fake shutters in lieu of windows. We could hide up there and spy on a huge area of the town without anyone knowing we were up there. We brought up some sleeping bags and hid beer and cigarettes and Playboys up in the Church Tower! Not even the janitor went there.

     By the time I was in 9th grade I was a true delinquent. I was using drugs constantly. It is just a matter of luck that I didn't get arrested, and also a matter of luck that I didn't start having sex at this time. Some of the guys I knew were having sex all the time with the girls in our ward who were sooo slutty (well, I hate to use that word, but it is fairly descriptive of what they were like).

     The fascination with doing things that were against the rules was amazing!

     My family moved in the summer between my 9th and 10th grades to Alaska. Once I had left "Zion" the underlying motivation to do bad things just for the sake of doing them slowly left me. By the time I was in the middle of my Junior year I had pretty much quit using drugs and had become a serious student again. I still had a lot of weird things to deal with (who doesn't as a teen), but the pressure to do bad stuff against society's rules had left me. In Alaska I was living in a culture which didn't care so much what teens did, and it made me look at what I was doing and consider what the real effects of my actions were.

     I kept in touch with my friends in Utah for a while, and almost every one of them ended up having to marry early or became true criminals. Only myself and one other kid whose parents moved away to the East Coast ended up going on a mission and eventually to college.

     Looking back on it I can very easily see that living in Utah turned me into a delinquent. The movie "Footloose" is a very good example of Utah kids growing up. There is such a fundamental underlying motivation as a teenager in Utah to disobey the system for the sake of rebelling. And this creates delinquency. When I moved away from this oppressive society back into the mainstream American culture, the pressures to conform were lifted to a degree, and with them the pressures to rebel as well.

     Anyway, I don't really know what to tell you about your grandkids except to share with you some insight into what my experience was. Perhaps it'll help in some small way.

~~Curt Allred