asked me to write about 1969:
A few days before New Years 1969 I turned 14. My siblings were 12, 9, 8, and 1. I was in 9th grade (the last year of jr.h.s.); I wrote book reports on a biography of Gandhi for social studies and a book of poems by Canadian poet Irving Layton for English, gave an oral report on hydration in the African gazelle with particular emphasis on its sweat glands (based on a Scientific American article) for science, memorized declensions and conjugations in Latin, and struggled with introductory algebra (I now realize I have dyscalculia). I went to Hebrew School once a week, and Jewish studies was my strongest subject, but the grades I got there did not count in my GPA when I applied to colleges three years later. Overall my academic performance showed I was not realizing my potential. Nine years earlier I scored in the 99th percentile on an IQ test, and three years earlier I got a perfect score on another IQ test. Standardized achievement tests in the spring of 9th grade placed me only in the 90th percentile.
Earlier that school year the black kids from our neighborhood with whom I traveled to school on the bus decided that they no longer talked to white people, and my local peer group became segregated, the reasons for which I understood but nonetheless made me sad. I ate lunch with the same group of guys (Jewish kids from the north end of New Rochelle–I lived a few miles south on the edge of the African-American inner city) with whom I discussed literature, music, sports and politics. I didn’t date that year and was still smarting from a relationship with a girl I broke up with the previous year after she refused to kiss me at her party when we were alone together during a game of “seven minutes in heaven.” School was two or three miles away, and on warm spring afternoons I would walk home through picturesque neighborhoods with large tudor houses.
In July and August I went to the same Zionist summer camp I had attended for several years, but now we were the oldest group of campers. I excelled at organized discussions of ethical and political issues, swimming, passed a junior life guard class, and played a lot of softball. One afternoon a girl my age dared me to make love to her, and I took her back to my bunk, but just as I was starting to undress her my bunkmates returned and we lost our privacy. I didn’t get a second chance with her, but my status with my male peers was certainly enhanced.
The autumn of 1969 we started 10th grade in trailers, because our high school (which was only a mile away) had burned in a fire the previous spring. On weekdays I would walk home with the girl who lived next door (and was in my last class of the day), a disturbed young lady who would take her own life four years later. I also attended confirmation classes at our reform temple on Sundays, usually riding my bike and stopping on the way home to hang out with some of the guys from my 9th grade lunch table at the home of one of them. This particular fellow would become a visual artist; I remember he suspended a tree branch from the ceiling of his bedroom. I also participated in the temple youth group, which I found rather superficial. In 11th grade I joined Young Judea instead.
Because of my success at competitive swimming in summer camp I tried out for the school swim team but did not make the cut; the competition was on an entirely different level (in 11th and 12th grades I played jr. varsity soccer with greater success). The fall of 10th grade I ran and lost a race for class treasurer. I continued to excel in social studies, got Bs in English, biology, and Latin, and after a promising start in geometry our teacher was replaced and my enjoyment of the class and my performance diminished.
Ask me to assign you a year to write about!
David F. Cooper 
Posted on March 24, 2008
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