Brothers' Boy Coming of Age in California Personal Essays
Gerald Haslam
An Essay From the Book
Coming of Age in California
Devil Mountain Books
Walnut Creek, CA
Richard Rodriguez and I were talking one morning prior to taping an
interview at Western Public Radio's studios in San Francisco when he casually said,
"I went to Christian Brothers' High School in Sacramento."
I couldn't help grinning. "No kidding. I graduated from
Garces Memorial in Bakersfield."
"Ah, so you're a Brothers' Boy too," he nodded, his
smile broadening.
Leo Lee, the program's producer, who had been adjusting
equipment in the studio while Richard and I chatted, overheard us, straightened up, then
he too grinned: "I don't want to shock you two, but I went to St. Mary's Prep in
Berkeley." So he also had been educated by the Christian Brothers.
That unexpected coincidence immediately changed our
relationship because being a Brothers' Boy is one of those special categories of
experience that does not fade, that brings with it a range of shared experiences and of
pride. Like being a Marine or a mother, it sticks.
The Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools,
called the Christian Brothers, was founded in 1680 by St. John Baptist de La Salle in
Reims, France. The distinct white collar and black robe that is their uniform dates to
that time. Not until 1819 in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, did a community of Brothers begin
schools all over California; Cathedral in Los Angeles, San Joaquin Memorial in Fresno, and
Sacred Heart in San Francisco were especially well-known.
Today, I consider the decision that sent me to Garces to have
been among the most important of my life. I had by no means been a juvenile delinquent in
public school, but I was - as a note from my sixth-grade teacher revealed - "a
disruptive under-achiever." After I had visited the principal's office a couple of
times, endured swats, and had barely passed the sixth grade at public school in Oildale,
it was decided that I should be sent to the Catholic institution in nearby Bakersfield.
This was no insignificant verdict for my parents, since it involved economic hardship and
personal inconvenience. To me, it was a novel idea I did not resist.
As a result, I encountered the black robe and white collar
draped on the red-faced, imposing form of a middle-aged man named Brother Gerald. He was
my first male teacher and, a couple of weeks into the seventh grade, I observed a scholar
named Schaefer snap a disrespectful remark at Brother Gerald, then turn and smirk at the
rest of us. A moment later, Schaefer was yanked from his seat, slapped, and thrust back
into his seat in such rapid order that I wasn't certain it had really occurred although
the whimpering miscreant harbored no doubts about it. He had not been sent to the office;
his parents were not called; the school psychologist was not consulted. No, summary
justice was administered, then Schaefer was publicly asked if he understood that such
nonsense would not be tolerated. He did.
And he wasn't the only one. I had just been loosening up at
that time, beginning to entertain my new classmates as I had my old ones, but that
spectacle of quick and certain punishment prompted me to put my showbiz career on hold.
Old habits die hard, however, and when a robin flew into our classroom through an open
window a couple of weeks later, I could not resist and launched into an athletic imitation
of the confused bird.
Too soon, the great dark shadow of Brother Gerald loomed over
me, and I found myself briskly escorted to the front of the class. As I made that gallows'
walk, visions of Schaefer danced through my head. The executioner, however, merely tapped
my trembling palm with a linoleum paddle and said, "Just remember that this is only a
sample. Don't make me do this again. Now take your seat and keep quiet." It was a
laying on of hands worthy of Oral Roberts because I was healed, no longer a discipline
problem. The devil had been exorcized.
As it turned out, the only acceptable way to attract
attention in Brother Gerald's class was through academic effort, a message that most of us
eventually understood, some more reluctantly than others. Once an unexceptional scholar
with whom I played football had to repeat nearly all his academic courses, so he was a
year older than his classmates. He became famous for cadging homework from younger,
smaller boys - some of whom developed the habit of doing theirs in duplicate. Once the
Brothers suspected that something was amiss, however, he also became the only lad always
called upon to explain his answers at the blackboard, where he always imitated a beached
catfish.
My first days of Catholic education were somewhat trying
because entering junior high can be tough even without changing schools and towns. A
friend had entered Garces the year before and he had offered advice via negative: "A
big mouth like you, everyone's gonna kick your butt." As it turned out, he was almost
correct. But that wasn't entirely bad, since we quickly shook out my spot in the school's
pecking order. Fighting actually seemed to be tolerated within limits by the faculty.
Those boundaries included not allowing anyone to be bullied into a clash, quickly stopping
one-sided battles, and carefully monitoring conflicts to make certain no one was injured.
It seemed an eminently sensible approach to me, instructional in itself.
Even the student population of my new class proved to be an
education, I soon discovered. In Oildale, everyone had been white, and was what today
would be called working class, since nearly everyone's parents had toiled in the nearby
oilfields. All my classmates at Standard School had been versions of myself. Garces, on
the other hand, attracted a heterogeneous population from all over Kern County; rich and
poor, white and non-white, Catholic and non-Catholic. Spanish, though discouraged except
in the class of the same name, was frequently heard and my first and enduring friends
there were other social outsiders, Mexican-American principally. Having learned some
Spanish at home was a great help to me. Through it all, the Brothers seemed to be
remarkably even-handed, rewarding work, punishing sloth, ignoring other considerations.
Sports were viewed not as distractions, but as integral parts
of the educational mission at Garces. The Brothers, males struggling with celibacy
themselves, understood full well the titillation of adolescent sexuality, so they promoted
vigorous exercise. My dad said they were "channeling the sap."
It was difficult not to compete in athletics. This general
participation, not the apocryphal reports of recruiting I heard discussed by friends at
public schools, was the reason we were able to compete effectively against public schools
with much larger student populations. We won California Interscholastic Federation
championships in both football and basketball during my tenure. The Brothers also extolled
the self-discipline and teamwork athletics promoted. A high percentage of the student body
participated in more than one sport.
While in junior high school, I became immediately aware of
social castes and realized that they were weightier than racial categories. In the seventh
grade, for the first time in my life, I was subjected to condescension by the children of
wealth, most of whom I considered jerks. It was frustrating because normal remedies did
not apply: punching them out, earning better grades, consigning them to the bench in
sports - nothing seemed to weaken the mind-set that assigned me an intrinsically inferior
status: I still lived in Oildale and they still lived in La Cresta; I summered at a
packing shed, they summered at a country club.
In the long run, though, rich kids turned out to be good guys
who, like me, had social lessons to learn. By the time we were in high school seniors most
of them had come to understand that affluence was not the only or most important thing you
might have in common with others, and some of them "dated down," even
interracially.
In fact, interracial everything was common among all but the
most socially isolated at Garces and I learned early that a brown fist on my snout felt no
better than a white one. While the Brothers were unquestionably aware of the social
distinctions and churning, and certainly courted financial support from high-rollers, no
sense of elitism crept into the classroom.
The social situation at Garces was somewhat atypical of
Brothers' institutions, I have learned, because it was the only Catholic high school in
the county. Elsewhere, the Christian Brothers specialized in educating boys from
blue-collar families ‹ to do so was a tenet of St. John Baptist de la Salle when he
founded the order principally to educate impoverished youngsters in France, a novel idea
indeed in the seventeenth century. Elsewhere, the Christian Brothers are still said to
provide the Church's working-class education (while the Jesuits, for example, are reputed
to offer a white-collar version). Also, unlike most other schools run by the Brothers,
there were girls at Garces, though not in our classes; no, they were confined to their own
section of campus and instructed by Dominican nuns.
Boys and girls ate lunch together, participated in
extracurricular functions - yearbook, forensics, rallies - and dated on weekends, but our
classrooms were male enclaves. Not surprisingly, they secretly housed some crude
diversions, especially toward the back of the room where less-dedicated scholars like me
tended to gather: farting was a popular pastime, for example, and lighting farts during
slide shows or movies was considered a great adventure indeed. One future business
impresario became famous for causing chaos by exposing a certain prominent feature of his
anatomy at unlikely times.
John Renfree, then a football stalwart, now a physician, who
sat in the front of the class by the way, grins and says, "That was no-man's land
back there, rank city. But it could sure calm down in a hurry when Coach Dugger cruised
through." Ah, yes, Tom Dugger: a lay teacher as well as a football coach, and a good
man, who once in response to an error in judgment on my part lifted me, desk and all, then
sent me - an experimental aircraft - toward distant climes. After that I decided to use
study hall to study.
In any case, the majority of students at Garces did not
engage in back-of-the-classroom displays. A certain burden of familiar ambition drove us;
our parents hoped we would ride education toward broader opportunities than they had
enjoyed, and a significant number of us have indeed taken advantage of the education
provided by the Brothers to achieve satisfying professions and lives.
(Continued)
 
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