An imagined “memoir” in progress, with fictional details that I believe are consistent with what really happened, during my elementary school years from ages 5 to 11, growing up in the first half of the 1960s in the progressive college town of Ann Arbor Michigan in the U.S. Midwest.

Many of my huge Baby-Boom generation born starting in 1946 into a burgeoning middle class after World War II were beginning to come of age in a relatively prosperous America. We had better access to education, and through the growing electronic media of radio and television, access to a popular culture that included championing the expression of sexuality and other forms of human liberation. Facilitated by the development of a reliable birth control pill in 1960, elements of American culture were moving away from traditional values and social strictures towards more permissive and informalized attitudes. Rock-and-roll music, emerging in the 1950s borrowing from black R&B roots and becoming mainstream in the 60s was a huge cultural aphrodisiac, urging its listeners to “rock”, its thinly-veiled code word for sexual activity.

Add to this that I was growing up in a progressive college town where a secular humanism of the prevailing academic thought was trumping more conventional religious beliefs and practice. My own parents and many of their social peers did not go to church or share traditional moralistic attitudes with each other or their children. An exception was that homosexual behavior was still taboo, considered still a psychological disorder, even associated with pedophilia, if not a mortal sin.

My mom and dad were a pretty good example of an egalitarian approach to parenting that was all about providing an environment for me to pursue my interests and my life but not attempting to direct any of those pursuits. I say egalitarian, because they treated me as a fellow human traveler like them, with my own mind, my own will, and my own responsibility for directing my life. They saw their role as facilitators, to the best of their ability and resources providing me with a stimulating environment to live in and the developmentally appropriate “tools”, like imagination toys and a bicycle. Beyond that they mostly did not involve themselves in my activities, other than observing from afar and only participating if I asked them too and they were available to do so. Occasionally they would suggest an activity that they wanted to do with me, like throw a ball together or accompany them on an errand, just to talk and enjoy my company or maybe discuss a particular matter with me. It was all more like how good friends engage with each other than the more conventional parenting practice of raising and training a semi-functional being who is “just a child”.

Outside of my wonderful mostly unstructured summers, I was continuing to be transformed by the many hours I was required to spend in my school classrooms, with its adult locus of control. I was ever compliant when in the presence of those adults, particularly those responsible for directing and passing judgement on my actions. My survival mechanism was to slowly learn to seek my self-esteem by being the most well-behaved and praiseworthy “trained seal” I could be. More and more drinking the kool aid of compliance with each successive year in this institution.

I would try my best to continue to put on an exemplary presentation of myself to my parents in their presence. That I was thoughtful, capable, could fend for myself and would always come home when the street lights came on. These were in fact all true, but any negative feelings I had from time to time I was more comfortable sharing with my peers than my parents or other custodial adults.

In response my mom and dad continued to parent without any resort to the conventional behavior modification techniques of rewards or punishments. My mom would always provocatively announce to her peers that she didn’t believe in spanking, because it was essentially “hitting children”. But what she did not announce was that she and my dad did not employ any of the non-physical alternatives to corporal punishment. I wonder if they would have been able to maintain those rules of engagement if I had been one to push more boundaries (that they were aware of) or act out more in their presence. What my mom in particular did do, was to call out my bad behavior on the few occasions she would witness it, indicating, sometimes with an angry tone, that it was inappropriate and even that she was disappointed to see it. Given my continuing discomfort around adults plus my sense of pride in my good and capable kid persona, I was always quick to correct any misbehavior once brought to my attention, though the wound to my pride would often remain.

As my parents became more integrated into the predominantly white adult university community that lived in the neighborhood, I was meeting their kids at school and in the park, the latter always an informal gathering place for the neighborhood youth without their parents or other adults present. These were families with a sense of intellectual privilege, seeing themselves as members, even key players, in the progressive academic elite at this major public university, and therefore the intelligentsia of the country. Their sons and daughters were growing up in an enriched environment of progressive humanist ideas with most of my young peers also being given a lot of latitude to develop their unique talents and personas, and not being required to conform to traditional religious or other conventional strictures.

I began my mandated participation in the institution of formal K-12 education in 1960, the fall of the presidential campaign between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon and the former’s close victory (possibly influenced by alleged vote fraud in Texas and Chicago). Nowadays K-12 schooling has become such a high stakes endeavor that academically oriented parents like mine might do their best to “game” the system by letting their kid start school a year later than possible, thinking to give them some sort of developmental and competitive edge relative to other kids.

But in 1960 when I turned five, judging me to be an intelligent and precocious kid, my parents had my IQ tested to see if I could skip kindergarten and start public school in first grade instead. I tested high enough to be considered for entry into first grade instead of kindergarten, which my parents and school staff all agreed to. I don’t recall being consulted on the decision, and had no sense at this point what I was getting myself in for.

Click on the chapter title to read the chapter…

PART 1: REGULAR SCHOOL (SEPTEMBER 1960) – After passing a test, and at my mom’s request, I start first grade in Bach elementary school at age five instead of going to kindergarten. It is a very strange environment for me, since I’m used to having grownups always telling me what to do and keeping track of and commenting on what I am doing. But at least my teacher likes me and is really nice, and I am excited about being able to finish learning to read, so I can read all the books in dad’s office down in the basement, especially the ones about the War.

PART 2: PRESIDENT (OCTOBER 1960) – The U.S. Presidential election is coming up, and dad takes me to see Kennedy speak in the middle of the night at the Michigan Union in Ann Arbor, where Kennedy first spoke to the need for more young adults to get involved in public service, without specifically calling out his idea for the “Peace Corp” yet. Then both mom and dad take me to hear Nixon speak at the train station, and I go with them to the polling place to vote.

PART 3: DINOSAURS (NOVEMBER 1960) – I am obsessed with dinosaurs and played out stories with dinosaurs and people, inspired by the movie “The Lost World”. I also take my obsession to school and share it with my classmates in my first grade class.

PART 4: BLUE BOOKS (JANUARY 1961) – My world is about books right now and all the stories inside those books. Mom and dad read them to me and I learn to read them myself at school. But at school I am also learning to write letters and words, so I decide to try writing my OWN book, and not just doing the pictures, but doing the words too! Dad, still working on his PhD, is teaching sections of college classes to make money, and had lots of blue exam books, that he gives to his students for their writing tests, which are perfect for me to use. With one of those blue exam books, I make my first attempt!

PART 5: MY SIXTH BIRTHDAY (APRIL 1961) – My birthday party, which to mom’s chagrin, we have to do in our house with no furniture in the living room, because even though it’s April it is cold and windy outside, so we can’t do the party as we usually do in the park. So desperate, my mom decides to serve Bloody Marys to the grownups, and Margie brings her record player and turns the empty living room into a dance floor, while all us kids hang out down in the basement.

PART 6: LAST DAY OF SCHOOL (JUNE 1961) – It’s the last day of first grade, my first year of “regular” school (since I skipped kindergarten) and I walk home from Bach school and across Allmendinger park full of my fellow kids also glad to be done with school. Even though I have a lot of new friends from my class, and even liked my first grade teacher who didn’t seem like a regular grownup, it feels so good to be done with school and not to have a grownup in charge of me every day, so I can go back to running my own life.

PART 7: DAY TRIP (AUGUST 1961) – Dad takes my brother and I on a car “adventure” so mom could have some much needed time on her own. I’m already worrying about having to go back to school for second grade next month, so I’m happy to think about this instead. I’m also starting to have some sibling rivalry with my brother, but we both are together enjoying this day with dad and seeing all kinds of places, some we’ve never seen before, including this place out past Silver Lake that is called Hell, even though it’s not the regular “Hell” that some kids say you go when you’re dead if you’re bad.

PART 8: SECOND GRADE (OCTOBER 1961) – The key moments and day to day realities of a fairly eventful day at school one month into second grade. Endless practicing in class with adding and subtracting numbers, and learning that our country is part of a world shaped like a ball in space. And then at recess, where us kids are mostly on our own, experiencing the growing divide between girls and boys that seems to happen even more at school than at the park. Going to our first “assembly” in the auditorium and experiencing the power of music sung in unison by many voices of our peers. And finally walking home from school through the park and hearing other music, this time on the radio, that inspires us kids.

PART 9: RIVALS (NOVEMBER 1961) – Exploring with my friends the history and stories of the US Civil War, seeing evidence of our town’s football rivalry with Ohio State, and seeing the boys versus girls dynamic especially at school, I wrestle with the idea of “rivals” and “rival teams”, and different ways that that applies to things I know about. And then I get another dose of sibling rivalry when I get home and my little brother has already set up ALL the toys the way HE wants them!

PART 10: CIVIL WAR CARDS (MARCH 1962) – With my growing obsession with the Civil War, I stumble upon “Civil War” cards at the toy store in packets of five with a stick of gum like baseball cards. I share my discovery with my friends at school, and our collective obsession and pursuit of knowledge about this major event from the past grows, to the friendly frustration of our teacher, who tries to accommodate what WE want to learn with what SHE’S supposed to teach us.

PART 11: THE PAINTED ROCK (JUNE 1962) – I spend my usual Saturday afternoon with my best friend Molly, who used to live across the street, but now lives across town. We explore her new local park, Burns Park, which is bigger and has more stuff than Allmendinger Park, and she even takes us on an adventure beyond the park to see “the rock”, where we briefly get caught up in forces beyond our full ability to navigate, but seem to portend for the future and our generation.

PART 12: JINX ISLAND (AUGUST 1962) – The end of the summer in 1962 at perhaps the pinnacle of my imagination play, aided now by my little brother as a junior partner, bringing together diverse cultural elements (historical and fictional) to create our own made-up story and world, played out mostly in our basement but with a final scene in the dirt pile in our backyard. Civil War soldiers, mix it up with Earth dinosaurs, Captain Nemo and his Nautilus submarine, even dinosaurs FROM MARS, and of course Godzilla.

PART 13: THIRD GRADE (OCTOBER 1962) – A new year of school, with drilling on the multiplication tables and a different sort of “stricter” teacher. Plus the Cuban Missile Crisis in the fall of 1962, a very traumatic experience for a lot of us kids as we contemplated what could happen to us in a nuclear explosion. We see a short movie and do a “duck and cover” drill in class and I am forced to confront some existential fears and whether or not I was going to believe in god!

PART 14: FOOTBALL SATURDAY (NOVEMBER 1962) – It’s a football Saturday in early November, and since we live close to the stadium, mom and dad let me make money having people park their cars in our front yard for fifty cents. Not feeling like I’m a little kid anymore, I decide to impress my neighbor friend by going by myself to the game at halftime, like my dad and I had done in previous games. Developmentally, I’m “feeling my oats” as they say!

PART 15: LONG DIVISION (JANUARY 1963) – Like my mom, I’m really good at math, and she shows me how to do long division before the rest of my class is taught it at school. So I decide to do a little bragging in class and I get on my classmate Mary’s radar, since she wants to learn it too before everyone else to best her class nemesis Amanda. She convinces me to show her how to do it on a cold winter afternoon in Wurster Park and offers me a kiss on the cheek as payment.

PART 16: MARY (APRIL 1963) – I have the most traumatic moment of my childhood to date (more would follow), when my classmate Joey told everyone else in class what I told him about my amorous feelings for our classmate Mary. Then to make matters much worse, my teacher tells ME I shouldn’t have said that! I am mortally embarrassed and deflated, my self-esteem in ruins, and lack the ability to process the whole experience even with my best friends. I am at least relieved that my teacher doesn’t tell my parents, and I do my best to try to pretend it never happened.

PART 17: LITTLE LEAGUE (JUNE 1963) – Still not recovered from that horrible embarrassing experience in April, I am doubly gratified that it’s the last day of third grade, with a wonderful and sorely needed two and a half months of summer ahead, including this new activity, Little League, tee-ball in this case. I ponder the sport of baseball, comparing and contrasting it to the other big team sports of football, basketball and hockey, and have my take on Little League, with grownups in charge rather than the kid-only “pickup” games I am used to.

PART 18: SAUGATUCK (AUGUST 1963) – Just a week before school starts again, I go with Molly and her mom and stepdad for a week vacation in the Lake Michigan resort town of Saugatuck. Molly and I get to spend more time together than we have since she used to live across the street. We explore the town, play our favorite song on the jukeboxes we encounter, swim in the giant lake which seems to me more like an ocean, and discuss the nature of love.

PART 19: FOURTH GRADE (SEPTEMBER 1963) – It’s near the end of September of 1963, two months before the larger world around me is turned upside down by President Kennedy’s assassination. Difficult times seem to be ahead for my family as well, but in the moment I like my fourth grade teacher, shows on TV, and the Beatles, and my friends and I enjoy the sweet ripe black cherries on my neighborhood friend Kenny’s black cherry tree in his backyard.

PART 20: ASSASSINATION (NOVEMBER 1963) – My family members, my friends, and I try to process the shooting and killing of President Kennedy and its aftermath with the shooting of his killer Oswald and the huge state funeral that closes schools on Monday. My mom is particularly distraught and says that this event will change everything and turn the world upside down, and I try to process what that might mean, and have worries about what’s ahead for me and all of us.

PART 21: D-DAY (JANUARY 1964) – I venture out on my bicycle with Christmas present money from my Uncle John to buy my first historical military simulation game, Avalon Hill’s “D-Day”. I start to set it up in the basement, and when I show it to dad he shares with me a very troubling memory from his time in the war. I become enthralled with the game, and along with my friend Paul, set it up and spend many hours figuring it out and playing it.

PART 22: PANIC ATTACK (APRIL 1964) – I return from visiting my Aunt Pat in Binghamton New York over spring break on a plane flight all by myself. My 9th birthday is imminent, pending warmer weather so we can have it in the park. That next Monday I wake up feeling under the weather and stay home from school and end up witnessing my mom having a full blown panic attack, telling me she can’t breathe, with dad out of town and I’m the only other one there!

PART 23: IN THE LILAC BUSHES (JUNE 1964) – Soon after my 9th birthday, it’s the beginning of summer break, and I have the opportunity to explore my own precocious feelings and curiosity about being naked, when I hear about a supposed “secret meeting” where boys get naked with each other. I do some detective work with the help of my friend Paul, and I manage to attend a “meeting”, and even arrange a second “meeting” down in our walk-in closet in the basement.

PART 24: BURNS PARK (AUGUST 1964) – We move from our house by Allmendinger Park to a house by Burns Park across town. My mom said she needed to make this change, and she and my dad get busy with a new plan to have furniture in the house without spending much money. Though my brother is sad about the move, I am not, even though my best friend Molly no longer lives near Burns Park, and I probably won’t see my old school friends very mudh. I like the adventure of a new place.

PART 25: FIFTH GRADE (SEPTEMBER 1964) – The first day of fifth grade at my new school in my new neighborhood we had just moved to a month ago, the move likely inspired by mom’s panic attack the previous April when she felt her life was going nowhere. It was a very different school with very different kids who seemed more grown up than the kids in my old school had been. And then there was that soccer game every morning and lunchtime on school days that the kids organized themselves.

PART 26: SNOW DAY (NOVEMBER 1964) – A big early snowfall before Thanksgiving closes our school for the day, so our dad ends up taking my brother and me to his work at “Eastern” (Eastern Michigan University). While he teaches a class and we hang out in his office and explore the building and its fun elevators, we spy on him teaching, and get a glimpse on him in his different world. When my brother and I are back at dad’s office, three of his students from another class come in and play a prank on him.

PART 27: OUT SICK (FEBRUARY 1965) – I’m home sick from school all week with the “flu”, but life goes on at home. My brother and I are discovering hockey as a new sport, on TV and with our new tabletop hockey set. I’m playing my Avalon Hill board games, listening to Beatles albums and all their songs about girlfriends and “love”. And I’m copying my classmates really neat notes on the science experiments in class that missed while I was out of class.

PART 28: MY 10TH BIRTHDAY (APRIL 1965) – Now that my mom and my dad have managed to refurbish used furniture to fill our new living room, my mom pitches me to have my tenth birthday party, our first big real party in our new house by Burns Park, at our house. With my agreement, she invites lots of kids and grownups, and the party proceeds on all cylinders, on multiple levels of our house, including things going on that I don’t really know about.

PART 29: STATE REPORT (MAY 1965) – Unlike most of the schoolwork I had to do at home I liked the story I wrote, “Enroute to Ekoe”, where I made up my own World War Two story about the war in the Pacific. But I really did not want to do that boring state report we had to do next, and I put off writing up my notes until the last weekend before it was due. Luckily my dad intervened and the report got done and I ponder the nature of school and what it’s all about.

PART 30: THE BLUE FRONT (JUNE 1965) – I have a season ending injury in my first Little League game on my new team, and cannot play baseball, other sports or even ride my bicycle for six weeks. So I decide to turn to other pastimes that involve reading comic books, magazines and paperback books bought at my favorite place, Ann Arbor’s iconic “Blue Front” newsstand. I look forward to exploring imaginary worlds of superheroes and “Lensmen” sitting in the cozy overstuffed rocking chair in our living room.

PART 31: CAPE COD (AUGUST 1965) – My mom, dad, brother and I pile into our station wagon at 4:30am in the morning, the back seats down flat and festooned with blankets and pillows, and do a 15 plus hour drive to Cape Cod for a week vacation. We stay at a cottage by the beach and I swim in the ocean for the first time and actually order fish at restaurant BY CHOICE for the first time. It is a strange experience to spend so much time with, and sleep in the same room as my parents!

PART 32: SIXTH GRADE (SEPTEMBER 1965) – It’s a couple weeks into sixth grade, my second and last year at Burns Park elementary school. My classmates are now the “top dogs” in the daily soccer match against the fifth and fourth graders and Coach Bing makes me one of four “captains” in gym class and we pick teams. After school we dare to play a little pickup tackle football, though mom has forbid me from playing. But that evening my mom and dad have a big fight, and what I hear mom say downstairs in the kitchen is going to change everything!

PART 33: DIVORCE (SEPTEMBER 1965) – Events unfold after my mom finds out my dad is having an affair with another woman. He moves out of the house, telling my brother and I that he made a bad mistake but he hopes to work it out with our mom and come back. My brother and I find some solace in comedy, including comedy records by Allan Sherman and Bill Cosby, and comedy shows on TV. And finally the other shoe falls but dad can’t bring himself to tell us.

PART 34: CATS & SATIRE (JANUARY 1966) – It’s January 1966, two months after our mom and dad divorced, and my brother and I are navigating much of daily life on our own as our mom is still angry and depressed. He and I find solace in our new kitten, new comedy albums and our table-top hockey game, and the pretend world we create around it. This chapter is full of song lyrics, serious and satirical, that touch on aspects of life, culture, and wisdom, some of which I’m only beginning to wrestle with.

PART 35: THUNDERBALL (MARCH 1966) – It’s March 1966 and it’s all about secret agents, whether Man from U.N.C.L.E. , Get Smart, I Spy or James Bond. My school friends all start their own secret organizations, and maybe even the girls too. But the pinnacle event was the new James Bond movie, “Thunderball”, which I go see for the sixth and seventh time with my friends Stuart and Frankie, and I wrestle with the discomforting sexual politics between men and women.

PART 36: PENCILS (MAY 1966) – Sick of school, sick of my parents being divorced, and ready for school to end and the liberation of summertime, I desperately try to be seen as “cool” by my friends, by getting special embossed pencils made that are sure to make the alpha girl in class mad, and we hatch a plot that gets me in trouble. Things don’t go as planned and our teacher investigates and tracks down the culprit… me!