The Fall of Mister Wales
Mr. Wales was, by the standards of his time, a pretty normal guy. But he was also kind of weird.
Mr. Wales was our band teacher at Harbor High, which automatically made him at least weird adjacent, attempting to shepherd a pack of adolescent prog rock and Monty Python fans, and he clung to an old-school set of values that at one time might have masked his strangeness but which by the late 1970’s in Southern California made him just that much more out of touch with the public at large.
Mr. Wales was about 6’4”, with beetle brows and one of those rectangular Scandinavian foreheads that was an outward sign there was a lot of residual Neanderthal DNA in the bloodstreams of the people from the western fjords. He wore clunky black dress shoes to work, along with slacks and button up shirts that looked to have come straight from the business casual section at JCPenney, seemingly clean and new yet so out of fashion it was like they came out of a time warp.
He was a former military man and ran a tight ship. For instance, all boys had to keep their hair off their ears and collars during marching band season, which led to some pretty ridiculous haircuts by Spring, as once the marching season was over, we all let our hair grow out into these expanded bowl cuts that hung into our face.
The band practiced a lot, especially during the first few months of the school year. Most mornings, we had to get to school 30 minutes and sometimes an hour early, and then we had a double band period at the start of the school day, so for over two hours a day, five days a week, we were either marching in the street or in the stadium working on the upcoming halftime show.
The administration generally left Mr. Wales alone to do his thing, and he was allowed to run the band as he saw fit. Our band had been successful (and one year about a decade before I got there the Harbor High School band even got to march in the coveted Rose Bowl Parade), albeit not spectacularly so, seemingly always a bridesmaid, finishing 3rd or 4th in our group each year at the big marching band revue out in West Covina in the Fall. So both Mr. Wales and our band were respected, if not exactly admired, in most circles.
And then there was the P.E. Department. We were a pretty big school, about 2,500 kids by the time I got there, but we were also in an established community, and the student body wasn’t getting any larger. Meanwhile, huge tracts of homes had gone up all across Orange County, bringing thousands of additional high school students to the area every year. When I got there, Harbor High was still in the Sunset League with some of the biggest public high schools in the area, a couple with over 4,000 students. And we held our own, competitive in football and track and the lead horse in volleyball and water polo, both of whose teams had recently won multiple state titles. So most of our coaches were well-regarded in the wider community.
Our varsity football coach was Mr. Pizzica. He was an old school badass, with the presence of a man who was used to his share of winning. And it was in large part the success of our football team that kept us in the Sunset League, which our school had been in since the 1940’s.
Like many of our teachers, including Mr. Wales, Coach Pizzica was a military veteran. A lot of enlisted men who had been stationed with the Navy or Army down in San Diego or the Marines at Camp Pendleton had stuck around Southern California after their stint was over, quite a few going on to college on the G.I. bill to become teachers in the area. Many were veterans of the Korean War.
These were tough guys, no nonsense. Back in Ensign Middle School, the wood shop teacher made thick, hand-crafted paddles out of oak with several holes bored into the middle to cut down on wind resistance, and he handed them out to colleagues, notably P.E. and a couple of math teachers, and these paddles were sometimes used on the boys at the school (never the girls, at least to my knowledge). In P.E. class on your birthday, you were brought up to the front of the rank and file in which we lined up every day and given a birthday spanking. In some classes, you got paddled by your teacher if you misbehaved, and even some of the women teachers threatened to send you to Mr. Kessler or Mr. Cuneo for a paddling if you got out of line.
My birthday is in June, so I missed out on the birthday spankings. I only got paddled once in my two years at Ensign Middle School. It was in math class. I was kind of a nerd, and was mostly in upper level classes taught by women that were paddle-free, but I didn’t like math much and tended to skip the assigned homework, so I was put in a remedial math class with some of the tougher kids. Mr. Cuneo, our teacher, had his own paddle, a slick item with a hilt at the end of the handle and five holes bored into the center of the swatting zone in the shape of a pentagon, and he would sometimes use it to keep us in line. At one point, I was arguing with one of my classmates, who was trying to mess with me, and Mr. Cuneo, with his back turned, said: “You, up here, now.” Right after he turned around to see it was me he was pointing at, Mr. Cuneo smirked. The entire room, both boys and girls, started yelling and cheering. Here was a chance to watch one of the well-heeled kids, the supposedly smart ones, up there with my glasses, my red hair and freckles, to get it good and hard, to know what it was like to be one of them. But I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of letting them see me flinch. I bent down and grabbed my knees. Mr. Cuneo ramped up his swing, and… tap, gave it to me at about 30% of the velocity he would have given one of the usual trouble makers. “Aahh, booo,” the class exhaled in disappointment. I smiled back at them, awkwardly triumphant, and went on back to my seat.
I should backtrack a bit to explain that at least half of my fellow students through at least middle school were the sons and daughters of families who had fled the Dust Bowl. Oakies, people called us. My parents were not literal Oakies, as my mother’s family hailed from just over the border in southeast Kansas and my dad’s family was from central Illinois, and they both arrived in California a bit earlier, in the 1910’s, before the Dust Bowl proper had kicked in, but it was all part of the same culture, the descendants of Scotch-Irish who had immigrated here centuries ago, whose parents knew family tales about Daniel Boone and the Civil War but not about any nation other than our own. Yes, there were some wealthy families around the bay, either the old school money that owned the harbor ferry company or an oceanside fish restaurant, or new money, mostly doctors, lawyers, and investment types, but they were outliers at the time, not like how it is today, where the rich own everything. Out in the beach shacks on the westside of town or up in the Heights where we lived, the houses were mostly populated by the grandsons and daughters of rough-handed Middle America. That along with a few bohemian types, sending their kids to school in faded T-shirts with slogans like “Life is a garden. Dig it.”
I grew up in a community where you were expected to acquit yourself adequately and with honor in tough situations. In sports, our kids, the Scotch-Irish and the surfers, may have been physically smaller than the German kids from Anaheim High, and maybe not as fast as the urban kids in Santa Ana, or as onery as the working-class kids that played for Redlands, as these were the power schools in the region when I was growing up, but we could hold our own.
We had a perfect subculture for someone like Coach Pizzica to come in and train a successful football team. His teams may have been on the small size, but they hit hard, and the fact we were from the supposedly wealthier part of the county and that Coach Pizzica had the audacity to put the American flag on our helmets, replacing the sailor that used to be there, tended to inflame our opponents. Which I think is how he liked it. Our football team lost its share of games, generally to the new regional powerhouses Edison and Fountain Valley, fellow rivals in the Sunset League, but we almost always made the playoffs, typically winning a couple games before bowing out.
So Coach Pizzica had become a legend of sorts, and well-loved, and the team’s performance during my senior year was particularly gratifying. They were an even smaller team than usual, both in the players’ physical size and in the numbers of players on the team itself, and they struggled through the first half of the season, sneaking into the playoffs with a 5-4 record. Then they started beating people, beginning with Mater Dei, one of the Parochial powerhouses, in an early round.
This made our principal Mr. Jacobson, who was young and relatively new to the job, proud, and he instructed Mr. Wales to take the band to an away game in Diamond Bar, about 25-miles away, to support the team in the next round of the playoffs.
But Mr. Wales said no, as a matter of principle. It was one thing to require the band to attend home games during the regular season, it was another to ask them to take the trek to Diamond Bar on a Friday night, particularly as semester finals approached. Or so I heard this is how the argument went.
Then the P.E. Department issued a formal petition, signed by everyone in the department except one, asking Principal Jacobson to force Mr. Wales to relent, that it was important for school morale to have the band there in support of the team. And then Jacobson took the next step, threatening to suspend Mr. Wales if he did not change his stance and bring the band to the game. Mr. Wales still said no. So he was suspended.
Harbor High won our game that Friday night, and Principal Jacobsen then reissued his request that the band support the team that next week. Again Mr. Wales refused. So Principal Jacobson fired Mr. Wales for insubordination. And Mr. Wales sued the district to get his job back.
It went on for months. It divided staff, student body, the community at large. Much to my surprise, my mom, who was an elementary teacher in the district and sympathetic to Mr. Wales, took the administration’s side: “He should have sent you kids to the game, then he wouldn’t be in this position.” My mom had that clear-eyed, Scotch-Irish view towards conflict: It is a serious thing, and you need to know what you are up against. And it was becoming clear that Mr. Wales’ prospects were looking increasingly grim. We were appointed a new band director, who kept her head down and tried to stay out of things. And then the school moved on.
Over the previous couple years of high school, I had developed an ambivalence towards being in the band. I liked playing the sax, but I began to tire of the music, and the marching, and all the standing in rank and file. I preferred running track; I liked competing, and I liked the fact that I controlled my own destiny. And I liked rooting for the football and basketball teams; I would have attended those playoff games anyway. Also, to be direct, I was kind of embarrassed by the band. There was a pack of Bandos who would hang out in front of the school at lunch, and some of the couples would smooch, or grope, or grind away their lunch period, in full view of the folks walking or driving by on nearby 15th Street. I was pretty nerdy, and shy around girls, and I didn’t want to be associated with that. I mean, they didn’t even have the good decency to be hot. And they, or at least most of the boys, listened to prog rock, along with Boston and maybe a bit of Foreigner, to which they would slowdance with their girlfriends at band camp each summer, while I was more into Led Zeppelin, the Isley Brothers, Cheap Trick, that kind of thing, and couldn’t hang with all that prog noodling. Did I mention that I had no girlfriend? And that finding one would have probably been a lot easier if I just played along a bit and didn’t act all high and mighty? But no. So maybe I was also a little jealous.
But I did have friends in the band, and I liked Mr. Wales. I thought what the school system had done to him to be an outrage. So I joined most of the band in engaging in petty acts of civil disobedience. Most everyone quit the afterschool jazz band after they fired Mr. Wales, and so few of us volunteered for the winter Pep Band that they had to disband it. But these were tame gestures, and Mr. Wales kept losing at every step of his appeal.
I lived about a block-and-a-half from campus, in a one-bedroom addition on the other side of our garage. One Friday night that Spring, I heard a loud knock at my front door while I was trying to enjoy a rerun of The Bob Newhart Show. It was Tom K., out of breath, adrenalin in full flow.
“I just egged Mr. Jacobson,” he declared, “Do you mind if I hang out here until things cool down?”
Tom K. was blond, heavy and almost without body hair, which was kind of strange as he was half Lebanese and his sister was dark and hairy, like she came straight from the Middle East, but I guess Tom got the Scottish side of their genes. He was a wild man and a tenor sax player of great enthusiasm but limited skill, which probably explains why we were friends.
Yes, Tom K. had hid in the bushes right outside of the Harbor High Auditorium, raw eggs in hand, awaiting the end of our high school play, which Mr. Jacobson attended in a gesture of solidarity with the creative types, many of whom he had estranged with his dismissal of Mr. Wales. Then on his way out, he ran into Tom and his eggs, who chucked both in Mr. Jacobson’s direction, the first sailing high and wide due to Tom’s excitement, but the second landing square, shell bursting, yolk sticking hard to Jacobson’s face, the gooey white sliding down nose, chin, shirt. At least by Tom’s account, it was glorious.
Hearing Tom tell his story was a moment of clarity for me. Here was how you do it, not with rational appeals to the people in charge of even quiet acts of civil disobedience, but with the decidedly uncivil disobedience of an egg to the face…. And when Mr. Wales lost his final appeal, losing not just his job but his pension, which he was only a few years away from collecting, due to being “fired for cause,” at least I knew that the main perpetrator of this crime had taken an egg to the face from a friend of mine. And when I heard that the following Spring, during a registration fiasco, as scores of overly anxious type-A kids, panicked that all the best college prep classes might be filled up by the time they had their turn to register, casting their entire campaign to get into their university of choice into doubt, had cornered Principal Jacobson, who was holding a box of high priority registration numbers in hand, and when Mr. Jacobson then threw the box of numbers up in the air as a way to distract the crowd, bursting into tears and pushing his way through the mob, literally throwing the school’s entire registration process into shambles, I felt a deep satisfaction that this might not have happened, that Mr. Jacobson just might have been able to hold his shit together in this moment of crises, if he hadn’t taken an egg to the face from my friend and fellow bandmate Tom K. the previous Spring. And I felt that justice had been served when the following year the district elected not to renew Mr. Jacobson’s contract, justice in this case taking a physical form, like the theoretical wings of a butterfly that through cause and effect eventually creates a hurricane, except in this case the agent in question was a humble egg launched from a teenage hand and then splatting into the face of our enemy.
But that’s just my feel-good end to the story. The hard facts are that Mr. Wales lost his battle with the system, this syndicate of jocks, coaches, and administrators, who always seem to get their way.
So whenever I hear an authority figure, and in particular the petty ones, like a former high school football coach who takes his role in the system far too seriously, cast aspersions on the supposed weirdness of another human being in an attempt to cast that person beyond the veil of “normal” society, I will always despise that authority figure on principle and stand with the other side. Just another one of the weirdos.