I proved to be advanced for the grade, so in February I was put in an "adjustment room" at another school. There I would do a little studying, take a test, and go on to more studying. Three weeks before the end of the school year I entered the Venice Junior Union Polytechnic High School in the B7. In the three weeks I mastered "square roots" and the math teacher gave me an A, but the other teachers didn't give me a grade. The junior high was located at the high school and Emily, Molly and I rode a Red Car train of five cars to get there.
That summer (1924) we moved into Los Angeles, so the next year I enrolled at another junior high. With only my B7 math grade, they still placed me in the A7. The big jump was a mistake for my long term development; I was young for my grade and small for my age -- not a good combination for one inclined to be shy.
But 1924-1925 was a good year. Brother Jerry and I made money selling the "Saturday Evening Post" and the hike up into the Baldwin Hills to the large concrete "57", put there by the Heinz company, was interesting (there was a bean farm below). July Fourth we sneaked carbide from a storm drain project -- mixed with water it generated hydrogen so that, when placed in a can with a lid and ignited through a small hole, it would send the can flying -- somewhat dangerous but a lot of fun!.
Apparently my memory is faulty with respect to attending a "Heder". I had thought it was while we were at our first Los Angeles house -- but Jerry insists it was not until we had moved during the next summer. At any rate I started to learn Hebrew, liked the teacher and was doing very well. But, according to Jerry, it was too expensive and we gave it up. That was the only language class where I made real progress -- but I don't remember any of it now. Perhaps having to drop it disturbed me -- when I started Latin in the ninth grade I hated it and gave up after one semester. Much later my Ph.D. was delayed until after WW II because I had difficulty satisfying the language requirement.
After our move I enrolled at still another junior high school where I started shop work -- making reed baskets, cups out of tin, lamp shades, a bit of auto mechanics and, in an electric shop, a motor and a model traffic signal with semaphore arm.
About that time my academic performance dropped substantially, perhaps because of the missed academic disciplines but, from my present perspective, more likely because I was disturbed by the various changes and because my vision had deteriorated. My parents were having their own problems, so I didn't say anything when an eye examination on entering high school showed a severe vision problem. It probably helped to have a name that started with a B as it put me in the front row in most of my classes.
I was at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles where they specialized in vocational work. I had done fairly well in algebra in junior high, but geometry was a bore and I didn't do well in it; if that was mathematics I didn't want any more of it (I suspect that I had problems memorizing things and the necessity to regurgitate the axioms, postulates, etc. for the tests bothered me.) Since there was no possibility of my going to college anyway, I changed to a vocational electrical course. Among other things I learned to design single phase induction motors and rewound a motor to run at a different speed for use on a table saw. I took physics and managed a "B" in the second semester, probably because I knew so much electrical theory (I had a better teacher too -- I remember measuring the velocity of sound by synchronizing hammer hits on an anvil with the returning echoes from a hand-ball back-stop.) I had little use for history and didn't recognize the value of my English classes. I somehow became very involved in a civics class in summer school and did better in it than I had in my other non-technical studies.
There were other activities during my high school years. I did a lot of reading (non technical) and would walk to the library that is now a part of the University of Southern California (USC) complex. Jerry and I built rubber-band powered model airplanes and we sneaked into the local Shrine auditorium to fly them (it had been designed by the father of one of our friends and was reputed to have the largest balcony with no interior supports of any auditorium of that time). I wonder how many of the airplanes landed in the large chandelier (none of mine).
And then there was the Boy Scouts. I joined a nearby troop that never really made it. We went to an overnight hike back of Mount Wilson that was a disaster; we carried our very wet blankets down the hill after a heavy rain during the night -- and I don't believe my feet ever recovered from it. As one of the senior boys I helped hold the troop together for a short time after our Scout Master disappeared (with the troop treasury Ñ but it couldn't have amounted to much.) Jerry joined a different troop sponsored by the ARNAMA Club (ARmyNAvyMArines) -- they did much better.
I graduated high school in winter 1930 with the great depression in full swing. I eventually got a job on a radio assembly line but proved to be too slow at it and was let go. (The radios were early table model super heterodynes with a single tuning dial and were very popular). I did better at a second company (perhaps because I had used money from the first job to get glasses -- what a difference!) and was able to make as much as six dollars a day for work on 200 radios a day (good money for those days, but the company ran out of parts too often and we would go home early). The work was tedious and I came close to a nervous breakdown (I had a raw elbow at one point from using a "Yankee" screwdriver that would slip off the screw and I'd hit my elbow on the edge of the chassis.)
On to I Become a Semiprofessional Engineer
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