Hooney, Then and Now

On a cold, clear morning in early January, 1971, we showed up at our fifth grade classrooms with two grocery bags each, as instructed. It was the first day back in school after winter break, and I was less dejected than usual because that day we were moving across the parking lot to the brand spankin’ new middle school. Happy New Year to us!

On the other side of our L-shaped school district, the girl who would soon become my best friend throughout middle school packed her desk, too. They’d be taking the bus to the new school today.

She and I agreed a week ago that her name in this story shall be Hooney. She likes the pseudonym because her husband and she have called each other Hooney ever since her young niece sang Rocky the Hoon, that well-known Beatles song, many years ago.

I like the name Hooney because it’s very similar to Honey, who was Trixie Belden’s best friend in a series of books I read around that time. Hooney read them, too. Trixie was a freckle-faced, messy-haired, extraverted tomboy who lived on a modest farm at the bottom of a hill in upstate New York, with a doting mom and a warm-hearted father.

You can see why I happily lost myself in the character of Trixie. Idyllic!

I’d started reading the Trixie Belden mysteries because I’d already finished all of the Hardy Boys books. The Hardy Boys taught me some important life lessons, like: Bad guys have swarthy skin and foreign accents.

I tried Nancy Drew, but the plots were just crap. Argue with me if you want to, but once I found Trixie Belden, I gladly left Nancy and her silly girlie escapades behind.

For the record, Hooney really liked Nancy Drew, especially Mystery at the Lilac Inn. As she said the other day, in defense of that Nancy Drew book, It had purple flowers on the cover!

In the first Trixie Belden novel, Trixie meets a girl named Honey, a beautiful girl with—you guessed it—honey-colored hair. Straight hair, chin-length---not at all unruly like Trixie's. Perfectly ruly. Honey’s wealthy family had just built a mansion on top of the hill, a short hike up from Trixie’s family’s middle-class place. Trixie and Honey become BFFs, a term that didn’t really catch on until decades later. The two of them had adventures, many booksful of them. Thirty-nine, to be exact.

Sidebar: I found out, during my extensive research for this story, that the original author, Julie Campbell, wrote only the first six books. After that Random House used any writer who happened to have a free couple of days. They invented a pseudonym to disguise the fact that they used multiple in-house writers, something like Culie Jampble. End of sidebar.

I have two boxes of Trixie Belden books in the Top Secret Place. I hope to read them to a grandchild or two, one of these days (hint, hint). And I dearly hope they are as wonderful as I remember them.

The Raggedy Ann and Andy books (Johnny Gruelle) were such a disappointment when I read them to my kids. Turns out they’re badly edited, badly proofread (!) and not well written. And yet, I devoured them in my pre-Hardy Boys days. Well, I also liked Spaghetti-Os.

You can tell that the Raggedy Ann and Andy series was written during the Great Depression. Ann and Andy find candy and baked goods growing on trees and bushes, and drink from springs made of milkshakes and soda water. Someone was tired of turnips when he was writing these books.

One detail I remember about Trixie and Honey is also related to food. It’s a detail no doubt meant to illustrate the difference between their circumstances, both emotional and financial. Trixie’s mom served hamburgers for dinner, with bread crumbs mixed into the ground beef to extend the meat and save money—but also to impart a delicious juiciness to the burgers. Honey’s family served big ol’ boring dried-out steaks.

Even now I prefer a hamburger with bread crumbs mixed in to a dumb old steak. You may disagree. We can still be friends.

My real-life friend Hooney was a ringer for Honey. In middle school, she was tall and slender, with honey-colored, straight hair. She had patrician features and naturally straight teeth. She was as elegant as a ten-year old can be.

On the other hand, I didn’t have Trixie’s freckle-faced, wavy-haired, athletic good looks. My identification with Trixie was more aspirational than real. In fifth grade I was short and soft-bodied with thick-framed cat-eye glasses, which I traded for thick-framed hexagonal glasses in sixth grade. The right lens refracted like mad to steer a decent image to my retina, while the left lens was plain glass. A monocle in a double-eyed frame.

Glasses were very definitively not cool back then. I maintain to this day that glasses make me look smarter, though being smarter back then was not an asset for social life as a pre-teen girl. Nor were the braces attempting to tame my crooked teeth.

My hair was waist-length and stringy. It wouldn’t be until the seventh grade that my mom cut it to chin length, and I started washing it myself. In fifth and sixth grades, Mom was still washing it for me, as I hung my head over the utility sink in the chilly, dank basement. Combing out meter-long wet hair was no fun at all, even after having applied Johnson & Johnson’s No More Tangles. So my hair was washed markedly less frequently than it should have been. In short, I was the dork counterpoint to Hooney’s understated middle-school glamour.

So Hooney was Honey, but I wasn’t Trixie, not on the outside. The other difference was that our housing situations were reversed, sort of. I lived in a five-bedroom, two-story house in a brand new, treeless suburb, while Hooney lived in a small ranch house with her three sisters and parents in an older home on a wooded lot. Hooney said that she thought of our house as a mansion.

I get it. When I switched school districts in ninth grade, my new friends were from a truly wealthy end of town, and I thought of their homes as mansions. And now I live in on the San Francisco peninsula, where we really have mansions, real ones.

My mom never mixed bread crumbs into her hamburgers, although in a nod to the recession of the 1970s she started bringing home generic food from the A&P instead of name brands.

Once, when I was grocery shopping in college, I saw a white box with black letters that simply said Elbows. It was still the early days of generic food, before they tried to make the knock-offs look like their own real brand. Still, they could have spared a little more black ink and appended Macaroni. Or maybe they realized Elbows would be funny to people like me.

Hooney texted that she thinks Elbows is funny, too.

My other favorite in that category is Wal-da-fed, the Walgreen’s generic for Sudafed. I made that up, though. I don’t think they call it that.

Hooney and I were true baby boomers, the biggest class in history to pass through our school district. Between her elementary school and mine, we had six classrooms of thirty-four kids each, plus or minus two. Salisbury Middle School was built to alleviate the overcrowding in the elementary schools by shaving off fifth grade, moving it to the new school so K through four could have a little Elbow room.

So halfway through fifth grade, we put on our hats, mittens, boots and heavy coats and trudged across the icy parking lot to the new middle school, carrying hundred-pound grocery bags full of our books, pencils, papers, crayons, trolls, hair clips, combs, Bonnie Bell lip gloss.

Each new classroom was half kids from my old elementary school, and half kids from Hooney’s. These days I think there would be some effort to get the kids to mix, but back then they really didn’t care. So for the first few months we mostly stuck to our old friends.

You can see from the photo that Hooney and I were both in Miss Gallagher’s fifth grade classroom, but we didn’t become friends until sixth grade, when we were assigned to work together on a book report. We had read Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I guess we had to write something, but the main focus of our book report, we decided, would be a super-faithful reproduction of the log cabin.

Popsicle sticks? I asked Hooney a few days ago.

No, better than that---real wood! Hooney insisted.

What happened to it? I asked. Do you have it?

She said, No. Probably it was so special that the teacher kept it.

We snorted.

It started with a square of corrugated cardboard on the dining table at Hooney’s house. We painted it green, and while employing the excuse that the paint had to dry (which probably took five seconds), we spent the afternoon out in her back yard collecting the right kind of sticks. Straight. Approximately finger-diameter. If they weren’t uniform enough, the wind would whip through the cracks in the snowy winter, and the pioneer family might get sick.

We weren’t so fastidious that we attempted to re-create the floor plan. A simple rectangular cabin of real wood would be good enough.

As we worked on planning and constructing the log cabin, we rapidly found friendship, a friendship that would continue to grow and solidify throughout middle school.

Hooney and I also worked as partners on our science project that Spring, outdoors behind the school. We used stakes and string to define a two-foot-by-two-foot square of dirt behind the school, and then observed what happened each day in our little plots. Every single day, for half an hour. The grass bent in the wind. A new leaf appeared that wasn’t there the day before. Mid-week, a ladybug!

No doubt we took soil samples at randomized sites across the plot. What could you measure, in a sixth grade public school in 1972? Density, maybe pH. The graphs must have been entertaining to our teacher. I bet they weren’t flat lines, because what you were really measuring, instead of the physical characteristics of the soil, was the ability of a pair of sixth graders to conduct a science experiment.

What did we learn from that? I asked Hooney when we talked last week. It sounded deadly tedious to me.

Hooney said, I don’t know. I just liked being outside.

Fair enough.

In sixth grade math class we learned to divide fractions. Our math teacher, Mr. Handwerk, was well over six feet tall, and this fact is relevant to his famous teaching method for division of fractions. The smallest kids were the most desirable assistants. The girls learned to wear shorts under their dresses so they could participate too. I was second smallest, so I was chosen often.

Here’s how it went:

Mr. Handwerk would write the division problem on the blackboard and proclaim, Change the sign and then invert!

He’d erase the divide sign between the fractions, and replace it with an x for multiplication. He'd erase the second fraction and make the numerator the denominator and vice versa. Then he’d gleefully pick up one of the small kids by the ankles and flip them over so they were hanging upside down.

No one in his class would ever forget how to divide fractions, that’s for sure. Dividing fractions was so much fun! My guess is that an extraordinary number of math majors were generated as a result of Mr. Handwerk’s early tutelage.

These days teachers are not allowed to flip kids upside down. The number of math majors is declining.

Mr. Good was our social studies teacher, and the State of Pennsylvania had decreed that we were supposed to learn about South America in sixth grade, following fifth grade’s concentration on Pennsylvania and Lehigh County history. In dramatic contrast to our math teacher, Mr. Good was a short, wiry man. He would show slides of himself posing in front of various South American monuments and statues, and in other historically significant places. He was doing one-handed handstands in every photo. He would also do one in the classroom if you asked him to. We did.

I later married a Chilean, but I never saw anyone doing one-handed handstands in Santiago. Disappointing.

I’m now married to a Canadian, but we never studied Canada in school, so I have no pre-conceived notions that could lead to disappointment.

While Hooney and I were in middle school, and throughout Pennsylvania in the 1970s, home economics was required for all girls. Cooking and sewing, four hours a week for four years. That’s over six hundred hours of home ec in total. Must be pretty important, right? Meanwhile, the boys were taking wood and metal shop. Theoretically girls could take wood and metal shop too, but the classes were held at the same time, so that theory was never tested.

But it’s okay: Since girls have to marry boys, together you’ll know how to cook, sew, and make wood and metal things. As far as the rest of family life goes, well, you can just follow the time-honored tradition of doing the opposite of whatever your parents did.

I didn’t get a lot of home ec-type guidance from my mom, but she once said, With all the water you waste doing dishes, I sure hope you marry someone rich. Because that’s the solution. We should tell the drought-ridden states to marry someone rich.

The worst part about sewing class is that, once you got to seventh or eighth grade, you had to wear what you’d made on a designated day at the end of the year. Seventh grade, I made a nightgown, so I didn’t have to wear it. The next year they said, No nightgowns or pajamas. So I made blue velveteen lederhosen. Shorts of any kind were against dress code, and I didn’t have to wear them.

Never learned how to sew very well, but I’m good at analyzing contracts.

In eighth grade Hooney made bell-bottom pants and a matching halter top from pink-and-white checkered gingham. She wore it to school on the designated day. It’s not that she was less of a rebel; it’s just that she was much better at sewing.

If I had one ticket for a time machine, I just might use it to go back to that day and get a photo of Hooney and me posing in our outfits.

Just before winter break in eighth grade was the holiday concert, an equitable mix of holiday songs, that is, all Christmas carols and the dreidel song to cover Hanukkah. I was in the chorus originally, but had been sick in December and missed too many practices. So I sat in the audience with Hooney for the concert.

It was time for the final number. The kids shuffled around on the risers, forming an isosceles triangle with the point at the top. In their red or green outfits—whichever of the two holiday colors you wanted!—the choristers stooped and picked up their candles. A flame was carefully passed from hand to hand until all the candles were lit. From the back of the multi-purpose room, the principal turned off the lights—which dimmed the room just enough at three pee-em on a winter afternoon in Pennsylvania to give you the idea of darkness.

The kids sang Silent Night and held their candles high. Even in my pre-teen cynical state, I was enchanted, transported. Couldn’t believe how beautiful it was! I’m not kidding. It was wonderful.

After Slee-eep in heavenly peace, they blew out their candles. Applause rose from the audience, and I was clapping mightily. It was then that I was inspired with the idea of being the very last person in the audience to give up clapping. Just because I was so delighted.

Whenever I remember that Christmas tree chorus, I clap, even now, years later. I’m ninety-nine-and-five-nines sure I’m the last person to clap for them. I just clapped again, right now.

I taught this to my kids. Whenever we really, really, really like a performance, we are the last people in the audience to stop clapping. We also compete with one another to be the very last clapper. It gets more and more embarrassing the longer you and someone else in your family continue to clap. Especially if the rest of the people are already in their coats and trying to get past you to go home.

We even do this at professional performances, like musicals in San Francisco. We did it at Carnegie Hall, a couple of years ago, when Max was on the stage for a Nassoons concert. It starts as we exchange a quick glance, as the applause rises.

Once Max sent me a video of himself clapping, about an hour after the two of us had left a performance and he’d gone back to his dad’s house. It’s cheating a little, because the clapping wasn’t continuous. Continuous clapping is the gold standard. Nevertheless, I sent a video of myself clapping back to him. He sent his back, I sent mine back, repeat, repeat, until finally our data plan stopped us.

In 1975, half a year after the eighth grade Christmas tree chorus, Hooney and I went our separate ways. I went to a junior high across town, in preparation for high school in the Allentown school district, while Hooney started at Salisbury High.

Then forty-six years of life happened.

Last year Hooney was reading a PBS newsletter article on Laura Ingalls Wilder, and thought of me and our log cabin from sixth grade. She googled my name and found a press release and photo of me from 2019, when the company I worked for, MNC, had the honor of ringing the closing bell for the NASDAQ stock exchange.

Two days before that photo, my boss had told me I didn’t get the promotion I’d been working towards for six grueling months, and I had to summon my best acting skills to smile and cheer and whoop while our CEO smashed his fist down on the closing bell. I had been asked to participate with the senior execs because—no lie—they needed a woman on stage, since all of the senior execs were men.

I came very close to declining the invitation, because I was really annoyed that I was chosen for my double-ex chromosomes, not any of my other pretty good qualities. I was good enough to help with the optics at NASDAQ, but not for promotion to vice president, for heaven’s sake. I’d talked to my mentor about it, and he said, Why not do it? As head of corporate communications, it makes sense that you’re on the stage. You’ll get a nice trip to New York out of it, and you can go early and visit your son at his college.

Also, the video of us doing the closing bell was on the ten-story-high screen in Times Square. Weird but funnish consolation prize for not getting the promotion.

So I bought a nice blue dress, the color of the velveteen lederhosen from eighth grade, and went through with it. And that’s how Hooney found me.

Once we’d texted back and forth a few times, the glimmer of why we’d been such great friends returned, four and a half decades later. We set up a FaceTime call.

Forty-six years, said Hooney. I was touched that she was nicely dressed, with makeup and earrings. She said, Where do we start?

I said, Well, I haven’t seen you since eighth grade graduation. Start with ninth.

I was just being silly, but that’s where she started. Our paths were very different during those forty-six years, but here we are, back together, reconnecting so easily and so naturally. A new friend, an old friend, the best of both in one package.

I can’t wait to visit Hooney as soon as Stupid Covid calms down.

*****

P.S. If you want to read more about the outdoor science experiment, Hooney still has her journal. She took pages and pages of notes. She said, That’s probably why you were bored. Her notes include what she ate for lunch each day.

[Photo creds, both photos : Hooney. Top photo is an excerpt of our fifth grade class photo. We are outlined in red rectangles, Hooney on the left and me on the right. My mom had washed my hair for the photo. Bottom photo is from the inside cover of Hooney’s eighth grade yearbook, a picture of my farewell scrawl. The frog drawing seems to suggest I thought frogs were mammals.]