I was in high school, Mark Keppel High, in Alhambra, California, just across the street from Monterey Park where I lived. I lived on Peach Street, about a mile away, and walked to school every day, because we were just short of the required distance to send a school bus. So I walked, and that was good because it gave me exercise, and started each day with the satisfaction of accomplishment, something I could do and did, every day, and then again at the end of school I would walk back home in triumph that I made it through another day.

We were a suburban high school, but really pretty good, not quite just on the fringe of things, not like an inner city where you had to watch out for everything, but most of us had television, alas I did not, and most had the newspaper delivered, alas I did not because that would cost money and my family never had enough money to stop worrying about it.

Even so, most of us students kind of knew what was going on in the world, and talked about it among ourselves, so I learned things I otherwise wouldn’t know about, and I could form opinions and make up my own mind, which I did.

I was in the “good” classes where they expected us to go to college, so I was given more freedom to think. I was learning to find the dots and connect them. Effects come from causes, and you could see the pattern. I loved thinking. It made sense to me.

There were other students at the school not so lucky to be in the good classes, and I don’t know what kind of education they were getting. I don’t think it was equal.

Thinking back on it now, that makes me sad and upset and makes me want to do something about it, which I’ve wanted to do all my life as soon as I found out about the way things are but don’t have to be. I fell into teaching, and then went at it with a vengeance, the determination to save the world, save it from itself.

Those were the days, the 1950s, when there was a red scare spreading out over the country. Even I could see it. There was McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, and I wrote about it, and you can read some of what I wrote in my blog, like the entry about the Hammer Museum and the Billy Wilder Theater and the Yes Men.

I saw the Red Scare up close. There were a few students at our high school, maybe two or three, I don’t know how many, they weren’t in the classes I went to. A couple of guys on the playground at lunch time sidled up to me like they were seeking converts and wanted to let me in on the “truth” that “they” were keeping from us. They were like missionaries and wanted to spread the word.

They told me about the Reds. They didn’t even want to whisper the word “communism” because that would be sacrilege to let it pass their lips. I didn’t know where they came from, those guys, not in any of my classes, not even on what must have been my side of the school. They were probably from “over there” on the other side of the school where there were shop classes and they were learning how to use their hands but not their brains. At least that’s what I thought. I generally tried not to be judgmental, realized I didn’t have enough experience with the whole world to see the whole picture, but I saw right away that these guys were some kind of fringe, that they had invaded my territory, maybe because they had been expelled from their own, maybe just because they were spreading the warning. They were like the people who knock on your door to “spread the word.”

They said, “They’re all around us, the Reds, you’re not safe on the streets, they drive around in cars, and they come right up to the curb and open the door and grab you off the sidewalk into the back seat and two of them hold you down, and one takes out a probe. You know how the skull is, you see it pictures, it’s empty spaces for the eyes and two empty spaces for the nose, so you know that’s how you get right to the brain, and they stick that probe thing right up your nose into your brain so it wouldn’t leave a trace and nobody could tell what they did, and they’d kind of move it around to scramble your brain so you wouldn’t be a threat, and they’d throw your body back out on the street and drive away looking for someone else.”

I may have said something like, “Really?” or maybe, “You’ve seen it?” or maybe, “Is that what happened to you?”

But I was shy, not really scared because they didn’t seem smart enough to be dangerous. How little did I know in those days!

They went on, “Oh yes, and the red eggs. They’re trying to infect our country with red eggs. They go into the store and take a carton of eggs off the shelf and inject every egg with red bacteria. They do it on the fat end of the egg shell so you won’t notice the puncture mark because nobody looks at the fat end because the eggs are always put in the carton with the pointy end facing up. Then they put the eggs back on the shelf so people will buy them and eat them and die from red which is infecting our country and spreading. You have to be careful what you eat.”

And I said, “There’s the bell, lunch is over, time to get back to class.”