Aug 26, tour of Tamalpais High

Our motel in Mill Valley was on the service road (but they call it something else in California, I forget right now) along highway 101. There was no view out the front of the motel except cars and trucks speeding past, towards or from the Golden Gate Bridge, but our room was in the back overlooking the very end of Richardson Bay. There was a little path along the edge of the parking lot and behind the car showrooms (were they really Maserati and the like? In Marin County, that’s plausible, so that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) down the street along the bay. We saw herons, egrets, and lots of shorebirds on a short walk.

We drove down the street where my mother lived from about ’63 to ’68. Here’s the house at her old address. The man who lives across the street told us that her old house had been torn down and replaced, but this looks very similar in size so I’m not convinced. The roof that I put on that house in the summer of ’64 is long gone, at any rate. Somewhere there’s an old picture of me dressed in khaki work clothes giving neighborhood kids a ride in a wheelbarrow when I was taking a break from working on the roof.

One of the activities of the reunion was a campus tour. Tamalpais High School has a campus more like a small college than what I think of as a high school. It never snows there, and rarely gets even as cold as 35 F. There’s no problem walking outside from class to class. Here are some pictures —

The band box. Unlike Lexington High, where band was an extracurricular activity that met a couple of times a week, at Tam band was a regular class that we had every day up here in the band box. Our baritone horn player was George Duke, who’s now a prominent jazz musician. I remember one day when he was fooling around on a string bass and the band director, Robert Greenwood, said to him, “George, you’re too good to waste your time fooling around. You should pick one instrument and really master it.”

Behind the band box (that’s the back of it at the top of the picture) is Mead Theatre, where school assemblys and the graduation ceremony were held. When I was there there was a stage in front of the ampitheatre, but it was falling apart and was torn down some years ago. The alums would like to see it rebuilt. The school had no lunchroom as such. Different groups of kids would eat at different places on campus — there was the front parking lot crowd, the back parking lot crowd, and the Mead Theatre group. I was in the latter, so I spent more time here than most people.

The big reunion dinner was at a restaurant called the Cantina, which hadn’t been there when I lived there (after all! how many businesses are still going 45 years later?) Someone put pictures from it up on his Flicker site. Bonus points for anyone who can find me or Arlene in any of them. We are in some.