A Victory for Gage Park High

I don't understand the previous post by Beagles.  Nothing there we don't already know, and Beagles, as a constitutional scholar was surely aware of this as well, I don't know why Beagles copied them.  It seems like he was going to make a comment afterwards but it seems to have been cut off at the end of the line, and not just by word, but in the middle of a letter.  I've never seen that before but am aware that when you paste some stuff in it wreaks havoc on the text you type in after that.  A helpful hint, before I paste anything in I type in the next few words beneath the paste and that way I get to keep my font.

I don't remember that peculiarity of the gym lockers.  Sounds kind of odd, who would want to steal gym clothes?  But then as I often say, people will steal anything, if for no other reason than to have something to throw away. 

I can certainly see how naming the gym teacher, though I think we only had two, so I guess people would have guessed, was enough to put the kibosh on the article.  But even without that, just mentioning something that the school would have to spend money to fix was something that was unlikely to see the light of day.


Because, gosh darn it, the only thing wrong with Gage Park, was that some kids did not have enough school spirit!  The maroon and white, the owls (Owls?  Yeah owls, you want to make something of it?), the stirring school song:  Hail alma mater, hail maroon and white yada yada yada, a victory for Gage Park High.  That was the stuff Jack.

Myself I didn't go for that school spirit stuff.  First of all if I lived four or five blocks further south I would be singing the praises of Lindbloom, four or five further north and it would have been Kelly and I guess I would have been expected to do it because those schools were better than any other school.

It was bogus, Man, they were using it to control us, maybe not exactly the They of Beagles's theory, but something close to that:  the city, the board of education, the staff of Gage Park High.  I suppose it was a good cause, to somehow keep us from smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, stealing hubcaps, getting into gang fights and stabbing each other with switch blades and shooting each other with those awful zip guns.

It was like, I don't know, patriotism.  I suppose I loved my country well enough, I always rooted for the US army at the movies, but the flag waving, the parades, the having to stand still and look respectful when some guy blathers on with a patriotic speech, I just didn't like it.  If I lived further north I would have been singing Oh Canada and south, whatever they sing down there. 

They had a couple paintings hung outside the office, the ideal Gage Park girl and the ideal Gage Park guy in their maroon and white Gage Park sweaters, done in, if I recall correctly, Soviet realist style.  And then one day somebody (Gasp) slashed them, left them in tatters, though you could still make out who they were.  In a peculiar decision they left them hanging where they were, the idea was that we would be shamed, shamed into maybe revealing the slasher, or maybe just shamed of that kind of behavior so that we would never smoke or drink or steal or stab or shoot, for our own good you know.  Myself I got a special little jolt of joy whenever I passed them, whoever did it, good for you.