Mitchell Part 1 "Camel Humps" (Part 2 below)

A modern Google Earth view shows a school which has not changed much in 37 years

I didn't much like P.E. class back in 1973. I was a 7th grader at W.E. Mitchell Junior High in Rancho Cordova, California and WE JUST DIDN'T HAVE ANY FUN. What did do was run. Run for punishment. And we ran on a hot, dry, dusty, pumice dirt track.

The school itself was intimidating, especially to a kid who had just left a small grade school. Mitchell was more of a campus, resembling a small college more than a public school. It featured an outdoor area called "the quad". The modern bunker like buildings were laid out symmetrically, one side the mirror image of the other, and lunch was served not in a cafeteria but at series of windows where you stood in line and picked things off a menu like at a snack bar.

The three P.E. teachers, one was named Doherty and another Stephenson, were sadistic evil men. You could see the cruelty in their small bloodshot eyes. I'm not sure how they rationalized to themselves the heritage of negative experience to exercise and an active lifestyle that they were promoting year after year, but somehow it was allowed to continue.

After dressing down it all started with lining up on the tarmac outside the locker room for attendance and uniform inspection (A). Mitchell did have cool P.E. clothes. The shirts were reversible so potentially, if we should ever have time to play a game against each other, half of us could turn our shirts inside out. Unfortunately, I don't remember this ever being done. In fact the only time I ever saw the blue inside of the shirt was when I brought it home on Fridays to be washed. Everyone would roll the uniform up by putting their shorts on the shirt and roll it from the bottom up and pull the sleeves over the whole thing locking it in place. This made a type of crude football that we would play with while waiting for the bus and exposed the blue color that we otherwise would never have seen.

The outside of the shirt and pants were white with the blue logo of our school mascot, a lavish Marauder straight out of a pirate movie.

So we left the locker room and lined up alphabetically outside on the black top on our assigned number. I still remember being number 8. It was easy to take attendance that way, your number wouldn't have anybody standing on it if you were absent. The coach, usually Doherty, would start at number one, dressed in his navy blue mesh outfit and hairy bull legs, and start on down the line making notes about who knows what and having some comment about your appearance or said nothing. The whole ritual took a good 10 minutes and seemed such a waste of time. Then the fun started. He'd step back from the line and we'd all wait for the announcement:

"Three laps!"

"Ah crap" and off we'd go heading for the track. In those days there was a water fountain on the edge of the track and to make sure we didn't short him a full lap we had to begin and end by going around it (B). I was dreadfully slow, and like today, melted in the Sacramento valley heat. The track seemed endless and having to circumnavigate it two, three of four times seemed as if it would never end. I hated it not just because I was slow and dorky but because it was meant to be punitive.

You see when we got done running we reassembled back on the tarmac (C) , now panting with hands on our hips, in rows and columns for some seventies-style "calisthenics"; push ups, sit ups, windmills, up-downs and squat thrusts (and I was hoping to save myself for marriage!) we would knock them out in a cadence we screamed out as "one-two-three-four, two-two-three-four, three-two-three-four" etc... A couple of the suck up stud kids were made "squad leaders" to lead the rest of us each day.

It was hoot. But we weren't done yet. Hell there was war on and in five short years we might all be heading over to Nam kill someone or something.

All the jumping jacks being done we next moved over to the obstacle course (D). This consisted of a series of parallel bars, monkey bars, tires, rings hanging from chains and other galvanized contraptions which you negotiated or tried to. But the worst part was saved for last and we unofficially called the camel humps. This was a set of parallel bars in the shape of a camels back. You would jump up on the bars holding on with your hands and locking your arms so you were perfectly upright, use your knees and legs to kick your way up the first hump, down the other side and then repeat on hump number two.

Needless to say most of us couldn't do it, at least not early in the school year. Some kids never did do it. In fact some bigger kids never got more than a couple of feet up the first hump and then would just drop off. We all knew it was coming but we went through the ritual every single day. The same humiliation for the same kids over and over and over.

And this is where the punishment part came in. The "coaches" would take the number of boys who could not complete the obstacle course, divide that number in half and that's how many laps we started off with the next day.

"Four laps!"

By the time we got done with all this there was generally 5 or 10 minutes left to play whatever activity had been planned. Yee-haw!

It was all different after we packed up and moved to Oregon halfway through my 8th grade year and thank goodness gym class is different for my kids today. They have a love for being active. But back at Mitchell Junior High it just wasn't much fun and worse it buried the only athletic chance I chance I had-being a runner.

But there was a positive note that evolved out of this whole experience and I'll explain all of it in the second part of this story which I'll call "Two Stripes"...