Olympus High School

Well, I got through the posting about my junior high years without too much pain. So here goes on the high school era.

I attended Olympus High School from September 1959 until June of 1962. There were many highs and lows while I was a student there. I still remember the school motto, "With freedom comes responsibility." I truly believe that.

Sophomore Year
One of the highlights of every young man's sophomore year was drivers' ed. We actually got to drive. The car I drove in was a 1960 Pontiac. The first day out on the road in the car, I felt that I was too close to the side of the road. I only felt comfortable in the middle of the road. The instructor had to keep pulling the wheel to the right to get me into the proper lane. I overcame that tendency by the second time behind the wheel. I eventually passed my driver's license test the summer after I completed the sophomore year.

Seminary that year was Old Testament with Brother Max Moffat. He made the subject fun. I still remember learning the order of all the books. I think I can still recite them up through the major prophets. I didn't ever get the minor prophets down.

For math that year I had Mr. Jensen for geometry. I loved it. He was an excellent teacher, and by the end of the first grading period, we were ahead of the advanced math class that many of my friends were in. But he had bought a dairy farm in Heber City, which he had hired a manager to run. That didn't work out well and he had to quit teaching half way through the year to run his farm. We had a series of substitute teachers the rest of the year, and made almost no additional progress.

I also took a typing class at the encouragement from Mom. She had taught me a little before on our little portable typewriter at home. I was able to stay ahead of the class on speed tests for the first few weeks. But when I got to 30 words per minute I hit a plateau. No matter how hard I tried, I could not get any faster. My old problem with poor finger dexterity had bit me again, just like when I tried to learn to play the piano. I still type about the same speed, today. I did learn touch typing and it has been a great blessing through all the years.

I did have a lot of friends at Olympus, but I was still suffering from shyness, and from problems with Dad at home. One of the boys who had tormented me was giving me a hard time after a class, and I pushed him down, hard, into some of the desks. Then I just walked away. He was very nice to me after that. The boys who had been so cruel in junior high were not at the high school. The worst of them were in juvenile detention for some really bad things they had done. The one who seemed to hate me the most ended up killing himself and some others, including a couple of police officers, when he grabbed the steering wheel and forced the police car into oncoming traffic while being transported between court and the detention center in Ogden. He thought he could escape that way. No seat belts in cars at that time.

Junior Year
My English teacher, Mr. Lynn Reading, was also one of the coaches. He thought it would be good to give more boys the chance to participate in sports, so he started an intramural program. There were 2 divisions, a team division, and an individual division. I didn't know enough people who were competing in team sports, so I only entered the individual events. But I entered every one: golf, tennis, swimming, track, rifle shooting, table tennis, badminton, bowling, skiing, chess. There may have been others, also. I did well enough at enough of them to win the first place trophy in the individual division. In high school it was socially important for a boy to be a jock. That success helped my self esteem. I didn't get to keep the trophy. Mr. Reading took it to get it engraved for me, but he moved away and I never saw it again.

My poor study habits carried on from the years before. I got by, but I could have done much better. I frequently forgot assignments, or put them off until the last minute and did them sloppily, so my grades were not as good as I could have. My friends in the advance placement classes moved further and further ahead of me.

For Seminary, I had Brother Olsen. He was very enthusiastic and I enjoyed my New Testament studies. For my class essay, I wrote about the Savior, and referenced Jesus the Christ by James E. Talmage. I'm afraid I copied too much from the book, because I remember the teacher's comment on the paper, "Next time more Hippen, and less Talmage!"

All 3 years at Olympus I took Spanish. I had started that in 8th grade at Evergreen Jr with Mr. Cooper. Mr. Cooper had been a pretty good teacher. He had also introduced us to Mexican cooking by taking us to the Casa de Tampico restaurant at the end of each year. I went with other students to the BYU campus to participate in the "Festival of Foreigh Languages" that the Y put on each year. I loved the college atmosphere. Every year I spent the time with Dave Powers at the competition. I remember having a comment on one of my presentations that I spoke Spanish with an Italian accent. However, the Spanish teacher at Olympus was not a good teacher. We never made any progress, because he never had us practice speaking. We called him "The Berb Brain." All we ever did in class was conjugate "berbs" (verbs, with a Spanish accent.)

I also got involved in more serious science classes. I took physics and chemistry. Mr. Poulsen was the physics teacher. He was quite good and I did well in his class. He invited me to join his advanced physics class the next year. I loved being in an advanced class.

Senior Year
My last year at Olympus was much better. I had better teachers for one thing. I dated more regularly, although it was still a painful experience to ask a girl out.. The main other thing was the swimming team.

Olympus had never had a swim team before. We didn't have a pool. But arrangements were made to use the Granite High School pool, and a coach was called. The coach was Mr. Sullivan, who had been my chemistry teacher the previous year. We had a pretty good team, especially considering that Mr. Sullivan had no training as a swimming coach, and we were limited to 3 days per week practice. At the end of the year we placed 5th at the state championship. I swam breaststroke as my primary stroke. Gerry Carlson, whose father ran a swim school, was the other breaststroker. I occasionally beat him. I also swam individual medley at times. That's 2 lengths each of butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle crawl.

In seminary I had Brother Groberg. He lived in the East Mill Creek 1st Ward, so I knew who he was long before I had him as a teacher. We studied the Book of Mormon for the first half of the year, then Doctrine and Covenants and Church History the second half. Brother Groberg had a reputation of being very boring. He did have a monotone voice, and showed little personality in his teaching, but he was not as bad as I expected from hearing him speak in church.

My English teacher was Mrs Clemmons. She was brilliant. She was a Vassar College graduate. I was familiar with Vassar, because my cousin, Kathryn Stein was going there that same year. Vassar had the highest entrance standards and the toughest curriculum of any liberal arts school in the country. It was an all girls school. The first week of class she passed out a list of about 100 classic books that she said were required reading for anyone going to Vassar. She said every girl going there was expected to read them all before starting as a freshman. She had us all check off the ones we had read. I had read 6 or 7 of them. But that was more that anyone else in any of her classes, so I started out on a very good footing with her.

We studied Shakespeare that year. Macbeth was the main point of study, but we studied parts of several other of his plays and many of his sonnets. We also studied other British authors, like Chaucer, and Bacon. For one of our term papers, we were given the choice of an essay on Macbeth or to write a Shakespearean sonnet. There were other choices also. I intended to write the essay on Macbeth, but put it off until later, and then forgot about it. Most of the other students wrote the essay. The morning of the day it was due, one of my friends asked me how I did on the paper. He could tell from the look of panic on my face that I had forgotten it. I decided the only choice I had time for was a Shakespearean sonnet. I had read all of his sonnets so I was very familiar with the format and style. The subject of my sonnet was 'virtue'. I cranked it out in the few minutes after I finished lunch. My friend was surprised when I handed in the assignment, but he was furious when I got the top grade in the class on it. Mrs. Clemmons actually read it to the class before she handed our papers back to us.

That was the only year she taught high school English. The following year she was teaching at the University of Utah. I was blessed to have her.

I started dating Cheryl Cutler that year. Her best friend was Georgia Smith. I had called Georgia for a date earlier, but she was in the hospital having her appendix out when I called. By the time I worked up the courage to call her again, she was dating another friend of mine, Paul Pitts, our bishop's son. We were encouraged to double date as much as possible by our church leaders, so it was just natural for Cheryl and me to get together with Paul and Georgia. We dated often, many times just Friday nights at Cheryl's house for ice cream and to watch the Friday night horror movies that were very popular on TV at that time. (That was the inspiration for Michael Jackson's Thriller.) We also went to all the church dances together, and eventually were called as Ward Dance Directors, all 4 of us. The problem was, I found myself liking Paul's date more than my own. Much more. But I was too good a friend to try and cut in on him then.

I tried to break up with Cheryl towards the end of the year. I did it very clumsily, and I probably hurt her feelings. Then Georgia asked me to ask Cheryl out for a special occasion, Jr. Prom, I think. I then realized that I had fallen for Georgia. I did ask Cheryl out again. I did it because I would do anything for Georgia. But she was still going with Paul.

I also took a couple of other girls out that year. One was Marjorie Debenham. At first I really enjoyed her, but after a few dates, her giddiness started to wear on my nerves. Her mother was also putting pressure on me to make some kind of commitment to her. I was definitely not ready for that.

I started school an hour early that year. My advanced physics class started an hour before the regular school day. We had a great time there. It was all laboratory work, and we designed our own projects and experiments to demonstrate various principles. One very cold winter morning we got to class and the heat had gone off in the night. It was barely above freezing in the room. Mr. Poulsen turned on some of the gas jets that we used for powering bunsen burners, and lit them! We had several 2-3 foot long torches going all at the same time. Warmed the room up pretty quickly.

I grew a lot, physically. When I started as a sophomore I was about 5 ft 2 in. When I started my junior year I was 5 ft 6 in and weighed 135 pounds. When I started my senior year I was 6 ft 1 in and still weighed 135 pounds. My entire junior year, and especially the summer between those years, I was tired all the time. I could sleep 12 hours a day, easily. The rapid growth took all my energy. When we went outside for gym the fall of my senior year, I had difficulty running because I was not used to the size of my body. I felt like I was falling over forward all the time I was trying to run. Being on the swim team helped me catch up by strengthening my muscles. I was still only about 145 pounds when I graduated.

Our graduation was a big deal. It was one of the largest graduating classes in the state. I think it was over 700 graduates. After graduation, Jeff Anderson, Charlie Nielson, and I took dates to Charlie's house for dinner and games late into the morning hours. I do not remember who any of our dates were.

I started working at the Holiday Neighbor newspaper during my junior year. I delivered bundles of newspapers to the carrier boys. I started using Mom's '52 Buick, then our '54 Chrysler Imperial, and eventually in my '57 Chevy. I made about $20 per week. I saved more than half of everything I earned, and used it to buy the Chevy and to pay tuition for my first year of college. I kept that job for about 3 years.