“Lana”

The REAL Lana Turner. My friend was prettier in the face, but the hair is similar.

In December of 1957 my family moved from south Jersey to northern Delaware.
I was 13, soon to become 14, and had started eighth grade.
My father had got a better job at a new oil-refinery in northern DE; he had previously worked at a Texaco refinery in south Jersey.
We had to move so my father’s daily commute wasn’t untenable — about 15-20 miles replacing 100+.
He started in 1956, commuting in our ’53 Chevy.
By then the Jersey Turnpike had opened, so he was using that, along with the Delaware Memorial Bridge.
I don’t remember this move being traumatic, but I’m told I was traumatized. Although I think that may be my siblings insisting they knew me better than I know myself.
I don’t think the move itself traumatized me; it was more that I’d have to make new friends.
As if someone totally unsure of himself could do that.
My family moved in early December, but decided I should stay behind to finish 1957 in my old school.
That’s just 1957; a full eighth-grade would finish in June of 1958.
I would live out 1957 with my paternal grandparents in nearby Camden, NJ, and take the bus out to my suburb, where I’d catch the schoolbus to my school.
I have no idea how I got back to my grandparents. What I remember is hanging around my old neighborhood in the predawn darkness hoping my friend Joe would come out so we could walk to our schoolbus stop.
We were in brand-new Delaware Township High-School, since renamed Cherry Hill High-School, as was the township. Later a second high-school was added called “Cherry Hill High-School East,” and Cherry Hill High-School was renamed “Cherry Hill High-School West.”
I think we might have been the first class, proposed to graduate in 1962.
We were the cusp of the oncoming post-war baby-boom. 1944, my birth year, makes me a war-baby, not post-war baby-boom. WWII ended in 1945, but our area was growing. I had to do double-sessions in fifth grade.
Seventh grade was the new high-school, and the school was only partially finished. Only the academic-building, “D” building, the classrooms.
“A” building wasn’t finished yet, nor was “B” (the auditorium), or “C” (the gym and cafeteria). “A” was shop-classes, mechanical drawing, art, and home-ec.
Delaware Township High-School got students from all over the area, not just my little suburb’s elementary-school.
With Delaware Township High-School my pool of possible friends vastly expanded.
Among them was a girl I’ll call “Lana.” I can’t remember her name, but she was extraordinarily beautiful in a “Lana Turner”-like way.
Not a cute sexpot.
She had long shoulder-length blond hair, waving onto her shoulders. She lived alone with her mother, I think a divorcee.
She had a steady boyfriend, a hard-rock greaser.
But she was attracted to me, always singling me out for conversation, the pimply kid.
I was clueless, no idea what to do.
I’m a graduate of the Hilda Q. Walton School of Sexual Relations.
Hilda was Sunday-School Superintendent at my parents’ church, and also my next-door neighbor.
She did her best to convince me I was totally unworthy of female attention; that my attraction to sexpots was disgusting.
The girls she wanted me to like were older, and hardly sexy.
Hilda’s legacy still haunts me, even at age-71.
I of course learned Hilda was wrong. There were plenty of girls interested in me, and many were cute and/or sexy.
And that was despite how screwed-up and unsure of myself I was.
I still have a scribbled note a cute sexpot left in my school-desk inviting me to a dance. It’s in my safe-deposit box.
DANCE! With my father? Utterly inconceivable.
I was dragged away from a school sock-hop I was deejaying when my father pounded on the school-door.
I had been invited to play my saxophone. My friends were dumbfounded when my father dragged me out by the ear.
Shortly after I moved a schoolmate came and invited me to join his circle of friends. He invited me to a dance.
I had to put him off. My father would have gone ballistic and beat me to a pulp.
I visited Hilda in 1992; by then she was in her 80s.
Her husband was gone, but she lived in the same house next to our first house.
By then she was no longer Sunday-School Superintendent, but she took me back to our old church — she still had a key — and then badmouthed all the travesties being visited upon her beloved Sunday-School building by younger pups.
That two-story Sunday-School building, much like a regular school, was her doing, her private preserve. Where she told us children alcohol would rot our brains, and anyone wearing pants, like me for example, was unworthy of female attention.
So I wonder how faire Hilda would react to “Lana;” the fact an extremely beautiful girl was attracted to me.
That didn’t happen. Our family moved, consigning Hilda, and “Lana,” to the filmy past.

• I learned how to drive in that ’53 Chevy, known by me as “the Blue Bomb” (it was navy-blue). It was a pig; PowerGlide-six.
• “Camden, NJ” is the urban extension of the Philadelphia area in south Jersey. My paternal grandparents lived in Camden.