We moved into our beautiful home in San Antonio around June of 1963. It was summertime in Texas and that was going to take some getting use to. The great thing was that this house was big and had a huge in-ground pool in the back yard. My bedroom had sliding glass doors leading out to the huge covered deck that lead straight to the pool. It was many a time I walked out of my bedroom and straight into the pool for a late night swim. I used the pool a lot but no where near how much my sister used it. She always had the greatest tan!!
Anyway, I went to register for my senior year at MacArthur High School. I went into the counselor's office with all my school records. This is where I found out that an East Coast education was a bit ahead of a Southwest education. When the counselor added up all my credits through the 11th grade...it was found that I already had all the credits and the courses to graduate from a Texas high school with the exception of one......TEXAS HISTORY. Yes, it is a law in Texas that ALL high school seniors MUST take Texas history to graduate.
It was then that I found out I had some options as a senior. I had to be in home room by 8am every morning to be counted as having attended that day. This was important to the school because they got federal money based on the number of students who showed up every day. My next class from 8:30-9:30am was Texas history. GUESS WHAT...after that, I was legally able to leave school......BUT, I was given some options. I could leave at 9:30 to go to a job (I wasn't about to choose that option!!), or I could take a couple of advanced classes and leave at noon or I could enroll in college early and take some freshman classes so that I would be ahead of the game when college actually did begin for me.
I decided to take advanced Chemistry and advanced Spanish (living in San Antonio, I thought the ability to speak a little Spanish would come in handy..especially with some of those beautiful Mexican girls!!) and leave high school at 11:30. I then enrolled at Trinity University to take 3 classes in the afternoon. These were freshman classes and these, combined with classes I took the summer before college gave me a good head start. I entered Trinity my freshman year as a second semester freshman....a big deal back then. More on Trinity later.
My senior year at high school was not all that eventful. Of course, leaving at 11:30 didn't allow a lot of time to make a lot of friends. Yes, I went to all my high school events, always looked forward to Friday night for pep rally's and football games. MacArthur HS was a powerhouse in sports back then and every football game was a huge event. The big deal was that I had my own car which most seniors did not. I had a huge amount of freedom and basically came and went as I pleased. My dad joined Canyon Creek Country Club so I was able to continue playing golf and was getting better and better.
The only thing that really sticks in my mind during my senior year is that I helped organize what was called senior skip day. That was a day that all the seniors would skip classes and head to Canyon Lake for a day of debauchery and other assorted activities. I had one of the cars so I volunteered to drive. Well, the administration got wind of it and made an announcement that any senior that was caught participating in senior skip day would not be able to attend graduation and have it noted on our "permanent record" (big woop!!). Well, that scared off a lot but there was still this hard core and we decided to go anyway. There were about 30 of us (out of a class of about 1200) that decided to go, no matter what. We knew that they would not enforce their threat. We went, had a great time and everybody was swimming, drinking beer or something else and just kicking back. Then, all of a sudden we see this school bus coming down the road...it was our chemistry teacher (and school bus driver), coming to pick us all up and take us back to school. He also had two of the high school security guards with him, making sure we would all comply and get on the bus. He made those of us who drove, leave our cars at the lake just as a form of punishment. Well, we got a tongue lashing and some of the kids got detention but since I was not a full time student, all the punishment did not apply to me. Yes, I eventually got my car and we all attended our graduation in May of 1964!!
It was certainly not your average senior year experience.
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