With advance apologies to the young women of our youth, whose own narrative experiences of what mattered most to them about growing up in the 1950s and early 60s tend to be underacknowledged or even misconstrued in our biased reminiscences, we submit the following piece as another tribute to Salt Lake City’s public school educators who played key roles in shaping our civic values.
ARE YOU IN OUR DREAMS?
Role Model Apparitions From our Youth
By Gordon and Gary Shepherd
Sometimes we tell people about our dreams, especially our wives Faye and Lauren, who counterclaim that they rarely dream, or if they do, they can’t remember them, or if they can remember them, they weren’t very clear or detailed. When we were kids growing up, before getting out of bed in the morning, we would query one another: “What did you dream about last night?” And then we proceeded to take turns narrating what we had dreamed about. So, if you’re going to remember what you dreamed, maybe you have to get in the practice of telling your dreams.
Some people keep a record of their dreams by writing them down for their analysts to interpret. We do no such thing. And, by the way, neither of our dreams are religious, either. They’re not visions or revelations from God. They’re not instructions to other people about how to live or what to believe. Whatever their crazy narratives might entail, almost always our dreams are populated with various family members or friends, both old and new (especially including old friends and significant adults, like omnipresent apparitions, from our childhood and youth).
The point is, the people we dream about are the people, both living and dead, who have meant the most to us, or they’re people who in some way, for better or worse, have had an enduring influence on our lives. So, if you’re in our dreams, you’re somebody who is important to us, and, from our egocentric points of view, that’s what ‘s important to understand. Often we both dream about being in Mexico again, and in those dreams we can still speak fluent Spanish. But more often, we dream about being back in school—the schools of our childhood and youth.
Do we ever dream about our old teachers, you ask? Yes, sometimes, but strangely enough, not that often, given the important role that many of them played in our lives—especially the dedicated women teachers whom we still remember with fondness and appreciation at Liberty Elementary (whose administrative and instructional staff did not include a single male): Teachers like Mrs. Madron, Blunt, Poulson, Lawrence, Murphy, McDermaid, Anderson, Taylor, and Jensen, among others. To an unsung degree, these women helped impetuously energetic and curious boys like us acquire a basic sense of fairness and responsibility toward others in a socializing context of learning how to read, write, do arithmetic, and learn about history and other countries in the public school system. God bless our underpaid, women public school teachers. Saying this in perfect sincerity about the many women teachers we admired, we must also admit that the teachers from our youth who are most likely to make appearances in our dreams today are men, two in particular: Hal Hardcastle and Dean Papadakis. Hardcastle and Papadakis were the boys’ P. E. teachers at Lincoln Junior High.
When it came to directing adolescent boys—capturing their attention, channeling their underdeveloped potential and inchoate aspirations, while simultaneously imposing elementary discipline on their behavior—it wasn’t the school principal (whose name we can barely remember—Richards, maybe?), or any of the academic faculty: It was Hardcastle and Papadakis.
Hardcastle and Papadakis. Their names went together. They were a tag-team, complementing and supplementing each another in organizing and running Lincoln’s elaborate boys’ P.E. program. Their authority and oversight of the school’s young men were unquestioned. And, to the extent that the predictably intemperate behavior of teenage boys between the ages of thirteen and fifteen can be disruptive of institutional order, it may be said, practically speaking, that Hardcastle and Papadakis virtually ran the school.
Is that an overstatement? Undoubtedly it is. But we want to emphasize the critical role played by Hardcastle and Papadakis in nurturing a budding sense of educational community and therefore increasing awareness of civil norms of mutual respect and reciprocity among their adolescent male charges. In doing this, they became our most important adult role models at Lincoln Junior High.
Salt Lake City Junior high schools in the 1950s did not, as a rule, sponsor competitive athletic programs with other schools. For that, one had to wait for high school. Instead, there were intramural sports that pitted different gym classes in competition against one another throughout the school year. At Lincoln there were traditional team sports (flag football, basketball, and track and field events). But in between these there were numerous other competitions as well, including wrestling, the sit-up contest, the rope climbing contest, the free-throw shooting contest, the weightlifting contest, and the softball throwing contest. Not only were individual winners recognized in these events for their achievements, but points were allocated to different gym classes over the year to determine which class was the overall grade-level champion. And, of great motivational importance to aspiring boy athletes, school records were kept, updated, and posted yearly.
We both disliked wrestling (sweaty, smelly, exhausting, and we always hated getting pinned by huskier kids), so we’ll skip past that to highlight some of the school’s other individual sports. The sit-up contest, for instance, was pretty basic: How many sit-ups could you do in twenty minutes? As 7th graders, we recall the school record was over 500. The next year, Dennis Madsen, a slight, wiry kid, obliterated the old record by doing over 1,000. We remember watching him for twenty minutes in mesmerized amazement as he popped up and down like a well-oiled metronome. In the 9th grade, Gordon tried competing in the sit-up contest as the rep from his gym class, and painfully squeezed out approximately 500—not enough that year, sad to say, for even an honorable mention.
The rope-climbing contest was a timed event to see how fast you could scale a fifty-foot rope from the gym floor to a beam in the ceiling. We had been given instruction on the proper techniques for climbing, which involved coordinating “foot wraps” with one’s arms systematically hoisting one’s body, hand over hand, to the top of the rope. A good climb would take less than ten seconds. Johnny Grego, a handsome, broad-shouldered Mexican American kid, disregarded the foot-wrap part of the technique and simply scrambled up the rope by pulling himself with agility and sheer upper body strength to set a new school record of a little over five seconds. (We only mention that he was handsome because all the girls seemed to be cheering for him to win.)
Free-throw shooting was a test of consistent basketball shooting accuracy: How many free-throws could you shoot in a row without missing? If we remember right, the record before our 9th grade year was somewhere in the low twenties. Alan Owens, a quiet kid better known for his math and slide-rule skills, proceeded to swish fifty in a row. Fifty. We kid you not.
In weightlifting, our neighborhood hero was Larry Swanger. Swanger was one of those kids who matured early and inherited big biceps from his gregarious, blue collar dad. To most of us, Larry Swanger looked like Sampson. He was tall, ruggedly handsome, and girls liked his 1950s Elvis-style hairdo. In the finals he was opposed by . . . by . . . well, hell, we can’t remember the other kid’s name (he didn’t continue on with us to high school). In any event, he was squat, had a crewcut and short, thick arms. Unlike Swanger, you couldn’t see his muscles. Neither of us recalls how many standing, overhead presses it took, but eventually Swanger couldn’t lift anymore but the squat kid kept going. He won and set a new school record! Our champion Swanger had gone down to gallant defeat. But such was life, we were beginning to learn.
Finally, in the softball throw, a contestant would stand behind a line at one end of the playing field, run forward a few steps for momentum, and heave the ball as far as he could. In our 8th grade year the school record was shattered by Dennis Borup, the 9th grade student body president. Borup, like Larry Swanger, had matured early and was a head taller than everyone else. When he threw the ball, it hit the side of the auditorium that stood twenty yards past the end of the field. Thereafter, we suppose, a new record would have to be measured by how far up the auditorium wall the ball hit.
Well, as we said, these (and others) were the individualized sports and the corollary prospects they offered for individuals to set new school records; they were a big part of the socializing allure of sports competition for sports-addled boys at Lincoln Junior High. The big team sports in the intramural program—flag ball and basketball—were seasonal sports that bestowed bragging rights and class points to the accumulating totals, but for which no statistical records were kept. Arguably, however, the biggest sports event at Lincoln was the annual track and field meet, again pitting different gym classes against each other in the late spring, toward the end of the school year. For this track meet, all classes were dismissed, and the entire student body became an audience to what transpired. (Yes, in the long decades of public-schooleducation prior to Title IX, girls were expected—if not required—to attend and support boy’s sporting events, and many did so with what appeared to be more interest in the boys themselves than whatever it was they were doing on the gym court or athletic field). And because track and field events feature individual contests that can be quantified by measures of time and distance, school records were also made and broken, and the results posted for subsequent student cohorts to admiringly contemplate on the walls of Hal Hardcastle’s and Dean Papadakis’ gym offices.
Which brings us back to reflect on the dynamic duo of Hardcastle and Papadakis and what they meant to most of the boys at Lincoln Junior High. We’re perfectly confident that every Salt Lake City junior high school in those days had intramural programs similar to Lincoln’s. But in blissful ethnocentrism, we’re also confident in asserting that no other school’s intramural programs were managed as effectively and inspirationally as they were at Lincoln by Hardcastle and Papadakis. If you think we’re wrong, prove it.
Both men, of course, were athletes themselves, so that was good. They had somewhat contrasting personalities, but that was also good because, as we already said, they complemented and supplemented each other. Hardcastle was a little more intense; Papadakis was a little more relaxed. Most importantly, they were respectful friends who agreed on how best to co-manage the many sports programs that involved every boy at all three grade levels at Lincoln Junior High. They were like conscientious parents who presented a united front to their kids. And what they were united on was what was most important for the kids they taught: honest effort, fair play, and mutual respect for your classmates, regardless of their presumed natural abilities in sports.
Hardcastle was ruddy, blonde, crewcut, broad shouldered and thick-chested. He was a football player who threw the hammer at the University of Utah (an ancient, esoteric field event still included in the Olympic Games) that requires agility, speed, and significant upper body strength. Papadakis—an exemplary specimen of Salt Lake’s Greek community—was a couple ofinches taller than Hardcastle, with dark hair combed in a modest pompadour, an easy smile, and Mediterranean features. Papadakis was a basketball player with a deft, lefthanded shot. He was also an artist, who applied his skill to the production of first-rate posters and charts to promote and record the sporting events of Lincoln’s unparalleled intramural programs.
But, as adult role models for boys, it wasn’t just sports that they were good at. We looked up to Hardcastle and Papadakis for guidance, and they didn’t disappoint. One of the other activities we were exposed to in our junior high gym classes was a week of learning how to dance with girls from the girls’ gym class that met the same period we did. When we say dance, we mean old fashioned ballroom dancing. The jitterbug, bop, and later the twist and other popular dance styles, presumably were dance moves that kids would pick up on their own. In retrospect, the main thing about our gym class get-togethers with girls was not so much to teach us how to dance the minuet, but how to act properly around girls. We can remember both Hardcastle and Papadakis lecturing us ahead of time to mind our manners and also reminding us that they would be chaperoning the dances. Even though both men had a good sense of humor and were well aware of the smart-aleckyness and arrogance of some of the boys under their charge, the bashfulness of others, and the immaturity of almost all of us at that age, they insisted that we be respectful to the girls at school.
We remember one occasion in particular. An African American girl was a new student at Lincoln and, Hardcastle informed us, she would be dancing with the boys in our class like everyone else. There would be no refusing, no eye-rolling, no smirky quips or comments. We would be friendly, politely take our turns, and we would damn well like it. We respected that then, and we still do.
On another vividly remembered occasion, a fairly large group of kids showed up on the steps of the school at lunch time for a fight (some of them were Lincoln students, some of them were not). A dozen fist fights and brawling quickly erupted. For a moment it looked like all hell was breaking loose. But suddenly, Hardcastle and Papadakis came flying out of the building—not the school principal or anybody from the administrative office. When someone ran into the school for help, to report what was going on outside, they went straight to the gym offices of Hardcastle and Papadakis. The insurgent fighting was over in a matter of seconds. Hardcastle and Papadakis each grabbed two brawling kids apiece, knocked their heads together, and angrily ordered everybody off the steps. The sizable crowd that had formed because of the fight quickly dispersed. Nobody else at Lincoln could have done that. No other adult authority on the school premises could have acted so quickly and so effectively to snuff out a potentially dangerous moment of harm to the school and its students. No other adults on campus would have been obeyed with such alacrity by a pack of overheated juvenile boys. We respected that then, and we still do.
Hardcastle and Papadakis. Two adult role models from our youth, who continue to inhabit our dreams at night. Are you too in our dreams? Feel free to ask us some time.
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