My four eldest brothers and sisters attended Robison Elementary School from 1952 to 1960. They then went on to attend Mansfeld Jr. High and Tucson High. I also attended kindergarten at St. Ambrose for one semester. Here are some of our class photos, most of them from Robison. I’ve also included some sports team and other group photos in which my siblings and I appear. My two older brothers were heavily involved in high school sports, and later became little league coaches, and my brother Fred and I played on different teams in the late 60s. These are mostly photos of kids who grew up between Plumer and Country Club from Broadway south to the railroad tracks. If you click on the picture, you’ll see a larger version of it. Click the back arrow to return to the post.
You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Click the back arrow key to return to the post.
Every chapter in My Life Story includes information about me, my work, my family and my friends.It also includes information about events that took place locally and nationally, etc. that I thought important enough to include. You’ll also find that I’ve included films, musicians and recordings/videos, in addition to books that were released in a given year.
While I have included many personal photos, most of the graphic content included below is borrowed from the Internet. I do not claim to own this material. I am just adding it for educational purposes. If the owners of any of the content in the “My Life Story” series want their stuff removed, I am happy to oblige. My email address is jrdiaz@arizona.edu. Thanks!
Note: I decided to split my original post, “My Life Story: 1959-1971”, in half. It was too long. This is the second half of the original post, and it covers the years I was in elementary school.
One of the fondest memories of my childhood was when my uncle Failo and his wife Armida came to Tucson back in 1965. They took me with them shopping to the new Sears store way out on East Broadway. They bought me a hamburger and fries at the restaurant there. It all came in a little plastic boat with an American flag. They made me feel so special. I loved my tios dearly.
I attended Robison Elementary School on 18th Street and Treat Ave. from 1965 to 1971. I cried on the first day of school, but quickly adjusted. I was in Mrs. Goldbaum’s class. She was a very nice lady, and had taught 3 of my brothers and sisters.
These were my next door neighbors, Becky, Tiny and Debbie Romo. I would go over to their house and play school with them and dance with them all the time. They had an older sister who gave them her old 45’s. I remember they had “The Loco-motion” “The Mashed Potato” and a lot of other fun songs. I loved being with them. It was a lot more fun than being in the Rat Finks, the little gang of boys in our neighborhood that I got thrown out of for not wanting to give back the coloring book they gave me to play with and for being a cry baby. The girls had a little brother they all called “Boy”. He was a year younger than me and we played together a lot too.
It would be another 20+ years or so before I got around to reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X. He was a brave, intelligent man who saw through all the b.s. we’re fed in this country about race relations and equality. The book was published on October 29, 1965. He was assassinated earlier in the year on February 21, 1965.
My brother Charles joined the Navy in 1964 with a friend of his named Art Carrillo. Art was very fond of my brother Fred and me and he sent us this photo of his ship. According to Wikipedia, “the USS Krishna (ARL-38) was one of 39 Achelous-classlanding craft repair ships built for the United States Navy during World War II. Named for Krishna (a deity worshiped across many traditions of Hinduism), she was the only U.S. Naval vessel to bear the name, and only one of three ships (along with USS Indra and the Civil War era gunboat USS Varuna) to be named after a Hindu deity”. Art also sent us several oversized color portraits of a number of other Navy vessels, but they are long gone. He referred to me and Freddie as his two “little men”.
I wrote a separate blog post about our 1966 family vacation. Click here to read it.
My sister Becky has always been an avid reader. She used to take me with her to the public library downtown when I was a kid. She was always returning her books late. One time, a man from the public library knocked on our front door. He came to ask for overdue books that Becky had forgotten to return. They don’t do that anymore! I have very fond memories of the downtown library. The music room was incredible and the children’s section was a lot of fun.
In 1966, the public library bought a two bookmobiles that moved from one location to another on a rotating basis. One of their stops was near our house, across the 22nd St bridge on Cherry and 22nd in the Pueblo Plaza parking lot. It would show up on Tuesdays and was open from 12 to 9. I used to love going there, and was scolded once for looking at the books intended for adults. I remember they had all the Wizard of Oz books and other children’s materials. Sometimes I would walk by myself over the bridge to visit, but 22nd was a very busy street, so I didn’t do it too often. .
Don’t Look Back, featuring the vocals of Paul Williams. This is one of my favorite songs by the Temptations.
As kids, we went to the Circle K up the street all time. It was just east of 22nd and Tucson Blvd., and we’d walk there to buy candy, sodas and baseball cards. The clerks there were usually women in their thirties and forties, and they were always very nice to us. One day we woke up to find the following headlines in our local newspaper. It was shocking. The lady who was murdered was the sweetest person. We couldn’t believe it. One of the kids who did the dirty deed hid near our house somewhere along the railroad tracks. Thank goodness they found him.
My third grade teacher was a lady named Mrs. Conn. She loved to teach us music, and we sang a lot. There were several songs she taught us, including the one that follows, “Love is Blue”.
My next door neighbors, the Romo sisters, had a Ouija Board, and we used to find out each other’s secrets by asking the Ouija Board for answers to our questions. One time one of the girls asked the Ouija Board to tell us who I liked at school, and before we knew it, the words Selina were spelled out. And it was true! I had a crush on a little girl named Selina in the third grade. One of the Romo girls later told me that once they were making fun of the Ouija Board, being disrespectul in some way to it, and suddenly the pointer moved straight across the the word “goodbye”, and it never worked for them again. No kidding.
Aretha records a masterpiece–Lady Soul, released on January 22, 1968.
What an incredible record! It includes several hits, such as Chain of Fools, Ain’t No Way, and Natural Woman. The musicians on this include Duane Allman and other southern soul session men. The album reached number one on Billboards R & B charts and stayed there for 16 weeks.
I clearly remember when the following accident happened. For some reason, I always thought it was fatal, but apparently it wasn’t. It happened right near our front door, as the 22nd street over pass was just a few feet west of our house.
“The Games People Play” by Joe South, was released in August, 1968. It was one of my mom’s very favorite pop tunes. She’d sing it to all her grandchildren over the years.
Hey Jude was released on August 26, 1968. It became our family’s favorite song, largely due to my brother Rudy, who had been infatuated with the Beatles since they first appeared on American television in 1964. He bought all of their albums and played them to death. As a result, my brother Fred and I knew practically every song. Their music provided the soundtrack to our youth.
Have I mentioned yet that I loved to read as a child? My sister Becky and her husband Larry would take me to the Wilmot branch of the Tucson Public library all the time. I remembered this series, and after searching and searching on the internet for these, I finally found them on Ebay. I read these in the 4th grade (68-69) during a reading contest in Mrs. Pilling’s class. I had to write a book report on each title and created a fact sheet for each state by copying information like the size of the population, the date the state joined the union, the geographic size of the state, etc. etc. I won the contest!
I clearly remember the Honk Kong flu epidemic. My mom and aunt took all of us kids to the Southern Pacific Hospital downtown for vaccination shots. In the end, I didn’t get one, however, because I had a cold. I never did catch the flu this particular season. I guess I got lucky. At least I don’t remember catching it, but I did get sick a lot as a kid. I had the measles, the chicken pox, the mumps, and even scarlet fever.
Although I was too young to know what was happening, students at both the college and high school levels were engaged in protests throughout the country. They were fighting for more relevant courses and rallying against the war in Vietnam. This happened in Tucson too. See the articles that follow, student activists fought to have a Mexican American studies program created at the University of Arizona, and high school students from Tucson High and Pueblo staged walkouts protesting conditions in their high schools. It was a volatile, but exciting time. The Chicano movement was in full swing.
My sister and her husband Larry lived in an apartment north of Speedway near Jones Blvd. at one point and then in the University of Az area near Helen and Mountain. My brother Fred and I would love to visit them. They were “hippies” and smoked pot and listened to groovy music. Larry took the following photos of Becky in February and March, 1969. I just love these.
The Stonewall riots started on June 28, 1969. This was the beginning of the gay rights movement. Within a couple of years, I began to realize that I liked boys and that I was gay, but I didn’t come out until I was 19. I would later write about this event in one of my Sociology classes on social movements.
During the summer of 1969, my sister Irene and her family brought my brother Fred and me along on their vacation to California. They took us to Disneyland, the San Diego zoo, and Buena Park, where we visited Knott’s Berry Farm and the Movieland Wax Museum.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, this was happening…
In the fifth grade we would sometimes swap teachers. I remember, for example, taking reading from a teacher named Mr. Koster, even though Mrs. Wagner was my regular teacher. Some of Mr. Koster’s kids would also take classes from my teacher, Mrs. Wagner. Mr. Koster wrote the word PIG on the chalkboard one day, and next to each letter spelled out the words pride, integrity and guts, letting us kids know where he stood on the hippie issue. He was a crotchety old guy, that’s for sure and wasn’t a fan of what was going on in places like Chicago during the Democratic national convention. The youth of America were on a mission to yippify the world.
A pretty blonde girl that I had a huge crush on the year before in the 4th grade named Janet Harrison was a student in Mr. Koster’s class, but one day while she was sitting in with my class, she wrote the lyrics to the Beatles tune Nowhere Man on the chalk board while Mrs. Wagner was out on a coffee break. The rest of us watched in awe as she spelled out every word of the song. Everyone was worried she was going to get caught, but she managed to erase it all just as Mrs. Wagner was walking in the door. Janet was the coolest, hippest student in school as far as I was concerned. I was still smitten by her, but she never paid any attention to me. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was a little rich girl, whose father Harmon Harrison was a well-known surgeon in town. I was way out of her league. We later attended Mansfeld together. In high school, she was a debutante with the Tucson Symphony Cotillion Ball. Later, in college, she became a party animal. She managed to complete her degree in Russian and went off to work at the embassy in the Soviet Union before returning to the US. I haven’t seen her since college.
He’s a real nowhere man Sitting in his nowhere land Making all his nowhere plans for nobody
Doesn’t have a point of view Knows not where he’s going to Isn’t he a bit like you and me? Nowhere man please listen You don’t know what you’re missing Nowhere man, the world is at your command
He’s as blind as he can be Just sees what he wants to see Nowhere man, can you see me at all Nowhere man don’t worry Take your time, don’t hurry Leave it all ’til somebody else Lends you a hand Ah, la, la, la, la
Doesn’t have a point of view Knows not where he’s going to Isn’t he a bit like you and me? Nowhere man please listen You don’t know what you’re missing Nowhere man, The world is at your command Ah, la, la, la, la
He’s a real nowhere man Sitting in his nowhere land Making all his nowhere plans for nobody Making all his nowhere plans for nobody Making all his nowhere plans for nobody
My sister Becky and her husband split up sometime in 1970. She moved back home for a while, and at one point got involved with people who were active in local issues. The El Rio Coalition was fighting at the time for a park and space for community activities. One day, my sister came home with a little pin and a book about Che Guevara. I didn’t really understand what this stuff was all about, but I kept the pin and still have the book. Here they are:
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band was Lennon’s first solo effort after the Beatles broke up. It was released on December 11, 1970. My brother Rudy loved this album and bought it as soon as it was released.
All in the Family premiered on January 12, 1971. It became an instant classic tv sitcom, but when it first aired, I was probably too young to understand the satirical humor, and I didn’t like Archie Bunker much at all. Edith was a blast, however.
Out there in the outside world, the Chicano movement was in full swing. Novels were being written, people were marching in the streets, and Chicano history was being documented. Music groups like Santana, Malo and El Chicano were very popular. This song is from El Chicano’s 1971 lp, Revolucion.
I did really well this year, and almost got all 1’s my last quarter. Mrs. Darnall was one of those teachers who didn’t like me too much. This was the year that another student, Steven Fontes, beat me up after I pushed him on the playground. Mrs. Darnall was not very empathetic. She thought I was a big weenie because I couldn’t stop crying. That was another low point for me, but life went on and I’m still here. Steve isn’t. May he rest in peace.
Stay tuned for Part II of My Life in Pictures: Junior High School… 1971-1973. Coming soon!
I started first grade in September, 1965. I was six years old. My teacher was Mrs. Goldbaum. She had been at Robison a very long time, and taught several of my older siblings. I was a bright kid and loved school, but I do remember crying on the first day. I was a big chipilon. I also remember reading Dick and Jane books and singing Frere Jacques in front of the class. My friends were Billy Fass, Larry Mendoza, and Hugo Ruthling. If I recall correctly, I had two little girlfriends, Roberta and Sue. One time in reading circle, they both kissed me on the cheek at the same time. I was in heaven. Another time, I was walking Sue home and my mom came by to pick me up. She said she came to get me but I told her, no thanks, because I was walking my girlfriend home. Mom got a big kick out of that and told everyone about it. Sue didn’t come back after first grade. Her family moved away from the neighborhood. She was a cutie pie. I made some lifelong friends in first grade and am still in touch with several of them. I can’t believe this was over 55 years ago!