Memory Lane
May 21, 2009
Before I moved away from my hometown of Carmichael, CA 13 years ago, I took a roll of pictures of the last high school I attended for posterity’s sake. I actually attended 3 different high schools between 1991 and 1995, but I hardly felt any connection to two of them. The high school that will always remain my true high school is Del Campo, the high school I attended for my freshman year, part of my sophomore and during my senior year. It is the high school which issued me and both of my older brothers diplomas. Most of my elementary and junior high school friends attended Del Campo. There was a lot of Del Campo tradition tied into the neighborhood we lived in. I found and lost myself at Del Campo. (But I’m getting away from the original point I wanted to make about the keepsake pictures I took before moving away all those years ago.)
Since I didn’t grow up with the Internet, I couldn’t have possibly imagined that I would easily be able to summon pictures of my old stomping grounds with my fingertips. All it takes now is an Internet connection to travel down memory lane. Photo albums are a thing of the past. And who cares because they were bulky and cumbersome anyway, right? I can now regale new acquaintances with images from my past, images of people and places which – when removed from their personal context – are mostly meaningless to others who don’t know me well.
For instance, here is a picture of one of the lesser high schools I attended (by “lesser” I mean that it is lesser in importance to me, not so much in overall quality). The photo is of a breezeway. Ah, I love those California high schools with their quads and breezeways.
Here is my high school below. Notice from the photo how it looks like a boreal high school – the lack of palm trees and houses in the distance make it look like it’s nestled in a rustic setting. Only one low building with pines behind it is visible and a big part of the picture is dominated by a mound of grass (this is where the Christian fundis used to flock in the early 90’s).
But the camera often lies. Del Campo was in fact situated in the densely populated suburb of Fair Oaks. Fair Oaks was located within Sacramento County, a county with a population of approximately 1.2 million people. And it continues to grow. Del Campo was part of the San Juan Unified School District, the 3rd largest district in the state of California during the nineties (I don’t know if it still is).
A cougar was our mascot. Prrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
Below is a promotional video for a rival high school I wish I could have attended in a parallel life. The only problem is that it was/is an all boys school, so dating would have been kind of tricky. Oh yeah – plus I’m not Catholic, so I guess that would have also posed a problem. But the Jesuits are really hardcore about discipline, learning, applying yourself and training young people to be some the coolest, most successful and richest bastards on the planet.
There you have it, Memory Lane. Next up: Forgotten Cul de Sac.
DC is smaller than I remembered. Hadn’t been there since the last day of senior year until Laura’s vigil.
Did you know that Sacramento’s overall population is over 2 million? And the demo of Fair Oaks has changed… not for the better.
I hope the upcoming cul-de-sac piece ain’t about a certain Sac cul-de-sac? Besides, that’s more mini-series material than a blog entry, don’t you think?? My mother alone continues to star in her own melodrama. Ha! :)
BH
You are right that DC is smaller than when we went there – the abstract mind has a way of blowing things out of proportion. Drifting through the “hallowed halls” of DC ain’t exactly like passing beneath the Colossus of Rhodes . Andy, John and I were there in 2006 when we were out in Sac for my grandpa’s memorial service. We talked with Mr. Zumbiel who was still teaching there at the time. And – oh yeah – DC looked just like any other cookie cutter CA high school.
2 million people in Sacramento! Holy Shnikies! I wonder how they pack ‘em all in without going vertical. I saw that the old vacant school on Paradise Drive has been turned into a cul de sac, and the property along Lincoln Ave where horses used to graze is now a residential street lined with 1/2 million dollar houses. Is this gentrification what you were referring to when you said, “the demo of Fair Oaks has changed” for the worse? I can’t see why anybody would pay 600-800K for a ranch house located in the posh oasis of Sacramento – no ocean, no glitzy downtown nightlife, no celebrities, no…well, you grew up there so I don’t have to explain it to you.
I still can’t believe the entire distance between Sacramento and San Francisco is a nonstop grid of subdivisions, strip malls and boom towns. The golden brown hills between Vacaville and Vallejo used to look resplendently beautiful in the sun and fog. Greedy Dentists developers care very little about the natural scenery, but I guess the exodus of people from other parts of the country – like the dying Rust Belt cities of the northeast and Midwest (you should see Utica) – is creating the demand for homes.
Finally – dying cul de sac post will not be about Ladera Circle. Probably need a few volumes for that one.
I think Mr. Jordan is the only one left from my years at DC. I talked with Mr. Laskey when I saw Lisa speak at a woman’s conference last November and that’s what he told me.
Natomas, Elk Grove, Roseville and Rocklin are responsible for the massive growth. The overall area of Sacramento is 97 square miles, compared to the City and County of San Francisco’s 7. There is a lot of space to continue expanding around the central city. Many new homes were built in the aforementioned areas making huge new subdivisions, and these are the houses that cause Sacramento to be number 2 in the country’s foreclosure epidemic next to Stockton.
People paid $500k+ because to live in these McMansions because they erroneously believed they would flip them in 5-7 years at enormous profits. Unfortunately, Sacramento lacks business and industry to support the ballooning house payments once the no-interest portion of the loan ended, and it was a recipe for disaster. The number one employer is the State of California, and the average yearly income is about $50k annually — not nearly enough to support the lifestyle many grew accustomed to. I wrote about this last November in a dissertation on my blog called. “Hot, Flat & Dowdy: Why Sacramento Sucks,” and yes, the headline is an admitted rip-off of my hero Tom Friedman’s last book.
Roseville has remained in a better position for a few reasons: it received a larger number of Bay Area transplants, it had better city management and there is a small Silicon Valley tech job sector. The commute to San Francisco can take 3-4 hours each way weekdays, and one Saturday I made the mistake of going to the city the day of the Raiders-49ers game. It took me SIX hours to get to Buena Vista park behind the Haight. I wanted to kill myself, but was prevented due to a lack of razor blades in the glove box and ability to get off the parking lot formerly known as I-80.
I’m relieved to hear you’re not writing about Ladera Way. Again, I think it’s mini-series material. :)
One thing about state workers – they give themselves pretty nice pensions. My grandpa made more money while retired from the state than he ever did working. He was making approx. $200-300K per year the last decade of his life, and this allowed him to travel the planet visiting all but 3 countries before he died.
These pensions are one of the reasons why Sacramento has always had a lot of retirees, and it’s also why I think the monolithic institution of state government in this country is mostly a sham and a crock. I see the same thing in Utica, septuagenarians who make six figures in retirement driving the development of 500K McMansions in the suburbs. And what’s worse about New York is that these former state and county workers did nothing but run the city of Utica into the ground during their careers.
They should be in prison but instead they roll around their graveyard of a city like big Dons in their Cadillacs, spending all their time at the golf courses, mass or the bowling alleys.
I used to have a Stollwood Heights paper route and I always wondered why so many people’s walls would be washed in tv flickers at 5 am. It was as if nobody in our neighborhood had a job. Duh, they were all probably retirees. Sometimes at 3 am I would see tvs on in the neighbors’ houses, the walls swimming with stroboscopic flashes of blue and white. One couple who lived at the top of a cul-de-sac behind Willy Way were in their thirties or forties, childless and very exclusive. No matter the night of the week, no matter the season, if ever I happened to be awake at an ungodly hour, I would always see their tv flickering away in the master bedroom.
I only saw them once when I was collecting for the Bee (they were my customers). They both answered the door wearing what appeared to be scrub suits (they even had the hats and the little plastic baggie things that wrapped around their shoes). They had one of those courtyards with a locked gate, and they wouldn’t leave the threshold of their house. I may have said something like, “I’m your paperboy, I’m collecting,” and I think they curtly responded with something like, “We send our payment in by mail now.” That was it. They seemed as if they didn’t want to come near me as if I was contagious or something. This is the only time I saw this couple, besides seeing the tv flashing away all night when I couldn’t sleep.
I have to admit it made me wonder about them: were they dying from some rare diesease (hence the scrubs), was their house a cult house, or were they just ER doctors or nurses who worked the graveyard shift? Or perhaps they went to bed each night watching Jay Leno’s monologue and fell asleep half way into it, the tv flashing away all night as they snored. I often used to this when I was in high school. I would fall asleep at approximately 11:45 pm just as Jay was wrapping up his opening gambit. Then, around 2 or 3 in the morning, I would roll over and hear something like a loud crash and open my eyes just in time to see Steven Seagal throw some guy through a window. This rude awakening only lasted as long as it took to fumble in my covers for the remote and switch the tv off.
So maybe I just have a wild imagination for thinking that these people who lived in the court behind Willy Way (I forget what the street was called) were somehow like the members of that Star Trek Cult who caught a ride on the Hale Bop comet. I guess I would want this to be true since it would make for a good story and also give me something to write about (my life being too boring to have actual things like this happen to me on a regular basis). But who really knows what was going on in that household, if anything.
By the way, it’s 2:07 in the morning as I write this and MY tv is on.
Oh, Tim, I think there was something in the 95608 water that gave both of us over-activate imaginations. I never knew the curt couple of Compadre Court, not did I know our ‘hood was named Stollwood Heights.
I think the most probable answer to the mystery of the blickering 5AM television sets is that most fell asleep with the set on. Unfortunately, the suburban hell of our childhood was just too cracka to be David Lynch-like. Had it been, we both probably would have enjoyed it a lot more than we did.
These days, some of the Bancimer Construction 1970s track homes have turned into rentals or bought by families headed up with parents our age. And after seeing many of our old Cougar classmates last week at Laura’s rally, I found out pretty much everyone’s parents still live in the Heights. Even weirder, some of us have elected to move there. What was that theory about area being built on a magnet?? Now that’s a suburban myth worth investigating.
As for the being built on a magnet theory, the only reason I’m called back to Sacramento so frequently is because, if you knew how depressing Utica is, you would yearn for the glory days of your Carmichael youth too. I was obviously not the happiest person while living in the 95608, but I realize now how many things I took for granted (e.g., palm trees, swimming pools, social life, etc.).
My 13+ years living in upstate NY has mostly been a long education in Rust Belt-ism. The weirdest thing, however, is that I still don’t understand it, the apathy and counterintuitiveness of these people who have no desire to better themselves! I can tell you straight up that there is absolutely no exageration or embellishment in Michael Moore’s 1989 shockumentary “Roger & Me.” This movie accurately depicts what life is like across the non-cities and places west of the Appalachians in the northeast and Midwest. Hellholes like Ohio, western PA, upstate NY, Missouri, and…oh god!…Michigan! Detroit is the capital city of this fucking region of blight, corruption and crippling 3rd world depression.
And also death. People barely bat an eyelash at it here, and it baffles the hell out of me. I was not raised that way, at least I don’t think I was. Hence the reason why I constantly pine for my Sac days. Not that Sac is the best place on Earth, but any place like Sac seems like a shangrila compared to the Rust Belt. Heck – when I was in Texas recently I actually was thinking to myself, “Hey, this is pretty cool. I could see myself living here.”
I envy you for hating Sacramento. The fact that you are jaded enough to call it a “hellhole” makes me realize how far I have to go to get back to some state of semi-normalcy. I mean, I used to be the same way. In 1994-95 I was ripping my hair out living there. And yet I blame my mom for filling my head with absurdities about upstate NY – everytime I said something negative about Sac, she would say, “Well, it’s not like that in upstate, NY” or, “People don’t do that in upstate, NY.”
But, yeah, I think the magnet thing is worth exploring. Not for me, however, because when you’ve been living in Yootica, NY for 13 years it should be obvious why somebody would want to move back to Fair Oaks and start over again. But WHY somebody who has been living in, say, Brooklyn or Santa Monica for 15 years would feel the calling to move back to the old ‘hood is kind of a mystery. Especially when the old hood is Sacramento.