Life imprisons everyone. I tell myself this very thing several times a week, because I forget it almost daily. And it’s an important part of our background circumstance as humans. For example, whenever I think of the less fortunate, people who are deprived of rights or opportunity or money or all of the above…I also recall that most of these people can move their bodies. They can wander down the hallway, up the hallway, and do whatever they want. I, of course can’t. And this does need to be acknowledged.

So, OK, having gotten this out of my system…. I want to talk about Hoffer Street School, Banning, California, about 1951. That’s when I started kindergarten. And that’s where I learned some of the most important things one can learn anywhere.

Banning is a town in a mountain pass, with a naturally beautiful view of two opposing mountain ranges. And it could be quite a lovely town. But there is a strange curse upon it. Postwar prosperity rolled like a wave across Southern California. But that wave, on its way to nearby Palm Springs, parted like Moses at the Red Sea. It left Banning as a small goods-and-services economy that retained its low-level mercantile engine until the interstate bypassed the downtown. Before that, people driving east to west from, say, Phoenix and, of course, Palm Springs, stopped off in Banning. There were roadside restaurants. There were motels, including one with triangular concrete rooms that promised the opportunity to “sleep in a wigwam.”

One of the other oddities of the place involved its prewar tax base. For some time, probably since the 1930s or earlier, Banning had been a low-cost place to retire and to escape tuberculosis. In the desert air, it was thought, the infamous disease had less of a chance to get a toehold. None of this mattered until World War II ended and the baby boom started. Suddenly, Banning had kids. Lots of them. It had, at that point, one grade school and one high school. Of course, there were efforts to build more classrooms. Bond issue after bond issue. Unfortunately, the latter kept failing.

With Social Security such a main feature of the local economy, there weren’t many in town who wanted to see their taxes increase. In short, the town had no future in any sense of the word. But suddenly it had one single grade school in which classrooms had been set up in the hallways. That is correct. Desks in the corridors, teachers using mobile blackboards, and so on.

The answer? The mayor of Banning drove into Los Angeles one day, boarded a DC-3 for Sacramento, and asked the governor, Earl Warren, to declare the town a disaster area. This happened. The town got emergency funds. And it built two new schools, of cinder block, at opposite ends of town. One of which was near my end of town, on Hoffer Street.

The kindergarten classroom had a large set of windows, a wall really, so there was plenty of light. The latter was important, because there were also large blocks, each of which could accommodate a kid in kind of a fetal position, and with small hand holds that allowed them to be stacked. I did this with a great interest and determination. Stacks of blocks, as high as the teacher would allow. And, of course, I crawled on top, dismantled the stacks. Rearranged them. And in general, exhausted myself quite happily. My constant playmate was Mike. He had a very wonderful cowboy shirt. The thing snapped. It was the absolute coolest thing a five-year-old could want. Together, we stacked, and stacked and re-stacked the blocks, day after day. The Sisyphean nature of this endeavor never occurred to us, of course. We were tired by naptime, all of us. There was music from a hand crank Victrola the old fashion type. And after lying on a blanket on the floor, it was time for that next big feature of the morning. A tiny carton of milk. I absolutely loved kindergarten.

It never occurred to me that Mike and almost everyone else in the class was Hispanic. Or Native American. The Morongo Indian reservation was just to the east. And there were quite a few kids with names like Dominguez and Rodriguez, Santillo and Herrera. Sadly, my parents brought an end to my sojourn at that school. For first grade, they maneuvered themselves outside of the prescribed school districts, to get me into a much duller first grade. In my adulthood, my mother explained that I was “beginning to speak with my hands.” To this day, I don’t really know what she meant. Perhaps Hispanic people gestured more. Or she thought they did. It was, pure and simple, racial bias, which in 1951 no one even noticed.

Mike, by the way, became a football star in high school. He got a scholarship to Stanford and became an attorney. I saw him at a 1984 high school reunion. He wasn’t wearing a cowboy shirt.