For my first and second grade I rode my bike about a mile through suburban streets to get to St. Nicholas Catholic School. My brother Chip, two years older, was in charge of the bike trip. We wore uniforms, brown pants and white shirts for the boys. The girls all wore the same light blue jumpers and white shirts. I remember a very scary Sister Clarissa and a kindly, young, Sister Judith. Sister Clarissa disappeared after Christmas vacation in my first year, having been taken away for mental treatment (I learned later).
In Loyola School in Los Altos, K-6 public school I attended, we also dressed in uniforms, but not what you might think. Not formal, official uniforms, but we as kinds enforced uniforms on each other. All the boys wore Levi’s jeans (Levi’s not Wranglers or any other brand) every day. In six grade all but a very few boys worse shawl collar sweaters every day. Those who didn’t suffered on the social scale.
The social scale was well established. Everything on the playground was sifted and sorted according to groups and hierarchies. The social structure was based loosely on athletic ability for the boys and appearance for the girls, but it wasn’t a single-factor system. Being in the “smart class” was a plus, unless you were in the smart class but also awkward, uncoordinated, or, for the girls, not pretty. Being in the “dumb class” We were all grouped in classes from smart to dumb, five classes for each grade at Loyola and four at Blach Junior High School. Schoolkids on the top of the kid social structure knew it and reveled in it. I was in the top class, and I was athletic, the captain of the fifth grade football team, so I was on top. Just placement in the smart class wasn’t enough if a kid was out of touch with social skills, likely to get outcast as the 1950s equivalent of what they later called a dork.
Kids were cruel. Bullying was rampant. But we didn’t have a word for it, we didn’t call it out, and nobody did anything about it. We had no vocabulary about bullying, or diversity, or ADHD, or on the spectrum, or any of that. It was in or out.