A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [27]
Down the hall, Val Foubert, their humanities teacher, assigned The Organization Man, The Hidden Persuaders, Atlas Shrugged, and Coming of Age in Samoa. Kathy Powell Sullivan recalled, “We devoured Jack Kerouac. On the Road would have been our bible.” Conformity was disdained; the very idea of difference was alluring. Foubert, a World War II veteran who some said moonlighted as a drummer in a swing band, is said to have eventually defected to another district in a disagreement over Mercer Island’s handling of parents’ complaints about his reading list. Parents complained, too, that Wichterman had no business teaching a college course in high school. The course was making trouble at home. “You know how kids are,” Wichterman told me. “They see an idea they get in class, they set that up at the dinner table with Dear Old Dad. Dad gets up out of his chair, all exercised. Of course, the kids love that. You don’t start out to cause trouble at the dinner table; what you start out to do is get the kid on his tippy toes: ‘If you don’t like this argument, refute it. Give me reasons you don’t like it. You have to think.’”
It may have been in Art Sullard’s tenth-grade biology class that Stanley Ann fell in with the group of boys who would become her closest friends in her last two years on Mercer Island. Sullard, also young and a musician, would banter with certain students and occasionally make sarcastic asides. Over dissections, students milled around in groups, the humor tending toward black. Stanley Ann’s somewhat sarcastic sensibility surfaced. “My seatmate was an old athlete friend, very intelligent,” John Hunt recalled. “I remember him making comments about Stanley because he was trying to figure out what was with her. She was so different.” The following year, she was assigned to a chemistry table next to one occupied by Hunt, Bill Byers, and Raleigh Roark. They all became friends, fancying themselves as thinkers on the cultural cutting edge. Byers was slightly older than the others, had access to a car, and had glimpsed the wider world—Seattle and Bellevue, anyway. He had friends off the island and, at sixteen, had started dating a girl in Seattle. The son of a liquor-company manager who had abandoned graduate work on Chaucer in order to find paying work during the Depression, Byers was reading Dostoyevsky, listening to Pete Seeger, and borrowing old classical records from the high school librarian. Outside of school, he and a friend would amuse themselves by making gunpowder out of saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur and creating small explosions in the woods—not to damage anything, just for fun. In the classroom, he was a contrarian on principle. Byers remembered Raleigh Roark as having “a very original type of intelligence. You could count on him saying or doing something that just went crosswise with the accepted norms.” Roark had a half sister living in bohemian splendor in the university district of Seattle, from whom Roark’s friends got a first glimpse of a counterculture. They discovered foreign films at theaters in Seattle. “Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy was one that hit us the hardest,” Hunt remembered. “It was totally different from anything we’d seen—Third World poverty, a complete cultural gulf. We had no experience, we hadn’t even read about that. We would go and sit and talk and talk. What did it mean? What’s it got to do