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As a child, I used to stare at the black-and-white class pictures my stepbrother and stepsister Bart and Victoria Hibbs brought back from Sequoyah School in the early 1960s.
Jeez, but those kids looked smart. And not just bohemian — they looked a little wild.
Not feral, mind you. They were just banging a different drum before different drums were cool.
As a young parent, I used to hear the Sequoyah kids’ calls across the wonderfully crazy-quilt campus at California Boulevard and Pasadena Avenue: “Phoebe! Phoebe!!!” Wait — there were no Phoebes in this world, excepting my wife. Were these children calling for my wife? Nope — it was little Phoebe Bridgers, a few years younger than our Julia, then the toast of the Bamboo Forest, now at 24 a properly vaunted singer-songwriter on top of the musical world.
Yes, it is a different educational planet, a barefoot school where the kids have called teachers by their first names since 1958, when my stepfather Al Hibbs was a founding board member.
Where you are not in first or second grade — you are in the Pond, or Over There.
It would not work for all students, and most definitely not for all parents. If you are in search of some standardized test score that defines a school, Sequoyah is not for you.
But it was for us, as Julia thrived there, especially in learning social and communication skills we still see in her and all her peers to this day. And as parental involvement is a must, it sometimes seemed like all our friends were Sequoyah friends, many of whom we are still close to. A great deal of the curriculum involves camping around California and the West, and there’s nothing like a few nights under the stars at Anza-B to bond a group for life.
So I’m thrilled to celebrate 60 years of Sequoyah, and was particularly thrilled to finally pay a visit to its still-new high school campus at the cool, woodsy Neighborhood Church campus on North Orange Grove. Funny, because the original K-8 campus is the site of the old Neighborhood Church, which sadly razed its old Craftsman building at the first 710 Freeway scare (and happily saved its Smith + Williams midcentury modern chapel, now the library) and sold to Caltrans, still the owner.
My tour guide: That perfect Sequoyahan, Louise Siskel, the cancer researcher and NASA biologist and 101st Rose Queen.
I hadn’t know what to expect. The rigors of college prep — I couldn’t figure out how that would translate from the freewheelin’ early years. I knew the students were smart; members of the school paper — The Barefoot Times, natch — had visited my office last year. I met Louise inside the church; we walked out past Greene & Greene’s Cole House, built by former Mayor Rick Cole’s grandparents; we wandered through Pasadena architect Doug Ewing’s perfectly matched new Craftsman-California Modern classrooms. “We’re a small school, so they’re multi-purpose — this is Spanish, and physics,” Louise said. She was just back from Sacramento. “Oh — were Sen. Portantino and Assemblyman Holden giving you ornate certificates?” “No,” Louise laughed. “That’s next month. It was like a moot court. A sexual assault case.” “You were defending or prosecuting the guy?” “Defending. It was actually a girl. False allegations. She didn’t get charged.”
We walked into her next class, Undiscovered Country, a hybrid of philosophy and literature taught by Ian Chang, an Iowa Writers Workshop MFA novelist and former cook at Lucques. It was Plato’s Parable of the Cave and it was Descartes, and all of a sudden I was 17 again, walking for the first time into Stan Sheinkopf’s literature class at Blair High, hearing stuff that was way over my head, wondering if I could ever catch up. Ian read Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West.” He asked: “Is nothing something?” “Yes,” came the answer. “Because nothing is a word that describes nothingness, so being a word, it is a thing.” “But what about the thing that word refers to?” “Nothingness is a state, one could argue.” “So: nothing is not nothing.” “There’s no such thing as nothing.” “But in your mind, when you think of nothing, that is something?” “Ian, you are proposing a paradox that kind of questions reality.” “Well, you kind of have to, in a class like this.” “What are we applying ‘nothing’ to?” That, the teacher proposed, was a slightly different question for another day.
Sixty years on, Sequoyah continues to give Pasadena students lots to think about.
Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.
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