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Portland, Oregon Period Piece
Copyright 2022 Grey Whale Press Productions --
Portland, Oregon’s John Marshall High School has been closed for more than a decade but it remains an indelible memory
for thousands of Portlanders of baby boomer age and below.
Here comes MAVO – High School in the 1960s, Freshman Year. It’s an epic memoir of the defunct high school’s
heyday, authored by Mike Bonner, a 1969 Marshall graduate. It covers the narrator’s freshman year of 1965-66, documents
the Marshall High social scene, his Oregonian newspaper route, his dysfunctional family, and other items germane to teenage
life in East Portland fifty plus years ago.
Portlandia notwithstanding, East Portland has never been the subject of literature in the sense that New York, Chicago, Los
Angeles or the American south traditionally have been. In every sense, MAVO is a first.
“It’s written as comedy,” Bonner said, “as any look back to life in a simpler time generally tends
to be. But like Huckleberry Finn, it’s a dark comedy. For instance, the word mavo is a slur that was used to describe
poor white kids from East Portland. An equivalent term today might be punk, goth, slum, or hood, but for us, mavo was a white
kid’s put down of choice.”
The memoir tells the story of fourteen year old Patrick Compton, who must rely on his own resources now that his parents are
divorcing. This occurs soon after he graduates from Catholic Ascension School to attend the sprawling public high school on
SE 91st Street, John Marshall.
Patrick’s four siblings are similarly at sea, if in different ways. The names of real individuals along with a mix of
fictionalized and compressed characters populate the story.
“I had to change some names for the usual reason,” Bonner says. “To protect the innocent.”
An excerpt:
The rest of the day passed in a normal fashion—if any day at John Marshall High School could be deemed normal. The school
day was divided into twenty one twenty minute “modules.” Every twenty minutes, the bells jangled and the halls
filled with kids. Some classes lasted twenty minutes, others forty. Majorly tough classes, like physics, chemistry, algebra,
and geometry, lasted a whole hour.
In between times, there were whispered conversations, silly antics, loud arguments, pranks, displays of affection, a few fights.
The florescent fixtures burned like torchlight on sweaty faces. Svelte girls in sleeveless pastel dresses would preen, boys
would swagger and strut. Wallflowers would hug walls, extroverts would shout and bellow.
Looming over the life of Portland teenagers during the era is the specter of the war in Vietnam. Ronald Reagan is a B movie
actor with ambitions to become California’s next governor. Richard Nixon is a washed up former Vice President.
John F. Kennedy is dead, murdered in a manner that still stirs controversy. In August of 1964, the new President Lyndon Johnson
pushed through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, stepping up the war in Indochina. Here and there, older boys from Patrick’s
neighborhood are being drafted or voluntarily joining the military.
“I’m not one of those writers who stands in awe of our parent’s generation, whom some would dub The Greatest
Generation,” Bonner said. “After World War II and Korea, the best they could imagine for their own sons was to
ship them off to die by the thousands in a pointless and cruel Asian war? I can’t think of a single kid from our time
and place, male or female, who wasn’t adversely affected by it. MAVO doesn’t address Vietnam directly, but it’s
there, hovering in the background, ;ike a serpent in our generation’s Garden of Eden.”
Along with the bad, there was the good. The building of lifelong friendships, associations with young women that presages
the advent of an overdue and welcome feminism. Serious, reflective, and caring teachers. Experiments in the art of growing
up that are impossible to forget.
Throughout 2015, Bonner circulated drafts of MAVO among former Marshall students through personal contact and select social
media. “I got back a whole variety of suggestions, corrections, and opinions, which I greatly appreciated,” Bonner
said. “Running the book by people in the know resulted in a much improved final product.”
Mike Bonner currently lives in Eugene, Oregon and has published many books for middle school readers on sports, celebrity,
history, and civics subjects, among other writings.
MAVO is his first memoir.
Since its original publication 2013, Grey Whale Press migrated MAVO from its original home on lulu.com for distribution
through Amazon and other national and international bookseller channels. An ebook edition of MAVO appeared in the summer of
2016. A final edition appeared in 2022.
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