My junior year was the funnest year I spent in high school. It was probably because I was an “upper-classman” and because I could drive and participate in more activities without having to ride the bus all the time. By driving myself, I could leave Heber about thirty-five to forty-five minutes before an activity started and make it on time, whereas on the bus, I had to leave at least a full hour early. That wouldn’t work because I didn’t get off work early enough. By driving, I could work at the store until 6PM and still make it to the school activities that started at 7PM.
In Snowflake Union High School there were also some definite advantages to being upper- classmen. By the junior year we knew the teachers and they knew us, and we could get away with some things the freshman or sophomores couldn’t get away with. I also pretty well knew everyone in the school. The seniors were worrying about graduating or giving the freshmen and sophomores a hard time so they ignored the juniors. We didn’t have to worry about graduation and college so we could just sit back and have a good time. The fact that many of us had cars we could drive also gave us a sense of independence which we really enjoyed.
As freshmen and sophomores we were not able to leave campus at lunch time. There just wasn’t enough time if we had to walk to the drive‑in, eat and walk back to school before classes started up again. We were consigned to eat in the cafeteria whether we liked it or not. By the junior year, we had “wheels” and we could drive to one of the drive-ins if we wanted to and quite often we did. Oh, the joy of being mobile!
A lot of the juniors had steady girlfriends. Some of them went on to marry their high school “sweethearts” as soon as they were out of high school. Most of the group I was in weren’t into that. Most dated, but were not “going steady” with one person.
By the time I became a junior, our school class had pretty well segregated into several different groups. There were those who were constantly in trouble for one reason or another. Many of them just squeaked by in school and a few even dropped out before they graduated. There was the Native American group although at that time we just referred to them as “Indians”. (Our high school had dormitories where the Indian students lived during the school year to attend high school. The government paid for them and it helped the school financially). They tended to stay pretty much to themselves but occasionally fights would break out between the Indians and the first group. Snowflake High School didn’t have many students of different ethnic backgrounds except for the Indians. The third group was made up of those “going steady” who more or less took themselves out of the larger group. Their world revolved around themselves as far as they were concerned, and they were mostly oblivious to what else was going on around them. Then there were the rest of us. It was by far the largest group and I was part of that group. We were focused on getting out of high school and going on to college. I thoroughly enjoyed my junior year of high school.