{"id":29246,"date":"2013-07-25T16:49:56","date_gmt":"2013-07-25T16:49:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alternativejonestown.com\/?page_id=29246"},"modified":"2014-08-22T23:49:37","modified_gmt":"2014-08-22T23:49:37","slug":"bebelaar","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=29246","title":{"rendered":"Roses in Memoriam – The students of Opportunity High"},"content":{"rendered":"

I taught the young people of Peoples Temple at Opportunity High in 1976 and 1977. Since 2006 I have been working with another teacher, Ron Cabral, on a book, And Then They Were Gone: Children of Peoples Temple from San Francisco to Jonestown,<\/em> about the young people from Peoples Temple who came to Opportunity High. Through this work, I have come to know those students better now than I did 35 years ago, as Ron and I have discovered stories \u2013 or have been fortunate to have people share stories with us \u2013 that we didn\u2019t know then, as well as some photographs which tell stories too.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the simplest things are the most powerful, like names written on stone. With the memorial, we finally have a place to go to look for a name, pause and remember. And that is exactly what I did on the day of the Memorial Day ceremony. I had planned to attend the dedication ceremony, but as it turned out, I was unable to make it. I did however go to the cemetery later in the day, after the ceremony was over.<\/p>\n

The cemetery was quiet when I arrived. I had brought some red roses, so I opened the bundle and began to look for my students\u2019 names on the stones. Walking around the group of newly-laid marble panels on the hillside at Evergreen Cemetery, I paused whenever I found a familiar name and bent to place a flower there.<\/p>\n

A rose for Mark Sly, who didn\u2019t want to go to Guyana. His art teacher, Anna Wong, encouraged him to apply to a college with a good art program because of his finely detailed, Escher-like drawings. One of the rewards of embarking on the book project is that I was able to tell Mark\u2019s mother Neva that \u2013 yes \u2013 Mark did have at least one girlfriend before he died, something she\u2019d often wondered about, and that Michelle, who was not in the Temple, was another smart, sensitive, artistic young person who thought Mark\u2019s smile, \u201cthough rare, was beautiful.\u201d I was happy I had been able to give Neva and Michelle the chance to talk to one another.<\/p>\n

A rose for sweet Joyce Polk Brown, whose poem about a beautiful tropical place and \u201clittle creatures hiding from the rain,\u201d along with her lovely face come to mind whenever I think of her. Teachers are not supposed to have favorites, but being human, we do. She\u2019d still be writing and dancing, I\u2019m sure, if she\u2019d been one of the lucky ones who survived, though I know it hasn\u2019t been an easy road for them. I wondered, like Mark\u2019s mother, if she\u2019d had a boyfriend in Jonestown. It\u2019s hard to imagine she wouldn\u2019t have had many suitors, though her biographical box<\/a> has no entry for a husband or partner, nor have I found any reference to anyone in the journals of Edith Roller, who was her teacher in Jonestown.<\/p>\n

And a rose for Dorothy Buckley, the idealist, the determined dreamer. Dorothy was a poet too, and Opportunity\u2019s equivalent of student body president. Her mother and sister had been with the Temple for a long time. Though Jones singled out Dorothy for special attention among the Jonestown children, she died with the rest. In a previous version of the book I imagined her day-dreaming about \u201cjumping over the broom\u201d in a West African marriage tradition, and talking about her plans for college.<\/p>\n

And one for Mondo, Amondo Griffith, a sweet and handsome boy, one of the poet-baseball players at Opportunity.<\/p>\n

And one for Ricky Johnson, another romantic soul. Jones chastised him in Guyana for letting his heart be broken and trying to kill himself. Maybe Ricky\u2019s swallowing the gasoline was his desperate way of attempting to escape.<\/p>\n

And one for Wesley Breidenbach, smart and serious, who angered at injustice on the baseball diamond and in the world. He would have loved college too, majoring, I\u2019d guess, in Political Science, maybe Philosophy. In Raven, <\/em>Tim Reiterman tells of how he managed to break through Wesley\u2019s grim soldierly mask, as they rode together in the back of the truck to the airstrip in Port Kaituma that last day by commenting on Guyana\u2019s beauty. Wesley became, for a moment, the teenager who loved the jungle and the idea of building an exemplary society there.<\/p>\n

And a rose for Ollie Smith, whom I know found love, and for her husband Eugene and their baby boy, and one for Teddy McMurry and his wife and child, and roses for Candace and Cindy Cordell, for Willie Thomas and Rory Bargeman and Sonje Duncan and Lisa Lewis and Marilee Bogue and so many more.<\/p>\n

At the gathering after the ceremony, I had a chance to talk with a man who had known Teddy McMurry and his brother well, and obviously cared for them. I talked with Linda Mertle again, and Johnny Cobb and Stephan Jones. There was a good feeling in the garden where people gathered in small groups to talk, a sense of something meaningful accomplished, of connections being made. I certainly appreciate the one I made with the woman who had known Joyce Polk in Jonestown, who told me that yes, Joyce had been one of the dancers and that, after pausing a moment to reflect, yes, \u201cJoyce was okay.\u201d In response to my question about a boyfriend, the woman said, \u201cEveryone had someone.\u201d That was good to hear.<\/p>\n

(Judy Bebelaar was a creative writing teacher at Opportunity High in San Francisco, which a number of young people from Peoples Temple attended. She and Ron Cabral are writing a book<\/a> which about the children of Peoples Temple whom they knew. She may be reached at judy@judybebelaar.com<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I taught the young people of Peoples Temple at Opportunity High in 1976 and 1977. Since 2006 I have been working with another teacher, Ron Cabral, on a book, And Then They Were Gone: Children of Peoples Temple from San Francisco to Jonestown, about the young people from Peoples Temple who came to Opportunity High. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":29507,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-29246","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29246"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61033,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29246\/revisions\/61033"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/29507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}