Iggy Pop Read Online Free PDF

gentleman, but he enjoyed playing golf, and we had a very nice relationship with father and son. Young Jim was just learning, an active boy who played left handed, and we all enjoyed each other’s company. I can still remember those evenings.’
     
    For most American schoolkids, the transition from elementary to junior high school is a critical rite of passage. Untold numbers of movies, books, songs and poems record the shattered illusions, psychological traumas or long-treasured triumphs of those crucial early teenage years, which for many defined the shape of the adult life that would follow. Jim Osterberg managed this transition with enviable ease - in fact, he would leave his junior high celebrated by his schoolmates as one who would do great things. However, as an adult, Osterberg would term himself an outsider, someone marked out by the fact he was raised on a trailer park. The petty indignities endured at the hands of his comfortably middle-class contemporaries seemed to rankle with him for decades; in later years that belief would drive him, an abiding sense that he was an outcast. But for his one-time Carpenter friends, who watched as Jim graduated to hanging with ‘the snooty kids’, that belief seemed at best ironic - and at worst, completely ludicrous.
    Duane Brown still recalls Jim’s competitiveness: ‘He was always trying to outdo the rest of us. And he was pretty good at it.’ No one in his small group of friends resented Jim’s need to prove himself the smartest - at first. ‘[Then] we got into junior high and high school, and I began to think, he thinks he’s too good for us, and I don’t know quite why,’ says Brown. ‘He just seemed a little stuck up, I thought, as he became an older child. It might be he didn’t want any of the people he was associating with [at Tappan Junior High] to know any of us from the trailer park because we might blow his cover. But he had very little to do with any of us from elementary school after we got to high school.’
    Sharon Ralph also looked on disapprovingly as Jim entered a new social circle with the move to Tappan in 1960: ‘I don’t know why he felt ashamed of being part of the trailer park - except that when we got to Tappan and Ann Arbor High, the kids were snooty, and he wanted to fit in with those. And he certainly did hang out with the snooty kids.’
    Tappan Junior High is on Stadium Boulevard, near Michigan Stadium, in a green and leafy part of town known as Ann Arbor Hills. It’s an imposing, elegant, spacious building, which must have been slightly intimidating to any child, especially one who took the bus down Washtenaw Avenue from an out-of-town trailer park. The presence of the University of Michigan ensured that Tappan, and the nearby high school it fed, Ann Arbor High, were both beacons of excellence in the American public-school system. Many parents worked as academics or administrators at the university; many of the teachers were exceptionally highly educated women who worked in the high-school system while their husbands studied for higher degrees. ‘There wasn’t a pressure from [Tappan] families about money,’ remembers Jim’s contemporary, Mim Streiff, ‘but there was a lot of pressure about educational attainment - that was a real focus.’
    Yet the scent of big money was inescapable at Tappan, thanks to the presence of a clique of wealthier kids from Ann Arbor Hills, which was where the city’s architects, administrators, professors and company managers chose to reside. Most significantly, it was also home of a new generation of Ford management, who consciously aligned themselves with the liberal, sophisticated traditions of Ann Arbor. The Ford ‘whiz kids’ were a group of ten ex-US Army Air Corps officers headed by Colonel Charles ‘Tex’ Thornton, which included two future Ford presidents: Robert McNamara and Arjay Miller. Both McNamara and Miller chose to live in the intellectual, academic environment of Ann Arbor,