THE REJECT BENCH by JAMES H MORGAN

The Reject Bench…
In June, 1961, the Morgan family moved from their little house in a blue collar neighborhood in Upland, California to a bigger and better house in Claremont, five miles away. Jim Morgan had just completed his freshman year, and he was not happy about leaving his Upland friends, who claimed he was moving to Snob City. But after nearly a full year of solitary lunches at his new school, he finally made a couple of friends, and over the next two years, other transfer students found their way to their group, a group that occupied a bench that one of them christened the Reject Bench.
While normal life was proceeding as it does, the world was in turmoil. The Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. By high school graduation, in June of 1964, the Vietnam War was beginning to dominate the news, slowly escalating at first, then rapidly expanding. The military draft grew to accommodate the war’s intensifying manpower needs, a Sword of Damocles for young men of that era. The Reject Bench is about Jim and his friends and how they lived in those trying times.