Writer Kurt Vonnegut once said that high school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else. Our high school reputations--as leaders or scapegoats, good girls or fast girls, popular athletes or feared delinquents--haunt Americans long into adulthood. The High School Scene in the Fifties: Voices from West L.A. offers a look at the high school clubs and social pecking order of postwar Los Angeles, when students' social...