Clint Eastwood Reflects on Oakland Tech

For those of you who don't know, motion picture icon and prototype of no-nosense masculinity Clint Eastwood is a member of Oakland Tech's graduating class of 1949. In a LA Times interview earlier this year, in promotion of Gran Torino, he mentioned Tech when addressing the supposed bigotry demonstrated by his lead character in the film.

"He could be from another world but he's a common guy for his generation," Eastwood said. "Everybody talked like that in the 1940s. I remember going to Oakland Tech and it was a high school but it also had a trade school connected to it. All the vets coming back from World War II were going there, so we were going to the same campus as guys who were 25, 26, 27 years old. They talked like that. They called each other Sam the Jew, Joe the Mick, Frank the Dago, whatever. Of course, you always said it with a smile on your face. If you said it without a smile on your face, well, then it meant something different."

It seems to me that not much has changed in this regard. A lot of my folks are hella racist to each other in jest, but there is also an understanding that you don't cross certain lines.

On a completely seperate note, there has been speculation that Clint graduated from sorry ass Piedmont High rather than the legendary Tech House, which cranked out legends like the Oakland A's Ricky Henderson and The Black Panther Party's Huey P. Newton. BUT the above picture is straight out of Tech's 1949 yearbook, irrefutable evidence that Dirty Harry himself is an Oakland Tech Bulldog. Now tell me that Clint's hairdo ain't clean and that my archival game ain't mean!