If you were growing up in the West San Gabriel Valley in the 1970s and early 1980s, it was for the first time ever in the century-long history of the area that what we might call school choice became an issue for teens entering high school, or rather for their parents.

The choice was between public schools, which at the dawn of the ’70s easily 90% of the kids in Altadena, Pasadena, Sierra Madre and South Pasadena attended, and both the long-established and rapidly expanding new group of private schools — “independent schools,” as they preferred.

La Canada had recently seceded from the Pasadena Unified School District so that its almost all-White student body didn’t have to attend, as its members long had, John Muir High School, alma mater of, not to put too fine a point on it, Jackie Robinson.

San Marino schools — hard as it is today to believe — were almost entirely White. So were Arcadia’s, a district to which many White PUSD families moved after the court-ordered busing for racial integration in 1971, before many moved on to Orange County beach cities.

You can debate the reasons for the White flight. But you can’t deny that it happened.

My family was pro-integration. I was in fact involved in the school board politics as pro-busing and anti-busing candidates slugged it out in vitriolic campaigns. I gave a public-comment speech at an Ed Center board meeting that was really, really sappy. I got to know, as I have now for over half a century, Ray Cortines, the political genius, pro-integration PUSD superintendent.

I wasn’t interested in the private schools. Almost no one I knew went to one. First off, they were very expensive, It was mostly a matter of Polytechnic and Flintridge Prep, or, if you were a girl, Westridge, Mayfield and Sacred Heart. Tiny Anoakia and Alverno, too.

But then my mother got her master’s degree in library science and became the librarian at Flintridge.

“Lawrence,” she said, “since I’m faculty here, you could attend for free,” she said.

“I’m staying at Muir,” I replied. “All my friends are there.”

“That’s fine.”

What I didn’t say out loud was that Flintridge — that’s we called it then; “Prep” is what they say now — was an all-boys school at the time, with a certain bro culture. I had no interest in going to a school that had no girls.

A few years later, Prep went co-ed. It also reached for the academic stars, and for the first time rivaled the other privates in reputation.

That was the time that Pasadena journalist and novelist Chip Jacobs, author of the acclaimed historical novel “Arroyo,” attended Prep. And the Prep of over four decades ago is mostly the setting for his novel “Later Days,” to be published Sept. 16 by the wonderful Los Angeles press Rare Bird.

Except he doesn’t call it Flintridge Preparatory School. He calls it Stone Canyon Prep. Don’t know why. I mean, he calls Poly, Poly, and the great rivalry plays out in the plot, including in a crazy high-caffeine dosed basketball game that ends in forfeit and ambulance rides to the Huntington emergency room.

Maybe Chip thought he’d be sued, or at least sentenced to detention by the headmaster, if he named the name. We will find out when I interview him later in the summer for our Books section about what it’s like to write two important works of fiction about his hometown after a career in newspapers and volumes about crime, pollution and his complex and interesting family.

I’m still in the middle of “Later Days,” which deals not only with Prep and its jocks, freaks, intellectuals and geeky faculty but with Caltech’s famous underground steam tunnels, where a Nobelist is encountered; besties bound for Stanford and Cal before problems arise; sex, drugs and lots of rock ’n’ roll. But I jumped ahead to a late chapter, “The Return,” about what it’s like to come back in 2000 to a school now endowed by big-time money, and love it: “Everything’s so freshly unwrapped: the expanded, Ethernet-wired classrooms and two-window snack bar selling salads and BLTs; the space-age gym with digital scoreboard. The twenty-screen computer center. Supposedly, there was a ‘relaxation couch’ in the girls’ room.” And, for a novel that begins with a harrowing bullying incident involving a campus tough and our protagonist, a sign in a walkway: “Our Honor Code Has ZERO Tolerance for Bullies.” How times change when we dare go back to our old school.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.