On Surviving School and Learning a
Little Along the Way -- Pardon my self-indulgence. It’s Funny how things come
back to you while you are doing something else. I was writing on an entirely
different topic when I took a turn and ended up here. I guess sometimes things
have to break out of your head and land on paper. This is a rambling
autobiographical account of my early days in school back in the “Leave it to
Beaver” era.
I was one of those students that, if in elementary school
today, would be spending quality time with the school psychologist and probably
diagnosed as having some degree of attention deficit disorder. Somehow I learned that putting words on paper
was fulfilling at this early age. Kids at this age are looking for something
that they excelled at and I was a champion reader. I read early and often so I
became familiar with how ideas were expressed on paper. Conversation was
sporadic and disjointed but when an idea was committed to paper it had to be
clear and complete. I can actually remember learning about the period and
experiencing one of those light-bulb moments when it became clear that when someone
was trying to communicate an idea they had to do it before the period showed
up. Periods and commas did not just appear at random. I also figured out that before you can really
be a writer you need to have something to write about. Luckily, there was so
much going on in my world that the normal school work of arithmetic and cursive
writing were an intrusion.
In first grade we had Jack the talking crow who would come
and sit on our class window sill and entertain the kids and aggravate the
teacher. The windows were at ground level and Jack would just walk up, like crows
do, and peer in the window. If it was warm and the windows were open he would
hop in and walk up and down the window sill. Jack was wild and big and the girls
were terrified -- which made his visits to first grade so much more enjoyable.
The school legend was that Jack had been captured by a neighborhood
ne'er-do-well and had his tongue split and somehow he learned to talk. We hung
on every word but he wasn't much of a conversationalist. My first grade teacher went nuts (literally) and
had to leave about two-thirds of the way through the school year. Maybe Jack
had something to do with it. We could
see it coming; she had been going downhill for a while and the Christmas
vacation must have sent her over the edge. She hung on for a few weeks but
eventually she “went to Chicago”. As a result, we were parceled out to other
classes like refugees for the last few months of the school year. Each
classroom develops a culture after a few months so we were alien beings in our
new surroundings and Jack the Crow couldn’t seem to find us. The other kids were
crow-deprived and had no experiences with Jack and figured we were as crazy as
our old teacher.
In second grade my teacher was a rookie straight out of
Little Rock, Arkansas. We only understood about half of what she said (I
swan!). We liked her mostly due to the novelty of her approach to English. We
all sounded like southern aristocracy after a couple months. She seemed very
young even to us. She couldn’t have been over twenty-five. We liked her a lot. Since we had more tenure at the school than she did we could stretch the rules and she didn't know any better.
The novelty of second grade got even better because my school caught
fire and burned down during the Christmas vacation. The students were farmed
out to local church basements where tables and a few salvaged desks were
arranged around portable blackboards. I
actually had nothing to do with the fire but I recall having my picture taken
in a triumphant pose next to the smoking ruins. I suspect that there were a lot
of similar pictures of other kids. They said it was faulty wiring up in the
attic that started the fire. The school was old and decrepit but it was better
than the church basements we had to report to in January. The teachers and students struggled to keep
things moving ahead but conditions were terrible.
Those years spent in the church basements I count as my
missing years. I spent most of my time concealed
behind the blackboard copying lessons that everyone else copied ten minutes
earlier. I was too busy at the time but was expected to catch up and to this
day I’m still running about ten minutes behind. Sometimes the blackboards
flipped so I was back there trying to copy the lesson upside down. I was right
side up…the lesson wasn’t. Sometimes
there were several of us back there and it was great fun until the teacher
figured it out.
Third grade was a total loss. We were in the dungeon at the local
Missionary Baptist Church. I didn't know churches had dungeons and if they did
I was sure that mine, being a semi-rural, hard-rock Missouri Synod Lutheran
Church, would have a doozy plus some torture equipment. But my experience among
the Baptists was bleak and foreboding. I remember it as dark with bare light
bulbs and no windows and I really needed windows. My third grade teacher was a
hatchet-faced lady who was always in a bad mood. I have to give the teachers
credit because the working conditions were terrible and I'm sure (now, being
much older) that they tried very hard to keep us on track. Some of our text
books were water damaged and smelled of smoke so no one even wanted to touch
them. Everything was makeshift. In third
grade I don't even recall having recess.
The sky opened in fourth grade. We were no longer in a
church basement but were in a funny looking asbestos cardboard type of
building. It had lots of windows and was full of all kinds of cool stuff like
bird nests and hornet nests and fossils and some real stuffed animals…never
mind the asbestos. We had class pets and terrariums and pen pals. This was
heaven and the teacher was an angel. I have friends from that period who stayed
in contact with that teacher well into adulthood. I was finally inspired to
write what was bouncing around in my head and some of it was good. My life
behind the blackboard ended and I was welcomed with open arms back into the
society of fourth graders.
As luck would have it, they rebuilt the school and we
finally moved back in at the start of fifth grade. This was my first male
teacher. I didn’t know they came in that variety. Up until this time I figured all teachers were
women...except for the music teacher who was a little bit odd and peevish and
was easily provoked into spasms of rage.
The new school was a disappointment as it looked just like
the old school. Our teacher was a part-time Baptist minister whose day job was
trying to teach something, anything, to ten year olds. I was a little wary of
the Baptist minister connection because I still had haunting memories of third
grade. As it turned out, he mostly enjoyed having the little girls sit on his
lap. The boys were free to do anything that
wasn't too disruptive. I was a budding scholar by this time and was beginning
to get the idea that if I was going to learn anything useful I was going to
have to teach myself. Unfortunately, my interests didn't always coincide with
the classroom material. I would write letters and ask people to send me
information. I wrote to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and got a large bundle of
material on King Tut, Luxor and Giza. My parents had an old Crosley radio with
a shortwave band that I used to listen to English language broadcasts from
Paris and (God forbid!!) Moscow. I wrote off to the Paris broadcasters and
received a bundle of information and ended up on their mailing list for several
years. What they sent was very technical and way over my head but it was still
cool getting mail from France. I had a pen pal in England and we sent letters
back and forth for a couple years.
This was 1957 and the floodgates had opened and we didn't
have time for this mundane school stuff. Everything was cool. Cars had huge
fins and soon the Edsel was introduced. Elvis was on the television...or at
least his upper half. This was the International Geophysical Year for heaven's
sake! Sputnik was flying around overhead. I managed to be sick (wink, wink) the
day the USA tried to launch our Vanguard rocket in an attempt to catch up to
the Soviets. I was tuned in on the old Crosley when they launched it and the sucker
blew up on the launch pad. I was mortified because I was sure I could hear
Sputnik’s little beep-beep on the shortwave laughing at us. I remember when a kid smuggled the first
transistor radio into school and we had to attach the wire aerial to a chain link
fence in the schoolyard to pick up anything and then you could only barely hear
it. We still had a classroom schedule but it was often interrupted by TB patch
tests, fire drills, tornado drills and atomic bomb drills. This was the year I joined the school band.
My band career was relatively short lived. I struggled with
the clarinet for two years. We still had the same old music teacher and he served
as our band director. He was even more high-strung when working with the school
band. His nerves were shot and he was beginning to hold grudges. If you did something wrong
you were on his list forever. We only performed one piece of music, "Our Director March" by F. E. Bigelow. We made no attempt to learn anything
else and I can still hear it in my head. Even at the Christmas assembly we
played the Our Director March. One day I managed to get tangled up in several
music stands and caused a racket and the music teacher suffered a melt-down. I
had apparently been on his list for some time already and this was the
last straw. We were both yelling and somewhere along the way I told him what he
could do with the clarinet. That was the end of my music career.
In my elementary school, sixth grade was the “senior” class.
The teacher that year was a nice lady with hairy arms who meant well but had no
idea what was going on in class…or should I say out of class. All the boys seemed to have weak bladders
that year and we tended to congregate, one by one, in the boys’ bathroom
several times a day. Our classroom and the bathrooms were on the second floor.
If one was so inclined, one could climb out the boys’ bathroom window and walk
sideways on the ledge, flat against the brick wall of the building, and peek
into the girls’ bathroom (much to the delight of any of the girls who happened
to be there). One could also go the other direction and peek into the classroom
window. I’m not sure what the local
neighbors thought about kids being on the second floor ledge during class time
but they apparently never called the school to report it. At one point the
teacher noticed that most of the boys were missing and had been gone for quite a
while. She decided to investigate and stormed into the boys’ bathroom. As eleven year olds, we were scandalized that
she would dare to enter this male sanctuary. In spite of our protests, we were
frog-marched back to class…all of us except for the kid out on the ledge. It never occurred to her that someone would be
out there. That episode put a damper on our ledge walking for a while.
The transition to what was then called “Junior High School”
was a little stressful for everyone that had to go through it. Kids going into
“middle school” today have similar experiences. The kids who were big fish in
the little pond suddenly became average fish in a much larger pond in seventh
grade. We all knew the kids from our local school….kids that had similar talking
crow experiences and had spent time in Baptist church basements or on the ledge…but
now there were kids from six other schools as well. It took some time to get
this all sorted out and I was mostly a spectator. It turns out that there were
some grudges between different schools and an apparent pecking order based on
where you lived. We had to scamper from one class to another and there were gym
classes and hallway lockers. Lockers were all we had as private space. That was
where you stashed your copy of Lolita or Playboy or where you daily checked out
that old banana until it turned into something else that defied description.
This was 1960 and it was an election year. Kennedy against
Nixon and our school was split down the middle. Twelve year olds became highly
partisan cheerleaders; a reflection of what was going on in society, and our school
became a huge venue for political expression.
The school busses dumped us off in the morning and we came equipped with
posters and signs promoting our favorite candidate and congregated in the gym
until class started. We were two opposing camps waving signs and mouthing
slogans. I was a Kennedy man, partly
because I just liked him but also because my Baptist missionary cousins flew
home from Brazil and were tramping around the country telling everyone not to
vote for a Catholic. We never saw those people before or since but they made a
bee-line to our house that year to deliver the message. I figured that if
Kennedy scared the Baptists that much he must be pretty good.
All during seventh grade we heard about the new junior high
school that was going to open the following year. This was, of course, the baby
boomer generation and we usually did things in huge groups. It was normal to
have forty kids in a single class with one teacher (hence the ledge walking
episodes in sixth grade). Apparently the district decided it couldn’t manage
with only one junior high school anymore and built a new second facility to
handle kids on the west side of the district. That was me and my friends – we,
who had endured such hardships and deprivations, were going to be the first ones
to inaugurate the new school that opened in eighth grade. Everything comes to
those who wait. We were also shucking some of those no-account kids from the
eastern provinces of the school district. Everything was hunky-dory…new school,
new desks, new lockers, new gym, and new books. The place smelled new. It was ours! I remember that they said that
the school cost $2,000,000 to build so I looked around and took it all in. For
a long time I used that as a yardstick of what $2,000,000 would buy. Unfortunately,
this was in 1961 dollars and my yardstick became obsolete before too long. Eighth grade itself was fairly uneventful. Kennedy won the
election so we were asking what we could do for our country. We had Civics
class in seventh grade so now we knew all about how government worked. All of this was taking place during the Cold War and we were constantly having various drills. The school district had publicized plans of what they would do in case of a missile attack but these plans changed almost every year. We went from hiding under our desk to hiding in the windowless hallways and stairwells to, finally, being turned out of school to fend for ourselves. That was the last plan that I remember. All the kids would be “sent home” to be with their families…on foot. Since they estimated that we would have maybe twenty minutes advance warning and I lived about five miles from school I would be running five consecutive four-minute miles to reach my front door just as the bomb went off. I didn’t have much faith in that plan.
Ninth grade…wow. I was in high school. Talk about a crazy place! Our high school was relatively new and was
designed and built on a California campus model. We had eight or nine buildings
with broad sunny sidewalks connecting the various buildings. This probably
worked in California but in Missouri it was a living hell. One’s locker was
probably in the 400 building while most of one’s classes were in the 200
building and one had only eight minutes between classes. One ended up carrying
most of one’s books along with one’s coat and gym bag for most of the day
because there was no way to make it to class if one had to visit one’s
locker. I learned to use “one” in ninth
grade instead of the incorrect “you” (or the ubiquitous “yous”).
Ninth grade was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis…October, 1962. We would talk and think of nothing else for a couple weeks. I kept a cool head and was certain that it would all be OK in the end. I'm not sure why I was so confident and recent evidence suggests it was more serious than we thought at the time. I recall some girls who sat in class sobbing and the teachers were not much help. Some families were spooked so much that they took their kids out of school and sent them to live with relatives far from the city. In a couple weeks everything settled down but it was truly a scary time.
Our school had a smoking policy. Students could smoke only
in designated areas. There was only one designated area and it was a fenced in
space, maybe twenty feet square, out by the football field. Every morning,
before class, students would shoe-horn themselves into that tiny corral so they
could smoke a cigarette. It was very strange. Rain or shine…hot or cold…there
would be a pall of smoke rising from the little fenced in smoking pit that was
crammed with people. Not being a smoker, I never ventured into the pit but I’m
not sure that smoking was the only thing that was going on but it was so
crowded that no one could tell. As I said, we baby-boomers did things in
groups.
Another curious feature at high school was a rocket ship planted
on the front lawn of the school. Our team name was the Rams…not the Rockets…but
we had a rocket perched like a hood ornament in front of the school.
Apparently, a few years earlier, one of the students entered an essay contest to
win a fully operational rocket ship simulator from Kraft foods. Well, she won.
This sucker was as big as a small school bus and equipped with hydraulics and
impressive 1959-era bells and whistles. It really worked and was mounted on
sort of a moving launch pad. It was big enough inside to seat four or five
people but the cost of installing and operating it made it impractical for the contest
winner to keep it…..so she donated it to her high school. It was an easy target
for graffiti from rival schools during football season. It was surrounded by a
fence but that didn’t deter anyone dedicated enough to climb over and paste a
sign on it. It was still there in the
1970s and may still be there for all I know.
In high school we were all back together again. Things were
better because we were focused on parading back and forth between buildings and
didn’t have time to interact much outside of class. We had real teams to cheer for and common
goals. The school band could play more than one tune and we had a school
choir…actually more than one. We also had interesting, almost legendary,
teachers. One teacher had been there so long that they named a building after
her…and yet she stayed. She couldn’t
take a hint. We had a Coach that would eat students alive…or at least we
thought so. He was built like a wrestler and apparently won a state or NCAA
wrestling title of some sort. Nobody messed with him. Besides being a PE Coach
he was required to teach health class. I was in his health class when the news
broke that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. This man was transformed
before our eyes into a caring and sensitive human being. He calmed everyone down and tried to make
sense of what was happening. We had a public address system and the school
piped the TV news audio into each classroom while we waited for the news. There was absolute silence throughout the
school while Walter Cronkite issued news bulletins. Everything was confused because
no one knew if this was some kind of broader attack or who was left to be in
charge. I don’t recall classes changing that afternoon and I’m sure we just sat
there for a few hours trying to sort things out.
I recall another teacher…not her name but just the
circumstances. She was our English
Literature teacher and we spent the first couple months of the term listening
to Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte-Marie records while she went on and on about how
relevant and important this all was. She
would almost swoon over Bob Dylan. One
day we came into class and she wasn’t there and no one knew where she was. Her record player was missing along with her
records. One of the biology teachers was
also missing and it turned out that they joined forces and ran off to
California leaving his wife and kids to fend for themselves. This was a few
years before the “Summer of Love” so I guess they were the advance party. By
that time some of us were feeling pretty groovy ourselves after listening to
Joan, Buffy and Bob every day. We then
had a series of substitutes who expected us to actually know something about
literature. They were not groovy.
I had a couple years of Spanish. This actually started in Junior
High but I stayed with it. I recall the language lab where we sat in little
cubicles with headphones on repeating recorded Spanish words or phrases.
Sometimes we would record ourselves and play it back so we could hear what we
sounded like. I swear that I was a regular Antonio Banderas in Spanish class. I
missed my calling.
Generally speaking I would say that I did not have a
wonderful high school experience. I was a little bookish and very quiet. Although
I dabbled in it, dating was not my thing. I recall going to school dances and
at least one basketball game…my least favorite sport...and occasional football
games. I still excelled in those subjects that I liked and hated anything that
had to do with math. Happily, I finally
found a math teacher who made some sense out of Algebra…the second time around.
My writing was better than most of the
other students and would be used as an example of what they should be striving
for. I had mixed feelings about this. I was happy that I was a good writer…it
felt good and I knew it was good. On the other hand, I was mortified that maybe
the teacher would reveal my name when she used my writing in class. She never
did.
I was not active in sports or clubs. The high school was
eight miles from home and any after school activity meant that I had to walk
for about two hours since there was no other way to get home. We had a few
clubs that met during school hours and I participated in some of that but never
became involved in organized sports…something that I regret a little.
We graduated in June of 1966. By the time we finished high
school one of our classmates who had already dropped out of school joined the
army. He was sent to Viet Nam and was already dead by the time we got our
diploma. Our class song was “Blowing in
the Wind”. Some of us were thinking
about college, some were thinking about the military (both good and bad) and
some were thinking about wearing flowers in their hair.
So, in the end I went on to two years at the local Junior
College where most people played cards but I found education (at last) and a
better understanding of myself (at last). I finished up at a state college (now
a “University”) in Cape Girardeau. This was my introduction to small town
America and I liked it. I managed to miss military service due to what
I still consider divine intervention. I
never actually wore flowers in my hair, or at least not for more than a few
minutes…or maybe I did and don’t remember. I tried to grow my hair long but I had so much
that it piled up and I looked like Albert Einstein…not the image I was striving
for.
And so it went. I still wonder what ever happened to Jack the
talking crow.
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