My Elementary School Years: Teachers and Other Memories from My Stafford School Days

Today is Presidents Day, a holiday that was actually created in 1968 on the third Monday of each February. When I was in elementary school it seems we celebrated both Abraham Lincoln's birthday (February 12) and George Washington's birthday (February 22*). At this time I don't recall either being a national holiday, but some feel the name Presidents Day diminishes George Washington's role as founder of our country and the day should be returned to its rightful owner.

Having just finished the book Coach by Michael Lewis, it got me thinking about my own early influences. This will be a summary of my elementary school teachers. Do you remember all your teachers? What impact did they have on your life?

Kindergarten: Mrs. Strickland
I was about two or so when our family moved into a new development in Maple Heights, a suburb on the East side of Cleveland. I can't imagine a more ideal place to spend my early years. Stafford Elementary School was a half block away. There was a wonderful park with a public swimming pool two blocks to the south adjacent to the football stadium where the high school team played. Beyond the school was a forest and beyond that the new Southgate Shopping Center. 

Mrs. Strickland, my kindergarten teacher was one of two teachers who taught kindergarten. For some reason, the rumor was that Mrs. Novak was not the teacher you wanted, that Mrs. Strickland was much nicer. I believe my brother got Mrs. Novak two years later, which will be confirmed when he reads this.

The classroom seemed spacious, half of which was fairly open. There was a large carpet which, if I remember correctly, was unrolled each morning at the start of class and rolled back up after. On the other side of the room were some tables where we did crafts or learned how to write to 100.

Mrs. Strickland herself seemed tall and gangly. She was much older than most of the teachers I had at Stafford. I remember her demeanor as caring, not overbearing. 

My most memorable experience from that year was when a sixth grade student was brought in to our class to spend part of the day with us. Evidently he was being punished for misbehaving. This was a humiliation for him, obviously. What I recall is that we were working on writing to 100 and had been given graph paper and instructed to fill in the squares from 1 to 100. He was a very big kid and seated at my table and had to do the same assignment. He was very quiet and cooperative, though it must have been a humiliation. I remember almost nothing else from that year except that Mrs. Strickland seemed very nice. 

1st Grade: Miss Blackjack

I must have really liked Miss Blackjack. I have a vivid picture of her in my mind, wearing a black dress and a smile. She was quite plump, as in chubby, and I sat in the front row with my desk butted up against hers. Somehow I have it in my mind that she told my mom that I used to swing my legs and kick her in the shins when she was sitting at her desk. 

First grade was great because we got to go to the library and take out books. This was a very big deal for me. There was one book that I especially liked which was about a family or bears, I believe. I took that book out so many times that I was taken aside and asked to think about how many other books there are besides that one. For some reason, as long as I kept enjoying it, I wanted to keep re-reading it. 

Beyond that, I actually have no other memories, just the feeling of that being a good year and that Miss Blackjack was warm-hearted and nice..

2nd Grade: Miss Enden

This was my first grade picture.

I really liked Miss Enden, too. She was young and pretty, and seemed to enjoy teaching. If I recall correctly, Miss Enden got married during Easter Vacation and her name changed to Mrs. White. (This may have happened to Miss Morse, my fourth grade teacher as details are fuzzy. One of them had their name changed at Easter, and the other got married at the end of the school year.)

From second grade several memories stand out. The first was how we had three levels of reading--bluebird, redbird and something else. I was supposed to be in the advanced reading group, but when I saw what the middle group was reading, I requested to be changed to the lesser reading group. I believe that my parents were even consulted about this, though I can't be sure. 

A second memory is how we used to have regular Spelling Bees. I was surprised that when it narrowed down to few kids up front, they were all girls except me, or me and Kevin Flanagan. (Kevin, as it turns out, would later be class president his senior year in high school.) I would be in New Jersey by that time. It wasn't till I got to college and had a good friend who was an awful speller, but had been a valedictorian in high school, that I stopped judging peoples' intelligence by how accurate their spelling was.

A very painful memory from that year was this one. We used to do quizzes and then grade them ourselves. It was done in this fashion. When we finished the quiz, she would have us put our pencils away and pull out a red crayon to correct with. That is, we'd put an "x" by the wrong answers. Afterwards she would take our papers and record our grades in the grade book.

On one occasion I noticed that I had forgotten to write my name on the top as instructed. I snuck my pencil out to write my name, and she evidently thought I was correcting a wrong answer. Clearly I had violated the instructions since it was red crayon time. She said, "Eddie, tear up your paper and put it in the trash can." I was so humiliated. The worst, however, was yet to come. 

Miss Enden would have us put out heads down for a "rest period" while she recorded our scores in the book. Her desk was across the room and it looked like she was focused on writing in the book, so I stuck my tongue out at her. (I have no ideas where we learn these things.) Well, she saw, and said, "Eddie, please come over to my desk." Everyone's heads were down so I don't think anyone knew what this was about except me. I was one inch tall, and she said I would have to stay after school every day for a week. 

Clearly my humiliation must have shown. And for a week I stayed after school with Miss Enden, emptying the trash, tidying up things, taking the erasers down to the boiler room to be "cleaned" (which meant banging them together like cymbals until the accumulated chalk was knocked out.) She made it as fun as could be, actually. I'd already been punished. I've never stuck my tongue out at anyone again.

The highlight of that year came in the spring. My grandparents were planning a trip across the country by train to visit my aunt and uncle and my cousins outside Reno. They hoped to bring me along, and Miss Enden approved. I was an A student (with the exception of my handwriting) and the trip was a memorable and formative experience of my childhood.

3rd Grade: Mrs. Deuker

Despite her severe sounding name (Doiker) she was a fine teacher with a special challenge. For whatever reason, we had a mixed class of second graders and third graders that year. She was not particularly pretty--somewhat gangly, with horn-rimmed glasses--but she handled the situation well. The third graders would work on assignments while she worked with the second graders on their material. 

Some things we all did together, like Show and Tell. I never realized then, till my experience in Toastmasters, that Show and Tell was an opportunity to develop impromptu public speaking skills.

On one occasion, one of the second graders--Ronald Jerome--brought. robin's next to class for Show and Tell. His seat was in front of mine, and before doing his talk he went to the bathroom. When Ronald came back, he forgot that he'd placed the nest on his chair, so he scooted in to his desk and sat on it, breaking the little robin's eggs he planned to share. 

My most vivid memory of Mrs. Deuker came at the end of the school year. She asked for volunteers to help clean the classroom. Kids who took the school buses had to catch their buses. I didn't so I stayed and helped clean up the last two days of school. We had an aquarium in the classroom that year with guppies, and she said I could have the guppies because I had been a good helper. My parents bought an aquarium and the ozygenator, and I had my first experience with tropical fish.  (Thank you, Mrs. Deuker)

4th Grade: Miss Morse

Topps Civil War card. The dramatic artwork made an impression. 

Miss Morse had black hair and a kind, warm face. I recall very little about her other than that I believe I had a crush on her a little bit. Fourth grade is the year I began to have a sense of history. We had a large American Heritage book about the Civil War in the back of the classroom by the windows. When we weren't busy doing other things I  would go back and study the maps, photos and illustrations. I'm thinking that around this time Topps came out with its Civil War card set. 

Fourth grade was also the first year I began to notice myself taking an interest in girls. There were two girls I liked, though they were very different from each other. The one was the most popular girl in the class, outgoing and a little flirty, and the other was quiet, wore glasses and seemed shy. The popular girl was Patty and it seems like the boys flocked around her for some reason. The other was Nancy Kyle. Something about her turned my own heart mushy. 

On one occasion there was a class outing at the ice staking rink. The announcer proclaimed the next skate to be pairs with boys and girls. I immediately ran (the best you can with ice skates) and hid in the locker room. A couple classmates evidently knew of my crush--and maybe it was mutual?--and tried to bring me back outside, but I was in the corner on the floor kicking my skates so they would be injured if they tried to grab me. 

Before the next school year Nancy and her family moved to Wisconsin and I never saw her again.

5th Grade: Mrs. Murphy
My recollection of Mrs Murphy is a middle-aged woman, medium height, neither skinny nor heavy. I have few memories of that year other than this singular one.

I had a metal-bodied pen and I used to put it in my mouth and chew on it. I distinctly recall teeth marks on the barrel. One day, Mrs Murphy told me to stop putting my pen in my mouth. I'm not sure why I did this, and I do not recall anyone else being singled out for that. Well, the next day I was doing it again, so she told me I had to write a 500 word paper on why I liked putting my pen in my mouth. 

I put a lot of thought into it and really enjoyed explaining how the metal had an interesting flavor, etc. Instead of this being a punishment, it was almost like a reward. Very possibly the beginning of my writing career.

6th Grade: ? ? ? 
I can't even remember my 6th grade teacher at all. I don't have a name. Was it a he or she? It's fuzzy but we may have had a couple teachers, the home room teacher and then a science teacher. 

In November JFK was assassinated. That Friday afternoon there was an announcement over the school loudspeaker that we were to all go to the auditorium for an assembly. My class was one of the last to reach the auditorium and I was one of the last in the group. The doors to the front of the school were on my left and I stood there watching one of the janitors lowering the flag to half mast. I watched him as he returned to the foyer where other janitors were standing and this old man was weeping. Minutes later I learned why. It was like a numbness came over us all.

That weekend, our family had the television on to watch Lee Harvey Oswald get taken from the jail. The cameras were rolling and the nation would get to see first hand the alleged killer of our president. Suddenly a man broke into the screen and shot Oswald, an unforgettable image from an unforgettable weekend.

At the beginning of that school year we were invited to take up instruments to play in the school band. I had won a Grotto Circus Contest a couple years earlier and had money in the bank. My parents let me buy a used trombone with some of the money and I practiced with the school orchestra. Our performance in the Christmas concert was appallingly bad, evidently, so that afterwords the bandleader chewed us out rather furiously. I walked out that night with tears streaming down my cheeks, vowing never to play the trombone again.

Four weeks later our family moved to New Jersey, the most dramatic transition of my life till I went to college. Three weeks after that, The Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan Show. 

* * * *
* Here's a surprising factoid that I just learned. The National Archives states that "George Washington was born in Virginia on February 11, 1731, according to the then-used Julian calendar. In 1752, however, Britain and all its colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar which moved Washington's birthday a year and 11 days to February 22, 1732."

I'll bet you didn't know that!

Mad

... as in Magazine.

Don't know what made me think of Mad magazine this morning, but once it was there and I began ruminating, it seemed worthy of a few comments.

Two months ago I wrote about the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. If you recall, I had to save my quarter allowance instead of spending it in order to buy the fifty cent monster mag. Mad magazine was only 25 cents then, and when the next issue came out, I was on it. My quarter was gone.

We lived a couple miles from the downtown strip in Maple Heights, a suburb on Cleveland's southeast side. There was a downtown strip called Mapletown with a movie theater and stores and once a year they held a giant rummage sale where the sidewalks were filled for blocks with junk sellers. This was the early 1960s, and it was here that I discovered one of my greatest early treasures: a box of Mad magazines selling for a penny each, nearly an entire collection of the 1950's mags, undoubtedly worth a fortune today if I'd kept 'em.

A couple years ago as my father lay dying in an intensive care unit in a Tampa-area hospital, I bought a Mad magazine to read. I reminded him of that time in Mapletown and we talked about those old Mad magazines... and I noticed, sadly, how unfunny the current version of the rag was, even though some of the topics were echoes of its former self, such as the movie satires.

I remember when the back cover fold-in was first introduced in 1964. It was an election year. Do you remember the rather pointed message of that Barry Goldwater spoof? When you folded it in, the illustration became a mushroom cloud, revealing a major attitude of the Right at the time: Better dead than red.

We were in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviets, so the wordless Spy vs. Spy series was a big hit. Both the black character and the white one were lookalikes, forever at war. As they ever destroyed one another, was the magazine making a statement about the foolishness of mutually assured destruction?

Dave Berg's "The Lighter Side of..." was a great piece of comic strip comedy. There were many issues Berg poked fun of in the sixties, from suburban life to the generation gap, office life, dating, psychiatry, fashions. According Wikipedia, Berg's pages were the most popular feature, and most anyone who read the mag knows why. I remember one cartoon where the parents are upstairs and the children in the basement are making noise so the dad screams down with an angry, exaggerated expression, "Will you keep it quiet down there!!!??" The next panel is teens in the basement, all necking, lounged over chairs, etc. The same dad (it is a couple years later) is screaming down the same stairs, "Will you make some noise down there!!??"

Don Martin's cartoons were original and hilarious, too. He made big lumpy characters with large chins or goofy faces, swollen noses in a very trademarked in style. He used to write out the sounds of things in big letters, like FWEEET, or PLA-FLOOOEY, imitating the sound a rush of air would make or a drill sound, etc. A memorable one comes to mind of a scene in a dentist's office.

Other regular features of the mag included "Scenes We'd Like to See", "A Day in the Life of..." and "You Know You're Really _____ When..." which might be, "You Know You're Really in Trouble When..." or "Skinny When..." ... And the recurring song parodies in which they change the words and say, "to the tune of..." Which I do to this day. Susie and I, for example, have a song about our first dog Sterling, to the tune of Simon & Garfunkel's Most Peculiar Man. "She was a most.... peculiar dog."

Mad was famous for inserts, too. Once they had fake book covers made so you could pretend you were reading famous "adult" books like Norman Mailer or Henry Miller. I put The Tropic of Cancer on one of my paperbacks and shocked my mother when I was about ten. I can imagine a lot of parents got similar shocks, to the amusement of their young children. Another time they had a vinyl record called "It's a Gas!" which was funky jazz interspersed with burping sounds. We laughed at the burping, not realizing that the double pun was that a burp is gas.

Of course the centerpiece of the mag was it's mascot, Alfred E. Neuman. Every cover featured our "What, me worry?" hero. And being a freckle faced kid myself, and a Newman, you might suspect that more than a few times over the years I have been teased by this dubious connection.

If you like, share your own favorite Mad memory in the comments... or send me a note I can post. Or if you prefer, one I cannot.

1964 ~ Welcome to New Jersey

I'd always told people that I moved to New Jersey when I was twelve. Technically, this was not true, however. My family moved to New Jersey in January, the 20th to be precise, and my birthday falls in September. So in actuality I moved to Jersey when I was eleven. That explains why I was able to play two years of Little League there.

Baseball was a big part of my life in those days. In Little League I was a pitcher/infielder, and above average with a bat. We played every day in Maple Heights, the suburb of Cleveland where I grew up. When spring rolls around the first thing you do is look for the pickup game in your neighborhood.

In Jersey, our temporary first home was a rental property on Highway 202-206 with no running hot water. We stayed there while the new split level suburban house was being built over the mountain, the first foothill of the Watchung range in Bridgewater. The kids in the neighborhood welcomed my brother and I to play ball with them, and we eagerly joined.

Something I did a lot was call out the score, announce the game as it was going along, how many outs there were, etc. It was a form of leadership, I'd like to believe, or maybe I was just a blabbermouth, always announcing what was going on as if it were a big deal. I think I just wanted everyone to be on the same page. But especially so when the inning ended and teams exchanged roles between being on and off the field.

On one occasion during one of those early games, the other team scored a run and I announced, "Five to two," to let everyone know that was their second run and we were no only ahead by three. Louis P, a tough kid who was a year older than I and captain of the other team, shouted back that the score was five to three, that they had three runs.

Naturally, being a little anal about accuracy in these matters, I objected and replied that the score was five to two. I proceeded to review in my mind the plays in which the two runs were knocked in, and began to lay this out before him as he was approaching. He walked up to me and grabbed my shoulders with rough hands. "It's five to three," he declared.

"No, it's only five to two," I said with conviction.

In a totally unexpected move, he kneed me in the groin. I was eleven and did what eleven year olds often do when a bully strikes them. I went crying home to my mother, hurting quite badly from the blow. I vividly remember sprinting across the field and up between the houses to my back door, serious tears streaming.

Running into the house, I told what happened. Mom came across very matter of fact in her response. In effect she said, "Do you like playing baseball? Well, those are the kids in the neighborhood that you have to get along with if you want to play ball."

And yes, I wanted to play ball. It was a little different kind of crowd from the kids in my old neighborhood in Maple Heights. But I found my place and learned a few lessons that would stand me well over the years. For example, if you are getting beat up, don't fall to the ground because they will also stomp on your head. And make sure you protect what your vulnerable spots.

In the bigger world there really are some different kinds of animals out there. Not everyone plays by the rules. You just have to be a little wary, and know what's important to you. Not everyone plays nice. On the other hand, that's no reason to quit.

Sports can bring all kinds of people together. And it can teach us many lessons. This week the Olympics have convened in Beijing. The opening ceremonies were a spectacle. There will be new records set, no doubt, and heartbreaking losses for many. Hopefully the scoring will be accurate and fair, and the world will be reminded of the important lesson these games are intended to teach: that as fellow creatures on a finite planet we must learn how to get along.

Can the Laugh Track

OK, so I had a photo of cans, and wanted to write words to surround it. A title like Cannes came immediately to mind. But then I might have to show how little I know about Cannes, the French city or the film festival that takes its name by virtue of being there.

I grew up in the earlier days of television, peppered with sitcoms and laugh tracks. Perhaps it was canned laughter that ultimately turned me off to television. (Or was it the banal content?) Laugh tracks certainly contributed.

Essentially a laugh track is a tool that television producers use to juice up an audience response. It is a way of letting viewers know, "Hey, that was funny." It is as if we need a cue, like trained monkeys. Come on, people, if it is funny, we will laugh.

In point of fact, canned laughter has the opposite effect. First off, due to its implied insincerity as if to say "we do not know if this is funny, but we wanted you to know that it was intended to be funny."

Doing stand up in front of a live audience is no piece of cake when you're not funny. The canned laughter really would help at times, but isn't the aim in comedy to actually be funny?

I was thinking it might be fun to used canned laughter in a few scenes of No Country For Old Men, because of the absence of sound... It would certainly change the mood. Especially in the motel scenes.

These cans also reminds me of my idyllic childhood in Maple Heights, Ohio, where we played whiffle ball and games like spud and kick the can endlessly. We were oblivious to the grit of life, in our brand new suburban Cleveland neighborhood. Neighborhoods get rundown, though and after we left in '64 that one did the same. It's uncanny how in childhood we can be preserved from life's harsher realities... That was my experience, though I know it is not everyones.

Oh well, time to hit the laugh track if you can.