Elementary Teachers

I was in kindergarten twice. It was half day. Fern Melby was my teacher both years. She was a kind women and a classic kindergarten teacher. She had incredible patience and loved children. She never forgot a student and would go out of her way to talk to me long after I had graduated from high school and then college. Mrs. Melby’s husband was the band director at the high school but was retired by the time I got there. They lived on the south side of town and were on my paper route. They were always very generous to me on Christmas.

Since kindergarten was half day the room was used for art with Ms. Iquita one day and Mrs. Evans for music another. It was in the basement room of the older part of the building. That room also served as the lunchroom until they started busing the hot lunch kids over to the high school for lunch.

After being retained in kindergarten I did not have much confidence and my first grade teacher didn’t have much confidence in me either. She was young and got married that year and after that left education, I think for good. I was in desperate need of her attention and support and she didn’t have it to offer or didn’t want to offer it. I don’t think I learned much that year. I have left her name out of this because she still lives in the Mt. Pleasant area.

Mrs. Hoffman was my second grade teacher. Her husband was the high school woodworking teacher. They lived down near the pool and were family friends largely because my Dad and Mr. Hoffman shared an interest in arrowhead hunting. Mrs. Hoffman was strict! She worked hard with me to help me learn how to decode text. The Hoffmans ran the Snack Shack at the swimming pool so I was around them for many years.

I did make up a lot of lost ground in second grade but still went into third grade significantly behind my peers. Mrs. Nelson was my third grade teacher and she was also building principal. Everyone, even the teachers were afraid of her. After a year in her classroom she determined that I should be retained. That didn’t sound so good to my mother and me. Fortunately, she would have nothing of it. She said, “He is already the oldest child in the room!” She vowed to work with me and help me do better in school. Mrs. Nelson reluctantly gave in on the promise that I would attend summer school not only that summer, but the next summer, too. I viewed it as a prison sentence.

My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Craig lived on the corner of White and Henry streets. She was a compassionate teacher and someone that served as a role model for me. I replaced her as fourth grade teacher at Saunders in 1971. I tried to tell her once the positive impact that she had had on me but I am not sure she understood. At the end fourth grade Mrs. Craig didn’t really think I needed another year of summer school but Mrs. Nelson, the principal, had mandated it.

Mrs. Thompson was my fifth grade teacher but part of the time we went next door to Mrs. Crouse, the 6th grade teacher, for some of our classes. I think Mrs. Thompson taught us reading and social studies and Mrs. Crouse had the science and math. I think someone told me Mrs. Thompson’s husband died in the war. I don’t know for sure. I know she struggled as a teacher and us kids didn’t help much. By now Billy Jackson was a handful and we did all we could to urge him on.

The switch between teachers worked the same way in 6th grade. Mrs. Crouse was a short kindly woman. I liked her and she had a better temperament and much better control over her students. She had a daughter in my sister’s grade. I don’t know anything about her husband or any other family. I don’t think I ever saw her again after 6th grade.

There were others. Mrs. Hite was my remedial reading teacher. Remedial reading class was held on the stair steps between the second and third floor. I can remember Mrs. Hite just shaking her head after working with me. I think I got special recognition for being the kid that was in remedial reading the longest. Mrs. Stansbury was the school nurse. She was large and jovial and someone I was always glad to see. She gave us lectures on health and hygiene.

Although I struggled with some of these teachers they all had a positive impact on me in one way or another. In those days I think they were underpaid and didn’t have the training they needed to deal with kids like me. All in all they did a pretty good job!

A Walk Around the Block

Imagine walking out the front door of our house in 1960. Saunders School is directly across the street. Turn right and head east on the sidewalk in front of our house and you come to the alley.

Just across the alley is Mrs. Hall’s big barn. Behind it on the alley is a chicken coop. There is now a house where the barn used to be. In the time I lived there I never got inside that barn. Jim McCabe and I did throw rocks and break windows out of the chicken coop. We blamed it on Jim’s brother, Pat, and I think he was forever scarred by the experience. Moving on past the barn and Mrs. Hall’s big yard is the house. It faces White Street. To me it is a big house and the only house on the block I was never in.

Moving clockwise around the block turn the corner and walk past the front of Mrs. Hall’s house and the next house is the Baptist parsonage. Reverend Troxell lived there with his family about this time. His son, Ronnie, the child nearest my age. I don’t suppose it would be a good idea to tell about the folks who have lived there during my childhood so I will just move on.

Just past the parsonage is Taylor’s Hatchery. Then on the corner is Taylor’s house. It faces Monroe Street. Their youngest daughter, Barbara was famous when I was growing up. There was almost nothing she couldn’t do. I shot baskets with her a few times and didn’t stand a chance. Barb was the kind of person who went after her goals and achieved them. In spite of the odds she became an architect.

Heading west past the front of Taylor’s you come to Mrs. Nelson’s house and then the alley. As I mentioned in a previous piece, I mowed this yard. I don’t remember much about Mrs. Nelson. I was always impressed with this house and thought she must be rich.

We are now about half way around the block. Across the alley is Wauneta Hobby’s house. Mrs. Murphy lives in the upstairs apartment. This is the friendly house. As many times as I walked by this house and saw the folks living there they were always friendly. It still seems to be true. Wauneta still lives there.

The Clarks live on the corner of Monroe and Van Buren. I don’t know much about this family. When I was growing up they were an older couple. I wrote previously about stealing the flower bulbs from their garden. We wouldn’t have done it but they made perfect hand grenades.

Dan Winter’s house was next. Dan was a mailman and close family friend. By 1960 his children had grown up and his wife was no longer living. I don’t know what happened to her. I know Dan was a nice man and my parents admired him.

Next was the Wendell’s. Their property bordered the very back of our yard. They had children that were closer to Nancy’s age. Pearl was a baker and had emphysema. He had a bakery on the North side of the square and one in Keokuk. Loween was a close friend of my mother. She was an Avon Lady and got my Mom started in the business.

The Hodsons lived on the corner of Madison and Van Buren streets. Charlie was a tall, thin man and a heavy smoker. Gladys was rather large and loved to laugh. In the summer they sat on their porch almost every evening. If you went over to say “hi” it was almost impossible to get away.

And then you are back at our house again. It is much smaller in 1960. The kitchen and dining room addition hadn’t been thought of yet. Dad is, this year (1960), paying off Melvin Smith for putting on the new siding. It is slate and many people thought that was unusual. It was a brighter yellow than it is now.

The block has changed some since then. Hall’s barn and the hatchery are gone. The barn and Hodson’s house have been replaced with a newer home. The parsonage no longer belongs to the Baptists and has been added on to considerably. The block is not all that different but my mother is the only one left of those who lived on the block in 1960.

Boy Scouts

My Troup met on Monday nights in the basement of the Methodist church on Main Street. I would usually walk over towards Terry’s house and then we would walk over to the church together. I think I learned a lot on the way to and home from scouts. Terry usually filled me in on the mysteries of life. He was a year older than me and felt obligated to mentor me. He had older brothers who had done the same for him

There were things we knew about and things we thought we knew about. Sex, of course, was one of those things we thought we knew about but actually didn’t understand at all. Terry would tell me jokes his brothers had told him and then just laugh like crazy. I would laugh, too, although I often didn’t get it. I made the mistake a few times of trying to tell one of those jokes and then not being able to explain it when someone pressed me about why I was laughing so hard. I’d try repeating the punch line a couple of times but after that I was helpless.

I learned about the black market in Scout camp. If somebody wanted comic books you could get a premium price if you had them to sell. I came home from Camp Eastman one summer with more money than I took. Of course, I was out of comic books but I thought I was rich anyway.

In Scouts I mastered lanyard-braiding way before I was supposed to. Boys in OA (Order the Arrow) were the only ones who were supposed to make the twisted and round braid lanyards. Somehow I figured it out early and made quite a bit of money selling those, too. That really annoyed some, but the senior Scouts protected me because they wanted me to make one for them, too.

I am ashamed to say it but one summer Billy bought a package of cigarettes at the corner gas station for me. He told them they were for his parents and they were used to him coming in and doing that so they didn’t think anything of it. I sold the cigarettes for a dollar a piece and was sold out after the first night at camp.

Our adult leaders were Dr. Kral and Al Riepe. They were men of remarkable patience and they also cared a lot about kids. They willingly gave up a lot of their own time for us. Both of them had boys in Scouts… Gerry and David Kral, and Mike and Jerry Riepe. I know we kept those men up many nights with our shenanigans at camp. They never seemed to get too mad at us. Maybe that was because their sons were often in on the trouble with us.

Our tents weren’t bad. There was room for two cots that sat on top of a wooden floor that was a couple inches above the ground. You could put gear under the cot and not worry about it getting wet. The tents were tall enough to stand up in and your stuff usually kept dry even in heavy rains as long as you didn’t touch the ceiling of the tent. That would start a drip.

One rainy afternoon Van Carter, Joe Hunsaker, and Terry and I were sitting two to a cot and having a comic book trade discussion. Joe was casually sticking his knife in the floorboard between us and pulling it out. Somehow my foot got in the way and knife went through my shoe and popped out and landed on the floor. We all looked in shock as the front half of my tennis shoe turned red. The blade had gone deeply into the soft tissue of one of my toes. The scar is still there.

Joe wrapped up my foot with a bandage and we told no one. He thought he would be in trouble and I thought I would be singled out at mealtime. There, anyone who had carelessly cut himself with a knife had to come up front and they put a big sign that said “Tenderfoot” around his neck. Then everyone sang a silly song about how careless the poor fellow had been. The humiliated person had to wear the sign for the next twenty-four hours.

We changed the bandage regularly and I went on a ten-mile hike the next day. It bled quite a bit but somehow it healed fairly quickly and none of the adults ever found out.

We had many great adventures in Scouts. I will write about some more of them another time.

Football

We played football at Saunders School…tackle football. Saunders produced the likes of Herb Holler, Stan Kerr, Tim Proctor, and Terry Ross. All were starters and impact players in high school. Those guys and many others got their start on the football field on the northeast corner of the playground. We thought we were the only elementary school where kids played tackle football. We were “tough!”

Those football games not only produced a lot of football players but also a lot of injuries. A school year didn’t go by without a broken arm or two. I remember a broken leg and collar bone, too. I, fortunately, never had worse than a black eye or a bloody nose. I remember having my breath knocked out a couple times, too. Tackle football was sort of a sacred thing at Saunders so no one ever let a few injuries stand in the way of playing the game.

Football games would go on every recess for days. Sometimes the sides were fair and sometimes not. Kids tended to pick their friends and as new kids would join the group they would end up on one side or the other. My favorite thing was to be on the side that no one thought would win and then surprise everyone. Danny Welcher was tall and faster than most of us. Gary Challen was fearless and even though he was small he could take a hit with the best of them.

One of the toughest players was Tom Dorothy. He would run right over kids. Terry said he had a steel plate in his head. I don’t know but I thought he had steel plates in his knees. He would get his legs churning and knock kids out of the way like bowling pins. I tried to stop him a few times and couldn’t even slow him down.

Terry decided we had to do something about it if Tom was not going to be on our team. His plan was to sacrifice his body for the team. He decided he would just hurl himself though the air and hope to slow Tom down so the rest of us could tackle him. It was a suicide mission but Terry was determined to do it.

So when we lined up the next recess we knew what to do. When Tom took the ball Terry crashed into him and the rest of us grabbed Tom’s legs. In a moment the dynasty was over. The giant had been defeated and there was again parity of the playing field. Not for long though, because then Tom decided he wanted to be on our team.

Some kids just didn’t like physical contact. They would do all they could do to avoid contact when we played. Others just didn’t play at all. One of the schools bullies lost all of his credibility because he wouldn’t play tackle football. While kids like me seemed to gain confidence, kids like that just seemed to disappear into the woodwork. It’s funny how someone so prominent in your life can just fade out like that.

Somehow the teachers who supervised the playground let this go on. The truth was that the teacher who had recess duty didn’t venture far from the building. They just walked around on the blacktop so they missed out on anything that happened out on the playground.

Lawn Mowing

When we can find someone to do it, my Mother pays twenty-five to thirty dollars to have her lawn mowed. My sister, Nancy, says she got paid a quarter for mowing the yard with a hand mower. The price has grown at least one hundred fold since she was a child.

I got more than a quarter for mowing it but nothing close to twenty-five dollars. I mowed several lawns and for ours I got a dollar. I mowed Aunt Ethel’s and earned another dollar for it. Fortunately we had a power mower by the time I got old enough to do it. I hated mowing yards and was happy to have any other job I could find. I really think that knowing I wouldn’t have to mow all of those lawns motivated me to get a job at the pool when I was only 14 years old. I still had to mow Aunt Ethel’s and ours but none of the others.

Aunt Ethel’s lawn on North Jackson had a very small front yard. You could mow it in a few minutes but the back was a different matter. It was wide open and extended all the way to the alley. There was one big apple tree in the back that I had to mow around and that was it. For a couple summers we put a big portion of the back into garden and shared the space with a neighbor. That cut the mowing considerably. I was sorry when it went back to grass.

The Hodson’s lived just west of our house. Their old house has been replaced with a new one on the corner of Madison and Van Buren. Charlie was a TV and radio repairman and had his shop in a room in the house. I remember the room has packed full of disassembled TVs and radios. How he could find anything let alone fix it was beyond me. Charlie was a chain smoker and always reeked of tobacco. Gladys was a large, jovial woman. She was always very friendly to me. She took in washing for several families and had a big clothesline behind the house to dry all of the clothes.

I remember the day Gladys asked me if I would mow their yard. I had to do it on a certain day each week so I wouldn’t be mowing when there were clothes on the line. Their lawn was an easy mow and they never complained. There were others who did, however.

Mrs. Nelson lived at the top of our alley and was a stickler when it came to her lawn. She actually came out and inspected it each time after I mowed. If there was a blade of grass anywhere I had to cut it. She even complained if the mower wheels made rut in the ground when it was soft. I once had to bring so dirt from home to fill in a place where the mower turned and made a rut next to her flowerbed.

Another particular customer was Mr. Clark who lived on the southwest corner of our block. He didn’t come out and inspect. He just watched my every move from inside the house. He would make comments when I went to get paid like, “You didn’t put the eve spout back, “ or something else that convinced me I was being watched all the time. It was kind of creepy mowing that yard.

The Wendell’s, our neighbors across the back yard, were particular, too. They had me cut their lawn in a different direction each time. Mr. Wendell thought the grass would look better if you did that. I don’t know if it did but he would be out there directing me like a traffic cop with the new direction for that mow.

Getting paid was always an issue. No one ever seemed to want to pay to have his or her lawn mowed and, whatever the price, it was always too much. I hated asking for the money almost as much as mowing. In the spring I was very busy but by July the lawn growth had really slowed down. If I went and did a weekly mow and the homeowner didn’t think it needed it I was sometimes not paid. If I didn’t go and mow they would call and complain that I hadn’t been there.

There were other yards that I mowed from time to time. You don’t see many kids mowing yards now days. I don’t know why that is? I still don’t like to mow my yard but covering it with concrete doesn’t seem to be an option. I do have a riding mower now so it is a little easier. If I ever have a kid mow my yard I am going to pay him promptly and not complain about his work.