First Grade

I remember being very nervous and afraid my first day of school. Funny, I don’t remember having that same problem in early Sunday school classes or in kindergarten. But in first grade, I cried when my mother left me at the door of the classroom. Not a lot, but I remember tearing up. Thankfully, I didn’t make a scene.

I definitely remember one pudgy little red-headed boy whose name was James. James didn’t just cry when his mother left him. He struggled. He screamed. He held onto his mother’s skirts and sobbed for all he was worth. He carried this demonstration on for so long that he finally had to be physically restrained by the first grade teacher, Mrs. Langston, while his poor mother made good her escape. From that point on, James was a marked boy. He was the butt of all jokes, and this torment continued on for years.

Public school lesson Number One: don’t show your vulnerabilities to your classmates or they will persecute you unmercifully for the rest of your days.

I didn’t particularly like first grade. I didn’t particularly like Mrs. Langston. It was very hot in our room. Imagine going to school in Houston, Texas in 1963 with no air conditioning. It was hard to pay attention to anything the teacher was saying with the sultry humidity steaming in through the windows and the cicadas singing us to sleep in the trees outside. I seem to remember being thirsty all the time. I can remember raising my hand and asking permission to go to the water fountain again and again, but Mrs. Langston would always say no. I have a very clear mental picture of her standing over me one day with tiny drops of sweat beading on her hairy upper lip telling me to sit down and be quiet! Nope, not my favorite teacher.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I first learned how to read, but I’m fairly certain it was not in the first grade. Mrs. Langston used to sit us in a large circle and hold up flash cards printed with words like “cat” and “dog” and “coat”. She would hold up the card, say the word, and we would all repeat it—just like a group of parrots. It was rote memorization, and it was very ineffective. I do remember being able to read my Highlights magazine at an early age. I remember reading The Timbertoes, so perhaps my mother helped me to learn to read.

I don’t remember doing any math that year either, although I have a vague recollection of her holding up apples and oranges. So much for first grade academics.

I do remember painting. Not long after school started, she sat a large easel up in a corner of the classroom. One by one we each got a turn to spend an hour painting our very own picture, which was then displayed along one wall on a clothes line, each picture held in place with wooden clothes pins. I remember waiting and waiting and waiting for my turn to come. Finally I got my chance at the paints. I painted a landscape. There was green grass and a large tree and lots of blue sky and a big yellow sun in the upper corner. I remember standing at the easel and thinking to myself, “If the sun is shining down on everything, and the sun is yellow, then I should cover the entire sky and all the earth with yellow paint as well.”

Well, no one had ever told me that yellow and blue make green. As I began to spread that cheery yellow paint across my canvas, all my beautiful blue sky turned green and the colors all began to bleed and run into one another. I was very surprised, but kept on spreading yellow sunshine, thinking that artistically, I just had to be correct. Mrs. Langston came over and said, in a very disgusted voice, “Just look what you’ve done! You’ve ruined your painting. Go sit down.” And she hung my painting up at the very far end of the clothes line, in a position of great disgrace.

I never picked up a paintbrush again.

The one bright spot I do remember from first grade is that I met my best friend, Martha Ann, there. She and I were best friends from 1st through 6th grade. Our class used to travel in pairs, and she and I were always buddies. We used to hold hands as we walked in rows, two by two, down the long hall to the school lunch room. We played together on the playground, were in Brownies together after school, and we had sleepovers at each other’s house and told each other all our secrets, then “pinkie swore” to be best friends forever.

So, first grade passed by like a 9-month prison sentence for me. About all I remember is physical discomfort, a lack of mental stimulation, and a great fear of the teacher. After such a poor start, it's amazing to me that I ever liked school at all, but then second grade was just around the corner. . . .

Growing Up

There are so many stories to share from my elementary school years. Growing up in the early 1960’s in America was in many ways still so innocent and idyllic. The sexual revolution of the late 1960’s had yet to occur. No one had heard of Vietnam. John F. Kennedy was president and life in white middle class America was good. Segregation was the norm at that time. Incredibly, I never met a single black person until I was in the 7th grade. I never made a black friend until I was an adult. We were isolated from most social issues in Overbrook, and we never even knew it.

Gender roles were strictly defined, as well. Little girls stayed inside and played with our dolls or our Easy Bake ovens. If we were outside, we played hopscotch or jump rope. We took piano or ballet lessons as our after school activity. We wore dresses and saddle oxfords or penny loafers to school every day. Even on the coldest winter days, we never wore pants to school. Instead we wore knee socks with our dresses--like that would help us stay warm. Play clothes, such as pants and shorts, were strictly reserved for the back yard in the afternoons. And no little girl wore jeans or pants with a front zipper or fly. Those were for boys. Our pants had side zippers because that was more modest.

The boys had a lot more freedom and were always allowed to have more adventures than the girls. Boys could wear jeans to school. Boys got to ride bikes and build forts and climb trees. Boys got to play sports. Boys got to run around with their shirts off in the hot summer. I went to many Little League games as a child, but always as an observer, never as a participant. Even if a girl had the athletic ability and desire to compete (which many girls did), there were no approved outlets for her save the occasional back yard game of softball.

Of course, the reverse was also true. If a boy were more inclined to play the piano rather then baseball, he was often ridiculed by his friends. A boy either played sports or he was considered a "pansy". It was a rather rigid caste system, and it was a rare individual who could buck it. Rather than be an outcast, most of us just conformed.

This was true of the adults, as well as of the children. Dads worked and moms stay at home. I remember that my mother sewed all of my clothes and used to scorn the notion of ready made clothes. She made me beautiful new dresses every year for school and church. I use to wear a lot of shirtwaist dresses: a fitted bodice that often buttoned up the front or back, and a very full skirt. When I was a very small child, Mama took great pride in making me petticoats of the fullest, stiffest tulle netting. I think she starched them. They sure did itch! They were three layers deep and they made the skirts of my dresses stand out wider and fuller than any of the other girls. Thankfully, by the time I entered elementary school, the trend for starched petticoats was waning somewhat, and my school dresses were a little less frilly.

She also curled my hair every night. I slept on pink sponge rollers for years. They were so uncomfortable! (Of course, she slept on “grown up” wire rollers—and they were ten times worse. So it was no good complaining to her about discomfort and rollers! It was a female rite of passage of sorts.) The only break I got from the curlers was on Friday nights because we didn’t have to worry about my hair (usually) on Saturdays.

Most mornings, she would fix my hair in “Shirley Temple curls.” It was a source of great pride to her that my hair was so curly and that she could form those big fat sausage curls around her index finger with nothing more than a brush and little spit. She would pull the top of my hair back off my forehead and tie the whole thing up with a big shiny bow. Let the other little girls who had straight hair wear pony tails or pig tails. My hair was curly and she wanted to show it off.

But for all of its seemingly archaic rules and restrictions, the early 1960's was a very comforting time to be a child. You knew who you were and where you fit in. Your mom and dad adhered to the rules, too, and you knew who they were. It often seemed as if everyone belonged to the same church, the same school, the same community, and there were no surprises to knock you out of your little bubble of contentment. Divorce was unheard of, political unrest was a thing of the future, and every family had about the same number of material things. We all had a black & white television set in our living rooms. Every family had a car, but very few had two cars. Sometimes the dads had a pick up truck. We all dressed alike, ate alike, and played alike. The world seemed to be one big homogeneous neighborhood of good will.

And so, with an incontrovertible background of middle class solidarity and prosperity, I was prepared to begin the next phase of my childhood--the elementary school years.