Elementary School Days

After my somewhat inauspicious beginning at Garden Villas Elementary school, I did go on to enjoy my elementary school years very much. I have much fonder memories of my second grade teacher, Mrs. Hoke, which rhymed with Coke, and made her automatically seem more approachable than my first grade teacher, Mrs. Langston. It was in second grade that we were first introduced to “Dick and Jane” and their dog “Spot.” Oh, how I loved to read those stories! I remember avidly reading anything I could get my hands on from that point forward.

It was also in the second grade that I began to realize that I was smart. I don’t mean to sound like I’m bragging. I was no genius child. But I was bright and learning came easily. This had never occurred to me before. I can remember always being one of the first to finish reading a chapter or finishing a test or working a problem on the blackboard. And it slowly began to dawn on me that not everyone was as smart as I was. It was a revelation that began to shape who I was.

I’ll never forget the first time I made straight A’s. It was in the third grade. My teacher was Mrs. Butler. Not a particularly sweet or sympathetic sort, she was exacting and demanding as a teacher, and I rose to the occasion. I had my best year ever, academically, under Mrs. Butler’s tutelage. No other teacher at Garden Villas Elementary after that ever really challenged me or insisted that I give my best, and so I didn’t. My parents were also undemanding of me, always happy with whatever grades I brought home, as long as my conduct grade was good. But I never forgot that I could learn and master anything I set my mind to, and that was what mattered to me.

Unfortunately, third grade was also the year that I began having trouble seeing the blackboard. Mrs. Butler had assigned us all seats based on the alphabetical order of our last names. Somehow I ended up in the last seat on the first row and I remember squinting and struggling to see the blurry white chalk marks on the blackboard at the front of the room. Toward the end of the school year my mother finally took me to see the eye doctor and to no one's surprise I tested nearsighted. Personally, I was just relieved to finally be able to see the leaves on the trees. In my youth and naivete, I was even excited to pick out my first pair of glasses--a truly ghastly pair of pointy pale blue frames with rhinestones glittering in the corners. I thought they were "cool." Little did I know how quickly my eyes would deteriorate or how thick my "coke bottle bottom" glasses would become in the future.

As third grade gave way to fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, I struggled to find my place among my peers. I might have been bright, but bright never did equal popular. I knew early the pain of being excluded from the popular girls' clique. I was fairly shy and a little bit "chubby" as we said back then. Not having any brothers or sisters, I had a hard time sometimes holding my own with the other kids at recess. I didn’t like being teased or picked on, but I always tried not to show it. One never forgot the lesson of poor James in the first grade. I wasn’t particularly athletic either, and from an early age, knew the shame of being picked last for dodge ball or kickball. But I wasn’t an unhappy child either. As long as I had one or two girlfriends or my cousins to play with, I was fine.

I remember reading a lot during those years. We discovered the Bobbsey Twins, Charlotte's Web, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, the Little House on the Prairie books, and a host of other childhood classics. I loved our weekly excursions to the library. I could spend hours alone in my room reading and reading. By the fourth grade, I was reading on a ninth grade level. Books were my very best friends and I loved them all.

There weren’t a lot of extracurricular activities for girls to choose from in the 1960’s. I never belonged to any kind of organized sports. I do remember taking tap and ballet lessons for awhile from Miss Emelda. Miss Emelda’s studio was filled with young hopefuls like me who soon discovered that we were born with two left feet and quickly dropped out.

I also belonged to the Brownies. I loved being a Brownie. My best friend, Martha Ann, was a Brownie, too, and we were in the same troop. I remember the special feeling of wearing our Brownie uniforms to school on meeting days. Later on, when we became Girl Scouts, we wore our green uniforms to school, too. It made us feel very special.

There was a rival girls’ group called the Bluebirds. They only had a blue vest to wear over their regular school clothes on their meeting days. I remember we Girl Scouts in our green dresses with our dark green sashes felt very superior to them.

Girl Scouts was fun, but I soon wearied of having to earn badges. I think I dropped out after fourth or fifth grade. I do remember that both my mother and Martha’s mother took turns being troop leaders of our troop. Those were the best years! We went on tours of several factories and went camping and did arts and crafts in the afternoons. I remember we went to a candy factory once, and I can remember them making candy canes. I remember the big machine with two opposing “arms” pulling the white candy into a huge satiny ribbon, looping it over and over, like a figure eight. Then, when the time was just right, the red candy was fed into the machine and viola! Red and white stripes appeared and the candy cane was formed. The factory visits were always so fascinating.

It was also along this time that I started piano lessons. At first I took lessons from a neighbor, Mrs. Delay. She was very sweet and patient with me and, as we didn't have a piano of our own, she allowed me to come over every afternoon and practice at her house for thirty minutes. I loved Mrs. Delay. She had three small children of her own, but she treated me like a long lost daughter. I probably played more with the Delay children than I practiced, but I did pick my way through Book A of the John W. Schaum Piano Course.

Christmas came, and lo and behold, a "new" piano arrived at our house. It was an old used upright, of course, but my mother had painted it and it looked brand new to me. Sadly, Mrs. Delay went to work shortly after that, and my lessons moved from her house to the nunnery at Mt. Carmel. One of the nuns there gave lessons in the afternoon, and I started taking lessons from her. I don't remember her name, but she quite intimidated me with her starched wimple and voluminous black robes. I do remember my mother being in a dither over what to give her as a Christmas present. She kept muttering about how the nuns weren't allowed to have any personal items. She finally decided on houseshoes, and I dutifully carried a package of pink houseshoes to her on the last lesson before the Christmas holidays.

But most afternoons we all just came home from school, changed into our play clothes, and went out in the yards and the streets to play until our dads came home and our moms called us in to eat supper. These were the days before daylight savings time, so darkness fell pretty early. My dad got home at 4:30 p.m. and supper was always waiting for him on the table. After supper, I sat at the kitchen table to do homework, and then maybe there was time for a television show or two. Bedtime came early, too. I remember watching the kitchen clock, even before I could really tell time. Each year my bedtime increased by one half hour, from seven to seven-thirty to eight and finally to eight-thirty. I'll never forget how grown up I felt when in sixth grade, I could finally, finally stay up until nine o'clock. It was a landmark of my youth.

I cannot leave my elementary school years without remarking upon my sixth grade year. It was 1969 and integration was beginning to be enforced on the schools in Houston. Many students were being "bussed" to different neighborhoods and schools in an attempt to enforce equality across the district. All of a sudden, the private school system of Mt. Carmel appeared to be a god-send for the panic stricken families in our all-white, but lower middle class neighborhood. I was not bussed, but I did draw the first black teacher at Garden Villas Elementary school. Not only the first black teacher, but the first MALE teacher at our all female-staffed school. Mr. Gillespie was alternately regarded with fear, scorn, prejudice and awe for daring to brave the bastion of an all white, all female populated staff.

It was a scary thing for me to walk into that sixth grade classroom on the first day of school. I didn't know whether expect the boogie man or what! But I soon realized that Mr. Gillespie was just like all my other teachers had been. He had his good points and his bad points. He did have a tendency to tease, sometimes unmercifully, which as I have already pointed out, I had a very hard time handling. But he was a good teacher and I like to think I began to learn to see other ethnicities as something more than an unnamed mass to be feared. I began to understand that people are individuals, regardless of the color of their skin.

However, this realization did not change the political climate of the times. My parents fell victim to the mass hysteria of the times and joined the "white flight" from the city to the outer suburbs and small towns surrounding Houston. They sold our house on Hirondel street and during the summer after sixth grade, we moved to League City, a small town halfway between Houston and Galveston. The secure cocoon of my young world with its familiar streets and landmarks and friends was abruptly severed, and I was forced to emerge into a scary new world, filled with new schools and new friends.

School Days

Who doesn't look back at the beginning of their school days with a bit of nostalgia? A bit of bemusement for how innocently we begin that long and laborious journey of twelve years of public education. Of course, if we dig a little deeper, those halcyon days of our youth are never quite as perfect as we think; still, the joys of one's youth should never be discounted as trivial. A person of six is no less a human being than a person of sixty. And all the events of our lives--both the past and the present--continue to shape us even now into the persons we are today.

When I was in kindergarten, my mother took me back and forth to school every day in our old Pontiac. But beginning in first grade, I was considered old enough to walk to school with the other neighborhood children, unless it was raining. This was a great privilege. It was the beginning of my independence--a step away from my babyhood. We all walked or rode our bikes to school without parental supervision, and incredibly, we all made it to school and back home again every day. If you were tardy to class in those days, it was because you dawdled on your way to school and deserved to miss recess.

At the start of my first grade year, my mother, as so many others, walked with me, to show me the way and to teach me the safety rules. We would travel up Hirondel street and turn left at the edge of a big wooded lot. There was a mysterious “shortcut” path through that wooded lot that the older kids used, but I was strictly forbidden to go in there—and didn’t for years. I was afraid of the dark shadows cast by the huge old trees, and the rumors of a crazy man who lived in there.

We turned right at the end of the woods, walked another block, and then we arrived at the corner of the huge complex of Our Lady of Mt Carmel Church and parochial school. You cannot imagine the mass exodus of children on foot and on bicycle from our neighborhood every morning. We all walked to school together for years. But for most of the children in Overbrook, their destination was the Catholic school, and the rest of us Baptists, Methodists, and Lutherans had to walk on and leave them behind.

Another few blocks and we left Overbrook for the neighborhood of Garden Villas by means of a bridge over the lazy, muddy Sims Bayou. That bridge scared and fascinated me all at the same time. When I was very young, it felt so high. It was wide enough for two lanes of traffic, with a partitioned sidewalk for munchkin foot traffic on each side. Looking down through the metal safety bars at the brown sluggish water slipping by below made me dizzy with fear and excitement. Sometimes we would see a snake swimming in it. We used to scare each other with rumors of giant alligators that lived under that bridge. Sometimes it would rain, and then the bayou would rise up in a churning boiling mass of swift, hard current filled with swirling debris and unfathomable muck. The water would be louder then, and crossing the bridge felt like an excursion across the mighty and mysterious Amazon.

Once safely over the bridge, however, it was only another block until we arrived at Garden Villas Elementary school. Ancient-looking even then, it was constructed rather unimaginatively of square corners, sturdy red bricks, and old-fashioned hand-cranked windows. It was tall, foreboding, and made human only by the enormous pecan trees and live oaks dripping with Spanish moss that adorned the grounds. Huge old ligustrums were planted rather haphazardly around its foundation, and to this day, the smell of ligustrums blooming evokes a sense of nostalgia in me so strong, that I will all but stop in my tracks to breathe in their heady perfume and remember the smells of my childhood.

The inside walls of Garden Villas were pea green. Horrible, unrelenting, disgusting pea green. Every wall, every hallway, even every bathroom was green. There was no relief from it. I read one time that someone somewhere did a study (probably in the 1950’s) and determined that GREEN was the color of choice for school walls. I personally have no problem with most shades of green. But I have never ever been able to look at that particular shade of pea green without feeling slightly repulsed by it.

The floors were study, hard-wearing linoleum tiles, and so damn monotonous. No pattern to them, just a series of green and gray flecks, perpetually dull and scuffed, except at the start of each new year when they were buffed to a high glossy shine.

Each classroom came equipped with a blackboard, a globe, an American flag standing in the corner, and old-fashioned wooden desks. That was it. No colorful posters or bulletin boards, no reading corner with colorful rugs and bean bag chairs, no cubbies filled with enticing crayons and paints, no aquariums on the windowsill with pet frogs, no hint of anything beyond a strict academic atmosphere.

Perhaps that was the point. There was nothing for a child to do except look at the blackboard and the teacher, or stare daydreaming out the window.

In those days, children didn’t stay in school all day long as they do now. Most mothers didn’t work, and afterschool care wasn’t much of an issue then. Children were slowly and gently introduced to the disciplines of school and gradually built up to a full day. Kindergarteners went half a day. They either went to the morning session, from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. Or they went to the afternoon session from noon until 3:00 p.m. First graders got out at 1:00 p.m. Second grade dismissed at 2:00 p.m. And finally, in third grade, students stayed until 3:00 p.m.

There was no air conditioning in Garden Villas Elementary School. Given Houston's heat and humidity, this almost seems inhumane, until you remember that the school was built early in the 1940's, perhaps even in the 1930's, long before the advent of air conditioning. So each classroom had a solid outer wall of tall, old-fashioned hand-crank windows. I can remember the teachers dutifully working their way down the bank of windows each morning, cranking each set of louvers open as wide as they could go. Classroom doors stayed open, in the hopes of drawing in a cross breeze or two. Large double doors flanked every hall way, and stood open to the world to draw in as much air as possible during the sultry September heat. Security wasn't an issue then. Comfort was.

And so, in September of 1962, I bravely entered the hallowed halls of Garden Villas Elementary School with a lump of nervous fear in my throat, butterflies in my tummy, and my mother's hand clutched rather desperately in my own to begin the First Grade.