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.

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.