Before beginning today’s narration, I sat for the first time in years in this chair. Unless I am throwing a party and have need of seating, the chair stands sulking against the wall, serving as a decorative piece and a reminder of boyhood. As I suspected, the chair is too stiff for real comfort and sits too low to be of practical use for most adults. Someone has re-caned the seat, but otherwise the chair remains as it was: four rails connecting the stiles, two stretchers connecting the legs, all stained a redwood color. If you squint, you may see on the front stretchers where my Keds scuffed the paint while I was writing school reports or solving math problems. Even then, the chair offered scant comfort for everyday reading, which was much better done curled up in bed or sprawled on the floor.
By my calculations, that chair held my schoolboy’s bottom some fifteen hundred hours over the course of my elementary and secondary education. Here I sweated, often quite literally, for my family lived without air-conditioning until my senior year of high school, over lessons in spelling (I was an avid reader and an equally atrocious speller), groaned over the perplexities of higher mathematics (my temper was regrettably sharp in those days, and my frustration with equations made me a pencil-snapper), and composed reports ranging from the Ancient Egyptians to the use of cavalry in warfare (the latter essay, dismally written, lies stashed in some trunk in my apartment.)
My most vivid memory of sitting in this chair behind a desk finds me in my fourth grade year writing out a sentence assigned as punishment for some misdeed in the classroom. I recollect neither the misdeed nor the sentence—it probably ran along the lines of “I will not talk with Albert Shore during class ever again”—but I vividly recall my chagrin at the prospect of copying this sentence two hundred times. After pondering my ordeal, I wrapped rubber bands around two pencils, and then three, and wrote out my sentences. This arrangement made for awkward writing, and even then I knew that a single pencil might have more expeditiously completed this drudgery. Still, the three pencil copying seemed very clever to me and so I kept it up until my sentences—and, I might add, my sentence—were finished. Another lesson learned in retrospect: sometimes when we believe we are very clever, we are in reality very silly.
Sometimes a mere glance at that chair can flood my mind with memories of Boonville Elementary School. There was the rambling old brick building itself, housing grades one through eight, with its wooden floors sprinkled every few weeks by the janitor with some sort of green cleansing crystals that he swept up the next day. There were the noonday meals consisting of foods like tomato soup or pinto beans, edible when doused in ketchup, and trays of fatback, with the pig bristles still visible in the rind, that we used to gnaw on as eagerly as students today consume burgers and pizza. Boys wore jeans, often with patches on the knees, and girls wore dresses.
In addition to writing sentences at home, punishments for misbehavior included spankings, being sent to stand in the hallway outside the classroom, and slaps on the hand with a ruler. Once in fourth grade I took several leaves of holly from our classroom Christmas display and put it in the seat of Spike Atkins, who when sitting on the thorny leaves let out a howl. When I confessed my crime, the teacher whacked my left hand with her ruler several times, which stung, but what hurt much worse and watered my eyes with tears were her words, uttered in a stentorian voice: “Your hands are filthy. Go wash them.”
Recess found us tumbling outside to play dodge ball, kick ball, and Red Rover. In inclement weather we sometimes visited the high school gym adjacent to the school, where we learned the hokey-pokey and the rudiments of getting a basketball through a hoop. When unsupervised, we boys also fought each other, sometimes in fun, sometimes with deadly intent. Spike was a migrant worker’s kid, and because he had missed so many classes was a teenager sitting in a fourth grade classroom. Being much bigger than his classmates, he’d take on four or five of us, throwing us like ragdolls around the grass of the playground. Only once was he knocked over, a stupendous event that occurred when Devon Benton launched himself like a swimming pool cannon ball into Spike’s back, and the rest of us swarmed over him like the Lilliputians on Gulliver.
Compared to today’s educational standards, our schooling would be considered primitive. We memorized much of what we learned—math, poems, historical dates, songs. In fifth grade, for example, the teacher required us to sing songs once a month before the classroom, and I can still remember warbling out “The Marine Corps Hymn” with a friend named Johnny, both of us fighting to suppress our nervous giggles as we staggered through the song. Old building, bad food, playground fights too numerous to count, a rigid education: all would appall teachers and students of today.
Too bad. Too too bad. Because those of us who wanted an education received one.
Let me start with my pantheon of demigods from that time: Whisenut, Brown, Fleming, York, Jessup, Speer. These were my elementary school teachers, the women who taught me in grades one through six. With the exception of Mrs. York, who played bridge on occasion with my parents, these women appeared ancient as stones to me. Again with the exception of Mrs. York, none today would be considered physically attractive, though I might add that Miss Fleming, Mrs. Jessup, and Miss Speer carried themselves with Junoesque nobility. None of them were entertainers in the classroom, and certainly none of them cared a whit for our self-esteem. Indeed, I doubt they had ever heard the term.
But they educated us. The evidence? From the baby-boomer generation, Boonville, little Boonville, has produced several heads of major corporations, a handful of writers, a highly acclaimed poet, and a number of university professors, one of whom is an award-winning historian. To this list we can add doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, and a whole raft of skilled workers.
Let me end with a personal example. In the seventh grade I attended Staunton Military Academy. My twenty classmates came from families wealthier than my own and had certainly attended more prestigious schools. Yet by year’s end I was the winner of the academic achievement award for our class.
At the time the attainment of this award didn’t seem particularly remarkable, but now, in retrospect, I recognize that the care, discipline, and guidance of Whisenut, Brown, Fleming, York, Jessup, and Speer were responsible for my achievement.
It’s too late to thank you devoted women in person. But if the mysteries of the universe allow such communication, I want you to know I’m grateful.
My most vivid memory of sitting in this chair behind a desk finds me in my fourth grade year writing out a sentence assigned as punishment for some misdeed in the classroom. I recollect neither the misdeed nor the sentence—it probably ran along the lines of “I will not talk with Albert Shore during class ever again”—but I vividly recall my chagrin at the prospect of copying this sentence two hundred times. After pondering my ordeal, I wrapped rubber bands around two pencils, and then three, and wrote out my sentences. This arrangement made for awkward writing, and even then I knew that a single pencil might have more expeditiously completed this drudgery. Still, the three pencil copying seemed very clever to me and so I kept it up until my sentences—and, I might add, my sentence—were finished. Another lesson learned in retrospect: sometimes when we believe we are very clever, we are in reality very silly.
Sometimes a mere glance at that chair can flood my mind with memories of Boonville Elementary School. There was the rambling old brick building itself, housing grades one through eight, with its wooden floors sprinkled every few weeks by the janitor with some sort of green cleansing crystals that he swept up the next day. There were the noonday meals consisting of foods like tomato soup or pinto beans, edible when doused in ketchup, and trays of fatback, with the pig bristles still visible in the rind, that we used to gnaw on as eagerly as students today consume burgers and pizza. Boys wore jeans, often with patches on the knees, and girls wore dresses.
In addition to writing sentences at home, punishments for misbehavior included spankings, being sent to stand in the hallway outside the classroom, and slaps on the hand with a ruler. Once in fourth grade I took several leaves of holly from our classroom Christmas display and put it in the seat of Spike Atkins, who when sitting on the thorny leaves let out a howl. When I confessed my crime, the teacher whacked my left hand with her ruler several times, which stung, but what hurt much worse and watered my eyes with tears were her words, uttered in a stentorian voice: “Your hands are filthy. Go wash them.”
Recess found us tumbling outside to play dodge ball, kick ball, and Red Rover. In inclement weather we sometimes visited the high school gym adjacent to the school, where we learned the hokey-pokey and the rudiments of getting a basketball through a hoop. When unsupervised, we boys also fought each other, sometimes in fun, sometimes with deadly intent. Spike was a migrant worker’s kid, and because he had missed so many classes was a teenager sitting in a fourth grade classroom. Being much bigger than his classmates, he’d take on four or five of us, throwing us like ragdolls around the grass of the playground. Only once was he knocked over, a stupendous event that occurred when Devon Benton launched himself like a swimming pool cannon ball into Spike’s back, and the rest of us swarmed over him like the Lilliputians on Gulliver.
Compared to today’s educational standards, our schooling would be considered primitive. We memorized much of what we learned—math, poems, historical dates, songs. In fifth grade, for example, the teacher required us to sing songs once a month before the classroom, and I can still remember warbling out “The Marine Corps Hymn” with a friend named Johnny, both of us fighting to suppress our nervous giggles as we staggered through the song. Old building, bad food, playground fights too numerous to count, a rigid education: all would appall teachers and students of today.
Too bad. Too too bad. Because those of us who wanted an education received one.
Let me start with my pantheon of demigods from that time: Whisenut, Brown, Fleming, York, Jessup, Speer. These were my elementary school teachers, the women who taught me in grades one through six. With the exception of Mrs. York, who played bridge on occasion with my parents, these women appeared ancient as stones to me. Again with the exception of Mrs. York, none today would be considered physically attractive, though I might add that Miss Fleming, Mrs. Jessup, and Miss Speer carried themselves with Junoesque nobility. None of them were entertainers in the classroom, and certainly none of them cared a whit for our self-esteem. Indeed, I doubt they had ever heard the term.
But they educated us. The evidence? From the baby-boomer generation, Boonville, little Boonville, has produced several heads of major corporations, a handful of writers, a highly acclaimed poet, and a number of university professors, one of whom is an award-winning historian. To this list we can add doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, and a whole raft of skilled workers.
Let me end with a personal example. In the seventh grade I attended Staunton Military Academy. My twenty classmates came from families wealthier than my own and had certainly attended more prestigious schools. Yet by year’s end I was the winner of the academic achievement award for our class.
At the time the attainment of this award didn’t seem particularly remarkable, but now, in retrospect, I recognize that the care, discipline, and guidance of Whisenut, Brown, Fleming, York, Jessup, and Speer were responsible for my achievement.
It’s too late to thank you devoted women in person. But if the mysteries of the universe allow such communication, I want you to know I’m grateful.
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