Summerville Elementary School

Rambling, Riffling, Reminiscing

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Coole Park, County Galway, Ireland

This is the first day of autumn weather wise, the turning of yet another page in the annals of my accumulated seasons, dating all the way back to 1952 when I was born just two weeks shy of the winter solecist.

Autumn was my mother’s favorite season, my late wife Judy’s favorite season, and my beloved Caroline’s favorite season. However, I always associated autumn with the beginning of school, which for me was always a sad occasion.[1] Despite the scorching heat, the subcontinental humidity, I always hated for to summer end.

Back when I attended elementary school, male teachers were as rare as white non-segregationists.[2] Rummaging through the cob-webbed bric-a-brac filled attic of my ever-dimming memory, I’m trying to come up with my first male teacher’s name.

A line of white-haired ghosts files past – Miss Marion, Mrs. Wiggins, Mrs. Jordon, Mrs. Montz, Mrs. Stall, Miss McCue, Mrs. Altman. Nope, no males in elementary school; even the principal Mrs. Muckenfuss was female.

In junior high, we had male PE teachers and a male principal whom I once saw knock two students’ heads together Three Stooges style, an act that today would no doubt land him before a judge.

Ah, those were the days. It was from him I received my first paddling, three sharp thwacks upon the tiny target my thirteen-year-old butt. I had Coach Blanton for PE, one of my mother’s good friends from high school, but I can’t think of a junior high academic male teacher.

As it turns out, I can’t remember all my teachers’ names, in fact, only a handful. There was Miss Shirley, a seventh grade Spanish teacher. I think I remember Mrs. Euler taught science, Mrs. Morgan English, Mrs. Meyers Algebra, and Mrs. Waltrip seventh grade math. I can’t for the life of me remember who taught me history, my favorite subject back then. And, oh yeah, Reid Charpia was another male PE teacher I had.

Okay, let’s try high school. One of my homeroom teachers was male, but I didn’t have him in class.

Eureka! It’s finally come to me finally. Captain House was my first male teacher, a WWII navy veteran, a colorful character who led this cheer at pep rallies:

Give ’em the ax,

Give ’em the ax,

Give ’em the ax.

Which side?

Which side?

Which side?

The cutting side!

The cutting side!

The cutting side.

Indeed, Captain House was the inspiration for a cheer I tried to install in Porter-Gaud’s collection of cheers, one I adapted from Alston High School, the African American high school in the “separate-but-equal” days.

Whup ’em, Cyclones, whup ’em.

Whup ’em, Cyclones, whup ’em.

Whup ’em, Cyclones, whup ’em, Cyclones, whup ’em, Cyclones,

Whup ’em!

I reckoned the primitive guttural chant would be a more effective motivator than the sing-songy cheers Porter-Gaud employed.

Victory, Victory, is our cry:

V-I-C-T-O-R-Y.

Will we win it?

You doggone right.

Porter-Gaud, Porter-Gaud, fight, fight, fight!

The irony is that I-and-I, a hater of school, ended up a teacher, did 34 years, as the ex-cons say. But now that’s over, I can fully embrace the pleasures of autumn, the crisp air, the turning of the leaves, college football, the MLB playoffs, etc. as I shuffle off towards my eventual exit.

The Wild Swans at Coole

The trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

*

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me

Since I first made my count;

I saw, before I had well finished,

All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings

Upon their clamorous wings.

*

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

Trod with a lighter tread.

*

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

*

But now they drift on the still water,

Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake’s edge or pool

Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day

To find they have flown away?

WB Yeats

[1] I did enjoy buying back-to-school supplies, book bags and spiral notebooks. I can almost still smell the army surplus backpacks that Mama bought. However, all too soon those notebooks would be filled with my chicken scratch scrawl and the backpack with cheese cracker crumbs.

[2] How’s that for a jarring transition?

Dick, Jane, Sally, and Nicodemus: Memories of Summerville Elementary School

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Last week in the wee hours after my perpetual nemesis Ol’ Man Insomnia banged on the bedroom door of my slumbers and roused me yet again, I decided rather than counting sheep, I’d attempt to short circuit my tendency to fret about upcoming responsibilities by seeing how many names of former teachers I could recall.

My academic career began in the school year 1958-59 at Miss Marion’s kindergarten, a one-room schoolhouse in the backyard of her home somewhere near the railroad tracks in downtown Summerville. I don’t remember Miss Marion’s last name, and what I do remember about kindergarten tends to be negative – getting in trouble with John Lang for sailing girls’ tea set dishes like Frisbees, Bert Pearce’s falling off a swing into a mud puddle and having to sit in the bathroom in his underwear until his pants dried, breaking my Davy Crockett thermos by pouring Coca-Cola into it instead of milk, a student telling me that my mother chose a black instead of a bright yellow raincoat for me because she wanted me to be run over by a car. I also remember Miss Marion’s reading bible stories from a gigantic book propped on an easel and my falling in love with nursery rhymes, which would bode poorly for my future employment as I ended up as an English teacher and hack poet.

Yet, as happens so often in life, I didn’t realize how easy I had it at my cloistered middle-class kindergarten until I entered Summerville Elementary with its all white yet economically diverse population of older kids. I got lost before school on day two. Guided by my infallibly fallible sense of direction, I lined up on steps among unfamiliar faces. It was the second-grade entrance. Some kind soul, however, led me to my proper station, but the damage was done. School was a scary place.

Nevertheless, my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Wiggins, was nice and nurturing. If you think about it, first grade teachers provide you with more education than any other teacher of any grade. They teach you to read, to write, to add and to subtract.  Back then I was always losing my crayons and books instead of like now when it’s passports and beers that go missing. 

The child is the father of the man, as Wordsworth wrote.

My second-grade teacher Mrs. Jordan was older and gruffer than Mrs. Wiggins. Plump, white-haired, Mrs. Jordan read to us out loud. Some of the books featured an African American boy named Nicodemus. These books, written in dialect, were rife with stereotypes, and Mrs. Jordan sounded very much like an African American when she read them. Meanwhile, actual African American students sat in desks across town at Alston, the so-called separate but equal alternative to Summerville Elementary. I remember that Mrs. Jordan only gave white drawing paper to capable artists; the rest of us got lower grade stock upon which we’d create valentines.

The older I get in school, the less I remember, oddly enough (as the following shrinking paragraphs suggest). 

I had Mrs. Montz in third, Mrs. Stall in 4th, and Miss McCue in 5th, perhaps the first pre-menopausal teacher I encountered. Redheaded and perky, she made school interesting. Unlike most years, I didn’t dread going to school in the 5th grade. In fact, I was chosen to be a patrol boy and got to sport a white chest belt with a badge, if I remember correctly.

Mrs. Altman was my 6th grade teacher, and it was in the 6th grade when arithmetic had turned into the new math and my grades began to suffer. Before the 6th grade, I could pretty much get straight As by merely listening, but those days were over, and the horrors of puberty just around the corner, along with Spann Junior High where I would witness an administrator bang two boys’ heads together in the lunch line Three Stooges’ style, but I’ll save that memory until a later bout with insomnia.