Those of us in the Perry HS Class of ’68 who came to Watson as third graders in the fall of 1958 came as innovators and victims of change. Having been first and second graders in other Perry grade schools that were beginning to boom with us baby boomers, we were called on to fill the new space. Some of the kids were from the nearby allotment (with so much dirt dug up, the kids referred to it as "Milkshake Canyon," I assumed at the time because it looked the color of a chocolate milkshake.) But most of us lived quite aways away. I for one lived closer to Whipple, Reedurban, and even Genoa than I did from Watson, and so I spent an hour and a half on the bus each day, five days a week just to come and go, but somehow the line-drawers put me that side of the line, and in retrospect, I am glad.
Since it was a new school, we all were starting over in a way, teachers, too, and under not such easy conditions. Fourth grade was even tougher, so fifth and sixth grades seemed easier and then, we had to move out again to become “Golden Flashes.”
The first boomer innovation came because Watson didn’t have enough students for TWO second and TWO third grade classes, so they took one third of each grade and formed a classroom, half second graders and half third-graders. They jazzed our parents up with talk about how innovative a split grade was and yet how traditional because really, it was the idea of the one-room school house: the younger would learn from hearing the older doing their lessons. Yea, good for the second graders like Tara Netzley and Nancy Nisewonger. What did we get out of it? Actually, what we got was Mrs. Cornell as a teacher, the first great teacher I ever had. She thought what we needed to manage the stress of this arrangement was more art, and her art projects were so fun and indeed creative. I remember one project that required us to bring in shoe boxes and salt boxes and oatmeal boxes, which we stacked and glued together to make a castle. And then we painted it white. And THEN, to create a stucco effect, Mrs. Cornell encouraged us to throw handfuls of Malt-o-meal cereal (uncooked) at the wet white paint. As an 8-year old who had seldom done anything more artistic than carefully color inside the lines of a coloring book, I thought that getting to throw cereal at wet paint was just a hoot. If this was art, bring it on! And she did. For Thanksgiving, the whole class built a two foot dais topped with a three foot high paper-maché turkey, made with flour paste and covered in white feathers we glued on with Elmer’s Glue. Tore Djupedal wrote lyrics to a song we sang titled “I’m Dreaming of a White Turkey.” I mean, I am in the arts today, and now we call all this “collaboration.”
I don’t know how the teachers were chosen to move to the new school, but they were a terrific crew, headed by one of the world’s great Principals, Mr. Jones. Mrs. Cornell was just the first of the four great teachers I had there, to which I’d add my sister’s fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Hross and most of the others, and Mr. Winkler, up in seventh grade and the first male teacher I had ever seen in my life, was exciting too.
The following year, with Perry Schools’ overpopulation still on the rise, we as fourth graders were the class chosen for half days…which sounded like a good deal, if you didn’t see the huge stacks of homework handed out by the likes of Mrs. Vosper, who, along with other fourth grade teachers, instructed our mothers how to make bookbags for us to lug all this work home in. They were drawstring style, so when the stack of books got heavy enough, the strings cut right into your hands. Don’t even let me hear how heavy the backpacks are for kids these days. They don’t give you rope burns.
We had begun learning our multiplication tables the year before, but the fourth grade teacher got SERIOUS about that year and purchased a 12-record set of forty-fives (you may recall forty-fives: they were what you needed that cylinder to put on your record player for) of songs, one record for each times table:
You will know you’re really great
When you learn your tables of eight
Are you ready, kids? Here we go!
Eight times one is eight (pause)
Eight times one is eight (pause)Eight times two is sixteen (pause)
Eight times two is sixteen (pause)
Mrs. Vosper encouraged us to click our fingers at the pauses. Mrs. Vosper also taught us a song about long division sung to the tune of “Dave Crockett,” the chorus of which went
Lo-ong, long division,
Headache of the whole fourth grade.(I do remember all three verses. For your copy, send an email or SASE.) I loved those songs! I may have been the only one who did.
Fourth grade was also the year of the flutaphones. I had started drum lessons by then, so I didn’t buy one, but people were always trotting off with their white plastic and maroon instruments, to play flutaphone symphonies with the visiting music teacher. Becky Haines played flutaphone. Who else?
It was also the year of getting a Shafer pen and five cartridges for $1.25, the whole class. Some people (ahem) learned to poke holes in the cartridges and squirt ink all the hell over the place, but I considered them holy instruments up until I was 22 and carried my diary to the beach and all my writing washed away. Ballpoint ever after, but I still love cartridge pens.
It wasn’t till fifth grade, when we went back to full days of school, that I felt that Watson had become a real school where we could talk meaningfully about topics such as who the bad boys were and the sweet girls and the meanest teachers. That was the year I had Mrs. Kimmins, who was not the meanest, but surely tallest teacher and woman I had ever seen with the posture of a model. She could have carried all her books on her head all day and never drop one. She used a teaching technique I myself have employed often: feeding students. Whenever we had a new social studies unit, we had food. And it was the year Hawaii became a state, and the ensuing fifth grade luau was quite the event. We spent weeks (outside of class, I’d like to make clear) making tissue flowers for strings of leis and grass skirts from newspapers and crepe paper. (As usual, I have no idea what the boys wore, but I am guessing it is where Tom Walter acquired his first of many bright shirts), and we were allowed to go barefoot in class to eat pineapple! I also distinctly recall having enchiladas for the first time in my life in that class when we studied New Mexico, which we were to understand was not a country. The enchiladas were cold out of a can and so pretty awful, in retrospect. And though Alaska had just become a state, too, we never had whale blubber, though we did learn about how warm it got in Juneau. (90 degrees in July!!)
So that was also the year that JFK was inaugurated, and back in those days, the teachers would bring in these teeny portable TV’s and two classes would crowd around them. It was a cold day in Ohio, and our teacher exclaimed how Kennedy was not wearing a coat! I did not know who Robert Frost was, but I knew a man with white hair came to the microphone and started to read from a piece of paper and couldn’t see it because of the bright sun, and just put it down and started to recite from memory. Years later in my college English classes, on Presidential Inauguration day, I would do a presentation to my students on all the poems that have ever been written for the Presidential Inaugurations and read them with the students and tell them about seeing Robert Frost on a 10-inch screen when I was 10 years old.
In sixth grade I had another of my greatest teachers of my, Elizabeth Scheub, who along with Mrs. Schissler just ruled us rowdy sixth graders. There was quite a debate about Mrs. Schissler. I was terrified of her, but the boys loved her toughness and sarcasm. Hoo, she could stare a bad boy down and not even blink, then smile smugly when she’d won the staredown.
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Mrs. Scheub talked to us like adults. She would come in, smelling like the cigarettes she and all the teachers puffed away on in the Faculty lounge, her full jersey knit skirts swaying at her calves, her throat husky as Lauren Bacall’s, and tell a story. I remember her telling one about a friend “who walked where angels feared to tread,” who was hospitalized in the Soviet Union and couldn’t get any booze until some friends brought in a melon plugged with vodka. I didn’t know what it meant for angels to fear to tread, what vodka was or even a plugged melon, but I loved that story. She encouraged class discussion, too, and since Terry Tschocheff was in the class, she was in for a LOT of discussion. Terry was never disrespectful, but he was very persistent about arguing his points. One day the teacher said that some day route 30 would not go through Perry Heights but would be built around it, and Terry said what a very bad idea that was. She argued that he only felt that way because his father owned a motel. Terry said so what, his father would lose business. I think of that every time I ride past that former motel that is now a barber shop while Terry is far away in Florida, I think of the two of them debating.
One last Mrs. Scheub story. When my first book of poetry came out in 1980, I sent her a copy and thanked her for being the first to ever assign me a poem. She wrote back a marvelous note, including with it all the poems I had written in her class two decades before! What files the woman must have kept!
My best friends that year were Sue Riley and Becky (“Becka”) Bowling. Sue taught me about Brenda Starr comic books, the Massillon Museum, and Zink Dairy. She had a sister named Debby the same age as my sister Daun, and we all sat together on the interminable bus ride we had every morning and afternoon with sixth graders Gerry Morehead, Jim Vincent, Kathi Lewis, Cathy Bowen, Tim Hildebrand, Becky and her cousin Tommy Bowling and others along the route. The January of sixth grade, Debby was diagnosed with leukemia, and by the end of the school year, she had died, and the Rileys moved to California as though to move very far from all that sorrow. From near L.A., Sue wrote Becky and I long letters about going to rock concerts and about how “bitchin” the boys were out there, but I have never seen her since, and I would give anything to find her.
Michelle Droggos was the most shocking person I had ever met. She looked and talked tough, in a very glamorous way, more like an adult than another child. And her mom was more like one of my wild wacky great-aunts than a mom, with her bleached blonde hair and deep cigarette voice. In fifth grade, Michelle decided she was going to be “Shelly,” and wouldn’t answer if we shouted, “Michelle!” and then in sixth grade, she decided that she would be “Micky,” and wouldn’t answer if we called her “Shelly.” And that seemed shocking to me, that one could just change who she was, just start going by another, albeit related, name. One momentous day in sixth grade, the boys were sent outside to play while the girls saw the Walt Disney-like cartoon on menstruation, followed by a discussion.Mostly Michelle discussed. She knew all about it.
I am very sad to see her name, along with Becka’s on our “In Memoriam” list. (And Sally Doll's and Tim Hildebrand's, oh I hate this.) I stayed close to Becka all through high school and even into college, when she was in college and then after when we were both teacher. It was a terrible terrible shock to lose her in this life. I am so glad that the Class of ’68 continues to remember the classmates we have lost, and we really have to thank Marg Hoffman Leffler, Marsha Brown Rennecker, and Kathy Ferrell Armstrong, who keep up the remembrance for us.
I have a very strong memory from that year of standing in a line, waiting to go through the cafeteria with Sue Riley, Becka Bowling, and Tom Walter all singing, in perfect harmony, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight:” a winga wack-a winga wack. (They did not sing wim a weh, I don’t care what anyone sings now.) Also that year, we put on the play, How Boots Befooled the King, with Colin Binns as King. I think Tim Hildebrand was Boots.
Speaking of Colin, when Colin was chosen, as we all eventually were, to come to the front of the room and write down the names of anyone who was talking when Mrs. Scheub left the room, he came with a dictionary and sat at the teacher’s desk, opened the dictionary and proceeded to read it (or at least, put on a good show of pretending to read it) while we all worked quietly away, stunned at the very notion. Kids talked about that one for weeks: “Do you know Colin Binns actually readsthe dictionary?” So it is time for me to confess that I have always read the dictionary, that I love reading the dictionary. To this day, my husband and I often drag several to the table, the American Heritage and the OED and some pathetic online version to puzzle out a word we are discussing.
That year we put out “The Sixth Grade Magazine,”--the actual title, chosen after much debate and voting--which I edited and which had one of Liz Mischler’s great horse drawings…of a donkey. I lost my copy, but Jerry Simler gave me his when he came back from the service. Also that year, a boy (who left a year later) named Fred asked every girl to be his girlfriend, and when the girls all found out, they formed a club called the “Fred, One-Eighth of a Brain Club,” with Sue Riley as President.
It was the year that Alan Shepard was the first astronaut to leave the earth’s atmosphere and enter space, and the teachers hauled the teeny TV in again and we all watched him blast off. 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1, and some of us actually looked up to the skies and waved.
It was also the year that the seventh and eighth graders disappeared from Watson and headed off for the even newer school, Edison Junior High. As our second semester was drawing to a close, I was a little anxious about going to Edison, a JUNIOR HIGH! A BIG one! Where we would have to change classes and probably get lost! Mrs. Scheub gave us reports on her daughter Beth’s year there to assure us we would all be fine. “And remember,” she said, “When you are on your way to a test, step on the tungsten in the light bulb in the front lobby. At the high school, no one is allowed to walk on the panther, but at Edison Junior High, everyone walks on the light bulb.” They probably hoped we would get a bright idea that way.
Soon enough that year was over, elementary school was done. I went back to Watson to visit the following year and when I bent down to the water fountain, instead of having to stand on tiptoe and get pelted in the face with water as I did at the “big” school, big tears welled in my eyes, my first experience with nostalgia. Why did I cry? I wondered. I am not crying today, but I am nostalgic and have gone on way too long. But this is all true. Ask Kathi Lewis or Wayne Hannum. Ask Becky Haines, Darlene Arbuckle, Colin Binns, Rosemary Haynes, Tom Walter. Becky Haines, Lynn Klotz, Mike Sturrett, Mike Sullivan, Terry Tsocheff, Pete Gentile, Deb Hershberger, Jay Warfield, Mark Andrews, and Tom Howenstine, Rosemary Haynes, or Mary Bryden, Jean Kirkpatrick. Jerry Simler. Patsy Orlando. Patty Siekle. Chris Lucas, Wally Stutchel, Chris Smith, Marcia Young, Sally Doll, Carlee Clapper. Rick West, Darlene Arbuckle, Gerry Morehead, Mike Grimes, Jim Vincent, Cathy Bowen. Who else? Ask them, too, what else? What do they remember?
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