#52stories - Week 7 (Feb 15th)

Elementary school - part 2.

4th Grade:  Between 3rd and 4th grades, my family moved down the road a few miles. That meant that I went to 4th grade at Mountain View Elementary School in Buena Vista, VA.  Again, I rode the bus to school.  Mrs. Mackey was my teacher.  She was old, but very nice.  She realized that I could not see the blackboard and moved me toward the front of the classroom and mentioned it to my parents.  So I started wearing glasses in the 4th grade. My mom also told me that she was the first teacher to compliment me to Mom on being a good student.  What I remember is having a couple of the girls in the class not like me because they had always been the top two students in the class until I arrived.  Apparently, I bumped them down to 2nd and 3rd place.  This was the year we learned Virginia history.  That's about it for 4th grade. Here's me with glasses in 4th grade.

5th Grade:  We moved to Winston-Salem, NC, in the summer after 4th grade.  I started the year with Mrs. Norman and ended the year with Miss Palmer at North Elementary School on Patterson Avenue. They were both younger than any teacher I had had so far and they were both nice. I walked the a little over half a mile to school. The school was torn down many years ago, but I found this photo at the Library of Congress online at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/hhh.nc0463.photos.212413p/.  The library has several pictures of the outside and inside of the school.

The big news/controversy at the beginning of the year was that the school became integrated.  And by integrated, I mean that one single brave black girl attended the school; she was either in the 1st or 2nd grade.  I'm sorry to say that the reaction of many parents was to pull their students out of North Elementary and transfer them to other schools.  The class size seemed to drop daily for several months.  It dropped so much that the principal decided to combine the two 5th grade classes into one.  And that's why I ended up in Miss Palmer's class at the end of the year.  Just before the holiday break, Miss Palmer assigned an extra credit project that involved making a list of words from the letters in "Merry Christmas."  She promised a special prize to the student who got the most words. I won that contest hands down...way more words than anyone else.  Thank you, Mrs. Borthwick! The prize, which took much nagging and some months to receive, was a Big Book of Answers that contained a lot of info about science and nature.  I remember one item explained how and why fireflies tails light up.  This was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis and practicing "duck and cover".  One day one of my classmates said that he had heard that the US had declared war.  By the time I got home, I was hysterical, but Mom assured me it was not true.  It was an anxious time.  This was also the year that I learned to twirl a baton.  My next door neighbor had four children, one of whom was a year ahead of me.  She was a majorette for the Tiny Vikings, a junior midget football team.  They had a cheerleaders and a twirling team and the Mom next door organized the latter. My parents bought me the baton that I needed (and I still have) and I'm sure Mom made my uniform. I see online that this is now a flag football league; it was regular football then.  My brother was on the team.  I had begun the year with a bad case of impetigo on my chin, so I felt like I had leprosy.Nonetheless, I made friends. JoAnna Self was my best friend, but her family moved across town to Polo Road and we grew apart in middle school.

6th Grade:  For this grade, my parents enrolled me at Lowrance Elementary, which was next to Hanes High School and even closer  to our house.  I walked a little less than half a mile to school. Mrs. Oakes was my teacher.   In addition to JoAnna Self, Vickie Green was another good friend.  Vicki was obsessed with The Beatles, while I was not.  I liked their music but didn't get the screaming, swooning stuff.  She lived with her grandmother who was a very strict Baptist.  We had many sleepovers.  I lost touch with Vicki but we were reunited somewhat when she ended up at my high school.  But we were not as close in high school as we were in elementary school. I continued to be a majorette with the Tiny Vikings.  For Halloween this year, I dressed up in my majorette uniform and went trick or treating with my next-door neighbor, who wore her uniform. We were in Blum Park and there was a talent contest, so we decided to join.  We basically just twirled the baton and whispered to each other when to change to a new move (some of the moves are the pancake, double pancake, figure 8, around the world, two-handed spin).  We won an entire box of full-sized Hershey chocolate bars!  On a sad note, this was the year that Kennedy was assassinated.  Several kids had transistor radios that they would listen to on the way home (especially during the World Series).  One guy in my class turned his radio on as we were leaving the school.  So I was walking across the school yard when he called out that the President had been shot.  I think I ran most of the way home and my mom confirmed the news.  I remember that my grandmother was visiting.  It was a very sad time, even though my parents had supported Nixon.  It was still tragic.  I remember the television showing Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald.  I had just left the living room and missed seeing it live, but heard the announcers saying what happened.  We all went in to watch the TV at that point.

So, I attended four separate elementary schools. It didn't seem as disjointed as it was happening as it does now.  It was even worse for my brother. He started 1st grade at Fairfield, then had 2nd at Mt. View, 3rd at North, 4th at Lowrance and 5th & 6th at South Fork.  And it was a little better for my older sister because she attended Fairfield for her entire elementary school; and, when I switched in 4th grade, she continued to the newly-opened Rockbridge High School with her friends.  And in Winston, she attended Hanes for 2 years while I attended North & Lowrance.