Tag: music

Another excerpt from Just Walk Away – a memoir of growing up in Iowa

I started school at Norris Elementary when I was four years old because I would not be five until October and school started in September. So, I was a bit behind the rest of the kids but not by much. Norris was easy walking distance from our house. At first Mom walked with me and then because there were so many kids in the neighborhood the same age and going to the same place all at one time we walked on our own.

Kindergarten was fun because it was short. I think their plan was to wean us away from the freedom that we were used to at home so we’d segway into school with a minimum of consternation. Whatever they did it worked. I didn’t cultivate a hatred of school right from the beginning. We made puppets out of shoe boxes and one kid had us screaming with laughter when he made his puppet’s head shoot up across the room out the top of the shoe box body. And then there was nap time where we’d lie down on little rugs and pretend to be asleep. It was mostly fun and games. One game I remember was Telephone. In Telephone one person was chosen to think up a phrase or word and whisper it into the ear of the child next to him/her. In turn all the way around the circle the secret word would be whispered into the next ear until everybody had heard the secret word. Then the last person to hear it would say out loud what they had been told, and it was ALWAYS completely different from what the first person had thought of. Something very weird and different. We laughed and laughed. In Kindergarten we got cartons of milk to drink. Maybe this is where my disgust with plain cow’s milk began. I didn’t like chocolate milk because it was too sweet.

First grade was also fun. I guess we must have started to learn to read but I don’t remember doing it. One thing I remember is Mrs. Porter gave us milk in a jar which we traded all around constantly shaking until the butter and buttermilk separated. Then we ate the butter on crackers, and it was absolutely delicious! I didn’t have any problem making my block letters on the newsprint lined paper she gave us. Is this where we started learning to write cursive? I didn’t have any problem with that either.

I don’t remember anything from second grade except that I liked the teacher Mrs. McCollum. It must have been more of the same as we had in first grade. I do remember the tradition of giving May Baskets. We put candy, flowers and other treats in them and then we would leave the basket on the doorstep of our teachers and friends homes and then run away so they wouldn’t know who left the basket. One girl picked her nose and ate the boogers. We were very grossed out by this and ostracized her. We didn’t understand anything but then we were only 6 years old.

My favorite teacher was the 3rd grade teacher Miss Knoll who taught us the La Cucaracha song. La Cucaracha mentioned marijuana and I don’t know if Miss Knoll didn’t know any better, but she told us it was a cigarette.

“La cucaracha, la cucaracha

Ya no puede caminar

Porque no tiene, porque le falta

Marijuana que fumar!”

Here’s the translation: “The cockroach, the cockroach

Can’t walk anymore

because he doesn’t have it, because he lacks it,

a cigarette to smoke.”

She also had us make up pen names and write short stories. I chose the pen name Miss Ster because I couldn’t think of anything and like a little criminal, I peeked over to see what John Lee had chosen. He had chosen Dr. Sterling. I thought, “That sounds good.” So, I took that as inspiration and came up with a name. Miss Ster. Later Miss Knoll told me how clever I was, and it took me a minute to understand what I had done and what she meant. I didn’t get that I had chosen “mister” (Miss Ster). She set me up for a lifetime of enjoying writing even if it was somewhat based in thievery. I’ll never forget her.

Recess was interesting. We’d go out to the playground and play four square or tether ball or try to get killed or injured on the jungle gym, slide or merry go round. Some girls were showoffs and would hang upside down on the jungle gym and show off their underpants. Scandalous! During recess there was this one boy kept chasing me trying to hit me. I complained to the recess teacher, and she said a stupid thing. She said oh well he just likes you. Ignore him. I guess that was the beginning of me being conditioned to accept abuse in relationships.

Norris was kindergarten through the third grade so when it came time to go higher, we all got on our bikes and went to Woodbury school which was a few blocks from downtown and a short ride from our homes.

Check out the metal lunch box in the bike basket. It looks like a house. Saddle shoes, Ill-fitting sweater, wrinkly old skirt, babushka.

On most days we rode our bikes. It would be a caravan of 6 to 10 girls from the neighborhood meeting up and setting off without parental supervision. It’s not like today where kids seem to need parental supervision for just about everything. Jamie, Patty, Marjorie, Sally, my sister Toni, Cindy, Pat and me. Where were all the boys? We didn’t seem to have any in our neighborhood. Cindy  had 2 younger brothers. Maggie had one brother and, of course, Toni and I had our brother.

If the weather was bad, we had a carpool with one of the moms driving. They’d cram all those kids in the front and back seat of a 60s sedan. We’d be sitting staggered, one up and one back, to make us all fit in. Seat belts did not exist yet or if they did no one used them and would not have worried about it.

Lunchtime at Woodbury was always an adventure. Judy had matchstick potatoes in her lunch box, and I coveted them in the worst way, but Mom would never buy them. Instead, Mom would give me a hot dog and her ingenious and insidious way of keeping it hot was to put it in the thermos along with hot tomato soup but not warn me. Invariably I would go to pour the soup into the cup and out came the hot dog splashing soup all over the place. Mom! Kids had peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches. For some reason peanut allergies were rare or non-existent in those days. You might get plain bologna on white bread. No mayonnaise or miracle whip. Just meat and bread. Kids had apples or bananas. Sometimes kids had the little fruit cocktail cups with peaches, pears and nasty red colored but delicious maraschino cherries. Only one cherry per cup please. They’re precious and rare, you know.

If you were super lucky you might get a chocolate chip cookie. They also had a free milk program where kids got chocolate or regular milk to go with their lunch. I hated milk as a drink. It was only good on cereal, so the taste was covered up. Milk tasted vile and chalky and clogged my throat. I still hate to drink milk. Milk is for calves not children but adults seem to think this is a good way to build bones and it might be but I don’t care. Let’s find another way.

After lunch we would be sent out to play in the playground. Woodbury had a super large playground with playground equipment, but we girls wanted to run to the farthest corner of the field and play around the giant cottonwood tree instead of on the jungle gym. We would play horses and pretend to be riding around on our magical steeds. It was great fun. We pranced around and trotted as if we were the horses ourselves.

Once some administrator or teacher decided that we should have cheerleaders for the football team so try outs were announced and a whole passel of girls showed up, including me, to demonstrate what we could do. It turns out we couldn’t do much and so, in the end, the teacher conducting the tryouts decided that all of us would be cheerleaders. The next weekend there was a game, and all we cheerleading girls showed up but only a handful of spectators came. There were more cheerleaders than spectators. We gave a few halfhearted cheers on our own and jumped around a bit and never came back to any other games.

In the fourth grade there was Miss Frandson who was way in over her head. We little hellions would frustrate the heck out of her for some reason. Apparently, she wasn’t trained to handle 8-year-olds which is perplexing to me because when I was teaching art in elementary school I thought the 8 year olds were the most lovely creatures. They loved me and I loved them back. It might have been because I was the ART teacher, and art was fun and not threatening or boring. Anyway, Miss Frandson’s solution to her frustration was to go into the supply closet, turn on the light, close the door and cry. We could hear her, and we had no idea what was going on.

In the 5th grade Miss Ward read thrilling stories after lunch (The Lion’s Paw and Around the World in Eighty Days). Every day I looked forward to her reading. We sat there rapt at the amazing stories which we could picture in our minds as if we were really there experiencing everything.

I had the biggest crush on my 6th grade teacher Mr. Melvin Peed. He was SO good-looking, like George Clooney, but can you imagine going through life with that name? Good thing he was so handsome! In sixth grade Mom decided I needed to learn a musical instrument, so she got me a rented violin from Smith Music Company.  The violin was beautiful and the rosin for the bow smelled good. I dragged that heavy thing up to Miller Junior High where Mr. Fowler, the music teacher, tried to teach us something. I was bad. Let’s just say that. I sort of learned the basics of a French song Au Claire de la Lune. Screech schreech screech screech, schreech schreech. It was a disaster, and nobody could stand to listen to me practice, so the violin was out, and we got a piano.

We drove to Des Moines and shopped for a brand-new piano at Baldwin Piano company. Baldwin Piano Company was full of amazing pianos and wandering around the grand and baby grands was wonderful. For one thing the pianos smelled really good. They were dust free and beautiful and like being in a rich person’s house or so I imagined because I had never been in a rich person’s house. We didn’t have the room for a grand piano so we got an Acrosonic spinet that would fit in our living room without taking up too much room, and it had a beautiful tone. When I wasn’t practicing in the grumpiest way imaginable and lying about how much I had practiced, Mom would get on it and play her German oompa music. Artie would sing along sometimes. He had a pretty good voice. As a matter of fact, they both could sing pretty well.

The best thing about the piano was that it came in a great big wooden crate, and we kids decided it was perfect to make a computer out of. Big main frame computers were just coming in and somehow, we heard about them. Maybe I read about them in one of those million LIFE magazines Mom had or else how would we have known we could make one? We cut a couple of holes in the crate and labeled them IN and OUT. Then Toni got inside the crate with a vacuum cleaner and a typewriter. Someone would write a question on a piece of paper and put it in the “in” slot, the vacuum cleaner was then switched on to indicate something was happening (it was WORKING ya know), then Toni would bang out an answer on the typewriter, cut the answer into a strip, and put answer out the “out” hole. This was great fun for a while.

Anyway, I was to take piano lessons all through elementary school, and junior high from Joyce Jackson first and then Audrey Hafar next. Joyce gave lessons in the basement of Smith Music company. It was a little closet room just big enough for an upright piano and us sitting at the piano to play. Audrey Hafar was a concert pianist, and she had a grand piano in her living room on Grant Street a couple blocks from downtown. Mom dropped me off and then I would go in there and pretend I had practiced. I wrote lies on my practice record sheet. I’m sure Mrs. Hafar knew I was fudging or thought I was the most untalented piano player in existence. She had the patience of a saint. I couldn’t have handled students who were such obvious liars.

In the fifth or sixth grade, I can’t remember, which we girls got The Movie. It was called Very Personally Yours. Oh, thanks but no thanks. I don’t want it. It was about what we girls were going to experience very soon, and we were all perplexed what this actually meant. We kids had had The Talk by Mom and my reaction was how could the husband do that? The pee hole was so very small. Mom was not a good explainer. The Movie was even more perplexing and so I put it out of my mind.

Junior High came next.