An excerpt from “Just Walk Away – A remembrance of growing up in the 50s in Central Iowa”
I started school when I was four years old. Because I was the oldest, I always got to be the first one to test the waters for everything that the kids in our household had to do. I thought this was a rip off and unfair as the dickens. Maybe they were trying to get rid of me sooner but in reality they probably thought I could handle it and I could.
I started kindergarten at age 4 because I would not be five until October and school started in September. Norris Elementary was easy walking distance from our house but at first my 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. I thought kindergarten was pretty cool. It seemed like all we had to do was play. For example, we made puppets out of shoe boxes and paper sacks and one boy had us screaming with laughter when he made his puppet’s head shoot up out of the shoe box body and fly across the room.
First grade was pretty much the same as kindergarten, and certainly we started to learn to read and practice rudimentary arithmetic. You know, one plus one equals two and that sort of thing. I don’t remember any of that although I can now read really well, and have been able to for a long time, plus I can also do arithmetic with the best of them so they did their job. What I do remember is the teacher filled a large jar with milk which we passed around to each other each taking a turn at shaking until the butter separated out from the buttermilk. We then ate the butter on crackers, and it was absolutely delicious! The beginnings of my interest in good fresh homemade food.
My favorite teacher was the 3rd grade teacher Shirley Knoll who taught us the “La Cucaracha” song. La Cucaracha mentioned marijuana and I don’t know if Miss Knoll knew this, but she explained to us it was just a cigarette.
“La cucaracha, la cucaracha
Ya no puede caminar
Porque no tiene, porque le falta
Marijuana que fumar!”
“The cockroach, the cockroach
Can’t walk anymore
because he doesn’t have it, because he lacks it,
marijuana to smoke.”
(Exposed to vice at an early age.)
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, who sat across the aisle, had chosen. He had chosen Dr. Sterling. I thought in my little pea brain third grade mind, “That sounds good.” So, I took that inspiration and came up with the name “Miss Ster”. Later I was surprised to have Miss Knoll tell me how clever I was. It took me a while to understand what she meant and I didn’t get that I had chosen “mister” (Miss Ster). She set me up for a lifetime of enjoying the process of writing even if it was somewhat based on thievery. I’ll never forget her.
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.
Most of the time we rode our bikes to Woodbury. It would be a caravan of about 8 girls from the neighborhood meeting up and setting off without parental supervision. It wasn’t like today where kids seem to need parental supervision for just about everything. Jamie, Patty, Marjorie, Sally, my sister, Cindy, Pat, and me. Where were all the boys? We didn’t seem to have many in our neighborhood. Cindy had 2 younger brothers. Maggie had one brother and, of course, Toni and I had our brother. It was a girl dominated neighborhood!
If the weather was bad, one of the moms took us to school in a car. They’d cram all those kids in the front and back seat of a 1955 two door sedan. We’d be sitting staggered, one up and one back, to make us all fit in. Seat belts did not exist or if they did no one used them and would not have worried about it. No one cared that the seating arrangement was not safe in case of an accident. We survived and things have changed.
I don’t recollect much about 4th, 5th and 6th grade except that Miss Ward read us thrilling stories after lunch (“The Lion’s Paw” and “Around the World in Eighty Days”) and that my 6th grade teacher Mr. Melvin Peed was so good looking! My mom decided I needed to learn a musical instrument, so she got me a rented violin from Smith Music Company, and I toted that heavy awful 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. That was a disaster, so we got a piano. The violin was out. The whole family drove to Des Moines and shopped for a brand new piano at Baldwin Piano company. We got a spinet, and it had a beautiful tone. I took lessons from Miss Jackson in the basement of the one and only music store in town. I’ll never forget how that store smelled. All those amazing instruments and the sheet music! It was glorious. As for the piano, 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 kind of oompa music. Dad would sing along sometimes. He had a pretty good voice. You know they both could sing pretty well. I wish I had had foresight because now I would love to be able to play. Isn’t that how it goes sometimes? I can hear myself warning my daughter, “You’re going to regret it someday if you don’t learn to pay that cello!” Typical.
The best thing about the piano was that it came in a great big wooden crate that we kids decided 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 the, what seemed like, one million LIFE magazines Mom had stored downstairs. We cut a couple holes in the piano crate and labeled them “IN” and “OUT”. Then we decorated the outside to make it look like what we thought a computer looked like. When it was ready my sister got inside the crate with a vacuum cleaner and a typewriter. Then we invited the neighbor kids to ask it a question. To do so you would write the question on a piece of paper and insert the paper in the “IN” slot. The vacuum cleaner we installed inside the box would be switched on to indicate something was happening noisily inside the computer (it was WORKING, ya know!), and sister would type an answer on the old Smith Corona typewriter and put it out the “Out” hole and switch off the vacuum cleaner.
And to think a lot of today’s kids can’t come up with a way to entertain themselves without the aid of a screen.
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R L Benoit - Writer/Artist 