17 -1964 Sept: A Big Adventure as School Starts
The summer faded and the 31st of August brought the start of my seventh grade school year. My 1964 diary annotations became a little more animated with new adventures. The county saw many changes as the major school systems of our county small towns combined. The town folk called it ‘consolidation’ of the schools.
My hometown became the location of the county high school. The junior high, grades 6–8, went to the small town nine miles away. Elementary schools remained locally at that point in time.
I remember the excitement of ‘riding the school bus’ that first day of school, after having spent all my elementary school years with the school house only a five minute walk from my home. Also, with combined student bodies now we had two seventh grade sections. My goodness, we hit the big times. My brother went back to Barnesville to begin his second year in military school.
That year was also the big transition of changing classes for each course. It never seems a big deal from the adult world standpoint, but for a kid that was a big deal! Ms. Mae Lee animated and brought to life English; Ms. Davis interlaced History lessons with great attention to detail; Mr Cox taught Math and Physical Education (PE) and at this point in my education he received my take on him as “mean and strict” only later to become much appreciated. Mr. Temple was the General Science teacher. We also had some auxiliary classes such as Typing, Art and Chorus.
Mr. Cox began our first session of 7th grade General Math with the requirement that as he called our names for attendance, we had to stand beside our desk and say, “Here, sir.” I remember writing my brother, who was actually attending military school and telling him, that I thought I was getting a small taste of his everyday life!
Ms. Mae Lee had a piano in our English classroom and she would sometimes entertain us with playing tunes on that piano and singing along. She was a lovely woman. She had a most colorful personality and there was never a dull moment in her class. She was a cracker-jack English teacher. The foundation we received from her was rock solid. I still remember the little green booklet covering the diagramming of sentences and our introduction to Literature opening the world of enriched writing and insight from voices beyond our regional perspectives.
Ms. Davis had a love for History, but did not have much tolerance for unruly or disruptive students. She was very caring and truly a loving person, but she had a tradition of ‘appointing’ a student at the beginning of each class session to sit in a desk in front of the classroom and take names of anyone causing a raucous behavior in class. Then, said offender would be required to hand-write verbatim several pages of a form referred to as “Form 90” or something similar. That form described many ideas of good and acceptable behavior in any learning environment, as well as detailing behaviors which interfered with learning. Most students really dreaded being tagged to “copy the Form 90” as an extra part of a night’s homework requirement.
Mr. Temple was a bit of a quirky kind of guy. He knew the course material very well. He just had a rather dry delivery style. I recall within the first month of being in his class that I passed a note to one of my classmates, Steve, concerning what I thought Mr. Temple looked like without his glasses. We were giggling and basically not paying much attention, when all of a sudden, Steve marched up to Mr Temple’s desk and gave him my note. Then, Mr. Temple, after reading the note, said to the class, “Donna seems to think I look kind of like a snail without my glasses. Well, what do you know class? She could have a point there. What do you think?” I was embarrassed beyond words and literally had to leave the classroom a few minutes to recover.
As September rolled in, school days offered the normal fare: classwork, tests, phys. ed, music, homework and bus rides daily now. Piano lessons clicked back into the routine on Tuesday/Friday afternoons. That first weekend saw my annotating that I baby-sat Gina and Shaun and got a grand tour of their home just up the street. I commented on Ms. Dolores’ (their mother) beautiful piano.
On that first Sunday of the new school year, my mom, dad and I went to Sunday school and church followed by a routine trip to Columbus to the S & S cafeteria. I wrote a special note in my diary that night. As I share my writing, I’m using the customary language of the era that I used as a child. My folks taught me to say “Negro” as a word showing respect whenever I might refer to members of our African-American community. Certainly, that doesn’t resonate as a norm at all in 2016 but so it was in 1964. My diary entry was “Six negroes came into the S & S cafeteria in Columbus for dinner.” It is unimaginable today that the event was so unusual back then that it would have warranted special mention in my diary.
The South was beginning a journey. The consolidation of schools was a step forward, where folks in two competing small towns put aside that competitive spirit and blended into one.
This consolidation represented first steps toward the next progression to be faced several years later, the integration of the white and black schools, a mandate directed across the US by the Supreme Court ruling of 1954. The slower approach from many southern states faced federal intervention to complete that process. Interesting that the pace of compliance varied so much across regions of the US. Even in Boston, if memory serves me correctly, busing to achieve the goals of desegregation came into the national spotlight as late as 1974.
I was very excited for the beginning of a new school year. Junior High is unlike any other time in life. I made so many new friends in my new school and became better acquainted with some of my other classmates, as we shared daily bus rides and had time to chat and explore ideas and the world together.
