The Value of School...

I’ve often wondered if my life would have been different had I been a better student. I also wonder what it would have been like to be 6 feet 2 inches, instead of 5 feet 7 inches, but that was out of my hands and I’ve accepted my fate and done okay.

But a better student would have been interesting. I know I was behind from the get-go as I didn’t do Kindergarten and didn’t learn how to read until the first grade. Many of you must think I was clueless, but that’s where a lot of us kids got our start in the fifties.

I really got into sports from an early age with older brothers, which is standard operating procedure. I’m not sure at what age I discovered the sports page, but when I did, I read it before I read anything else including the comics.

I plugged along for the first three grades and when our class hit the fourth grade we were blessed with a Foreign Exchange teacher. We had a large class and needed three classrooms through the fourth grade. Our fourth grade teacher spoke with a strong accent and at times it was difficult to grasp exactly what she was saying. This was about the time that I was playing Little League, football on the playground and basketball with a little soccer thrown in. We got through that year and it was off to fifth grade.

We had an interesting year as our teacher had a nervous breakdown in the fall and she was replaced with Mrs. Bourne. I have to hand it to her as she took over a bunch of us who were full of energy and mischief and took control quite well. We’ve remained friends over the years and that is a good thing for us. We survived the Cuban Missile Crises and the duck and cover drills, which made learning a little difficult at times.

It was during the fifth grade that we had intramural basketball in the grade school gym during the lunch hour. We used our PE gear without uniforms, which meant that one team wore t-shirts and the other one didn’t. It was called shirts and skins, and as a skinny kid it was a little embarrassing until the ball went up in the air and then it was 20 minutes of semi-organized rat ball. But it was fun.

The sixth grade was interesting to say the least as we were changing classes a couple of times during the day. President Kennedy was assassinated that fall and I’ll never forget how I found out. More intramural noon hour games and Little League and something called new math, which put a lot of us behind in math skills and made many of us wonder who didn’t like the youth of America!!

Seventh and eighth grade basketball was also intramural after school in the old high school gym on Seventh Street. I know it is hard to imagine what it was like as the “old girl” is now in horrendous shape but we had fun: cold showers and all. As part of our eighth grade basketball season we had four scheduled games and a tournament in Sprague. We went 6-0 and thought we were world-beaters.

I was still an average student but my sports skills had improved quite a bit. I also ran track in the eighth grade and enjoyed the hurdles most.

High school was quite an experience, climbing stairs and running over to and from the gym for PE. We also got to go to the Ag Shop and a lot of time was spent there during my last four years. I broke a bone in my hand as a sophomore and found it difficult to type. My teacher put me on the adding machine where I excelled but when the cast came off I was six weeks behind in typing and never got close to catching up. And geometry wasn’t much fun. Our basketball coach was the teacher and I learned a lot about basketball but not so much about the subject at hand.

We had some great successes on the football field and pulled of a few big upsets on the b-ball court. I had some interests in school but I didn’t overdo it. School is easy for some, and if you get behind it is definitely difficult to get caught up. Since so many of my classmates have retired and I’m still working, maybe I’m still trying to get caught up. But then, so many of those same classmates were in a job that they really couldn’t wait to leave whereas, I’m happy with what I do.

I’ve been fortunate in one regard, as an average student I never got burned out from learning too much. I do value my education but will always wonder, what if…