by Gwen McMath
“What do you know?” my sister Shirley exclaimed, “You don’t even know how to write your name! You don’t even go to school!” “Yea,” my brother David joined in, “You can’t even walk and chew gum at the same time!” So now I knew the truth, if you don’t go to school, you’re stupid. This was to be my first life lesson about school, and I didn’t forget it. In fact, whenever David and Shirley talked about school, I always felt inferior and angry. Part of this attitude, I’m sure, was from being the baby in the family, but I did not like not being in the know about school.
That conversation reminded me of an incident when my brother, sister, and I were all playing at the back of the house. We had an old, white garage door that lay up against the chain link fence and we were always running up and down the door. It was the nearest thing we had to a hill in Grand Prairie, Texas, which was a flat area of the state. My sister sat on the bottom of the door with a piece of paper and pencil, smugly spelling out and writing her name. I was very irate because I couldn’t do what she was doing. I ran over and got the garden hoe and started twirling it above my head (not a very bright thing to do), when all of a sudden the hoe connected with my brother’s ear lobe and cut it. I secretly enjoyed that I had hurt him because I was still upset with my sister and brother because they could write and I couldn’t. I could hardly wait to go to school to learn all the secrets my brother and sister seemed to know about it.
That summer before I started school went by like waiting for homemade ice cream to get hard enough to eat when its one hundred degrees outside, but finally, after Labor Day, it was time to start school. The elementary school that I attended, James W. Fannin, was like many of the schools of the nineteen fifties. It was a white rectangular brick schoolhouse with no air conditioning. Even though there was no air conditioning, if you were really fortunate you could sit near the classroom door and feel a wonderful breeze blowing down the hall, then it being drawn into the classroom from the open windows. It was really heavenly if you were a girl because the breeze helped to pry your nylon cancan petticoats from your thighs. Our moms had to use a lot of starch to get those petticoats to stand out, but did they scratch! Wearing them was a sacrifice made for beauty, certainly not for staying cool. The school was located in the northeast part of Grand Prairie, Texas. At that time the neighborhood was blue collar with mainly whites, no Hispanics or blacks. Over the years the area has changed. It is now mostly Hispanic and the school was rated the lowest it could be educationally by Texas Monthly magazine. The school had a sizably, spacious playground with play equipment that was dangerous by today’s standards. We had a ride called the Ocean Wave and it was like a Merry Go Round except it also went up to a pole in the middle and back. The problem was that if your legs were in the wrong place when it went toward the pole it could smash your legs. We had enormous wooden seesaws that if your friend decided to hop off of you would bang to the ground and feel the vibration of it from your butt to your head.
In first grade (there was no pre-K or kindergarten) I had an older gray-haired teacher named Ms. Munger. She was never smiling and she was mean, it was not uncommon to see her slapping a kid that didn’t stay in line well enough or walk slow enough. Even her cruelty didn’t deter me because I was finally in school! I can recall when we first began to learn to read. Our reading series was “Dick and Jane” and the first word we learned was on a big, colorful poster with a picture of a wire-haired spotted terrier named Tip on it, which was written at the bottom of the page. That lesson began a love affair with reading that is still ongoing for me. It was during the first grade that my perfectionist personality really began to manifest itself. If I could not do things perfectly the first time I tried, I would get sick and throw up. Needless to say, I missed a lot of days due to illness. I learned very quickly that perfect little girls were rewarded at school (and also weren’t being hit by the teacher.) I was one that dressed neatly, did all my work, and told on others who didn’t. Sad to say, these qualities made a good student at the time.
Second grade didn’t do anything to decrease my anxieties. I had a first cousin named Peggy who moved to Grand Prairie from Charleston, South Carolina. She was mentally challenged. Since there was no special education in those days and I again had another gray-haired, elderly wicked teacher named Ms. Mabry who didn’t want to be bothered with Peggy, I spent most of that year trying to teach my cousin to write within the lines and to remember how to spell her name. I really had reason to call my teacher wicked because there was an unpleasant incident in class when I interrupted her and she slapped me across the face. Of course, I didn’t go home and tell my parents because I was afraid I would get in trouble again. The teacher had traumatized me with unmerited shame I know now was wrong but the occurrence made me feel like all eyes were on me in class because I must of done something terribly wrong to have a teacher slap me.
My cousin Peggy was remembered at school for other things beside her lack of academic achievement. One day she got upset with a boy in the lunch room and she dumped a bowl of stew over his head. Peggy thought it was hilarious and just laughed and laughed. I don’t remember who the boy was but I will never forget how his faced looked when she dumped the bowl over his head. Another time Peggy tried to wash her hair in the bathroom sink as her mother wouldn’t let her wash her own hair at home. We had to take Peggy with us just about everywhere we went and that meant watching out for her too. It was way too much responsibility for me and I was glad when she moved back to South Carolina a few years later. Another classmate Helen Shramek reminded me that during this time we would catch large, brown grasshoppers, cut their heads off, and then roast them over lighted matches for fun. I think this was a little misplaced anger at the inability to change my school situation with Peggy. All of these things added to my feelings that there must be something wrong with me also. I felt self-conscious for having Peggy as my cousin and ashamed for feeling that way toward someone in my family.
As I look back now, I know these incidents with spiteful teachers and a mentally challenged cousin contributed to my picking teaching as a career and I became an empathetic teacher because of it. I taught special education and regular education for twenty years and I thank God now for using my bad experiences and turning them into good. Those incidences made me a good teacher. When I became a teacher I was shocked to find out that there were still sadistic teachers. That is why I have described these teachers in less than endearing terms. People who believe that man is basically good should work at a school for a while and you will change your mind. It is so hard to believe that there are teachers in the field who don’t like children but there certainly are. If you come across one please expose them, it is child abuse. Maybe you can’t see the inside of the child to see how cruelty from a teacher affects them, but the emotional abuse can put out the light in the happiest child. The experiences were an example of Romans 8:28—“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purposes.” As with all other painful things in my life, God had not caused them, but as I eventually began to turn these things over to God, he made good come out of them.
Another big event in second grade was a tornado. We could see the vast black funnel cloud from our large windows at school and we were all very unsettled by the sight of it. My sweet mother risked her life by coming up to the school to try to take my sister, brother, cousin, and me home. We refused to go home with my mother because we thought it was safer at school (not to mention more exciting!) After all, we had been practicing both tornado and bomb drills by going outside our classrooms into the hall, crouching on our knees while holding books over our heads for a long time. I wasn’t afraid at all because I had no idea tornadoes could hurt people. I had led such a sheltered life that the only fears I remembered having were of car wrecks because I had been in a minor one with my family. I had fears of men coming through the open screened windows of my bedroom because of urban myths I had heard my older sister and her friends talk about late at night such as a man cutting your screen with a knife and coming in your room and getting you. I was really scared of that happening. The tornado hit Dallas County with a vengeance, but we were by-passed. It was the biggest funnel cloud that I have ever witnessed. Again, I felt kind of uncomfortable because my mom had come up to the school to rescue us and I was ashamed that I felt that way. It was like having my mom invade my school life and I didn’t like it.
Another second grade memory was of chasing some boys (Freddy Townley and Jim Hill) one day on the playground. I looked behind me quickly to see where they were and I ran right into the basketball net pole! It really knocked me for a loop but I was so mortified that I just got back up and kept running. I probably had a concussion. I’m sure I looked like something out of the “3 Stooges” by bonking into a pole because I wasn’t looking where I was going but it felt more like I needed an ambulance. One of the things that was unique about our school in our fairly small town was the privilege of going from the first to the twelfth grades with the same kids. Those same boys I chased in the first grade I chased for different reasons when I got older, and in the end we all were able to graduate from high school together.
My third grade teacher Miss Coker was considered an old biddy because she looked and acted harsh and never smiled. A good thing about her was that she would start every day with Bible reading and prayer (too bad she didn’t always apply it). Rumor was that Jim Hill and I were her pets. If we were her pets, I would have hated to be someone she didn’t like.
During my first through six years at Fannin we had a stout principal that signed his name ABC for A.B. Cain. It was rumored that he had an electric paddle. Randy George Smith could testify that he felt that paddle a few times but never knew for sure if it was electric or not, because he was too scared to look at it.
I had a good teacher in the fourth and sixth grades named Rose McMurray. I loved her dearly. She had short, red hair, and an Irish brogue. She had never been married and she reminded me of a character from the movie “Picnic” which starred William Holden, made in 1955. The character was played by Rosalind Russell. She played an older, unmarried teacher named Rosemary. She had a boyfriend named Howard, played by Arthur O’Connell. She spent the whole movie trying to get poor old Howard to marry her, and in the end he relented.
We had an essay contest that year about the presidential campaign when Eisenhower was elected president. You would realize that times were very different then if students got excited about writing an essay! One of our classmates, Charles Redwine, won the contest and he got to go around to all the rooms and read his essay. His political position was to vote for Eisenhower because he was a general and would know what to do if we went to war.
A lot of excitement was also stirred up that year by one of the parents who was passing out pamphlets at our school written by the John Birch Society. For those of you who don’t know what this organization was, it was a white supremacist group that didn’t tolerate any minority races. I don’t remember at that time having any blacks in our school.
At Christmas time we would always have some kind of program. I recall when I got to be a Christmas tree. My mother helped me to make a tree out of cardboard and cover it with green crepe paper and gold tinsel. I had gold tinsel in my hair and recited a poem about a Christmas tree. I had bells sewed into my petticoats so that when I walked around during the school day, you could hear the jingle of the bells.
I had a male teacher in the fifth grade named Myron Guither who was a very gifted teacher and a Godly man. I remember rainy days when we couldn’t go out to recess, staying in his room working puzzles or playing board games. Though he was a wonderful teacher, the teaching field was not really a place for a man to make a good living. I remember him having to work another job at J.C. Penney’s on Saturdays, and he directed the choir at PrairieHeightsMethodistChurch on Sundays (this was my church). Teachers today still don’t make enough money for what they do, but in the fifties it was nearly impossible for a man to support his family on a teacher’s salary.
Valentine’s Day was important every year, but in the fifth grade when we began to notice the boys and vice versa, it became more important, and fifth grade was my most memorable Valentine’s Day. We would spend days working on our special valentines boxes putting glitter all over them and covering them in red and pink crepe paper. A boy named Buzzy Lane gave me an immense stuffed animal, a black and white teddy bear with a red bow. I did not like Buzzy and told him so and he spent the whole day telling everyone what a gold-digger I was! I might have been a gold-digger but he was a clown. Quite literally, I mean. He would dress up in his clown costume and do magic tricks in front of our class. His family was all in the clown business and worked in the circus in Gainesville, Texas. I suspect I was a little jealous of him. Now that I think of it, Buzzy was a good clown name, but can you imagine romanticizing about a boy named Buzzy?
Perhaps the most special day of the year was at the end of the year and was reserved for the sixth grade kids. It was called the end of year picnic. It certainly was not sophisticated but we loved it. It consisted of being able to walk a few blocks to BowlesPark and play on the playground and have lunch (I would later have a wedding shower in a historic home at that same park). The playground had an especially high slide that I remember jumping off the side of and nearly breaking my ankle. It was swollen for months and again I didn’t tell my parents. I kind of had a problem with not paying attention and hurting myself which you can see, so I often didn’t add offences so my family wouldn’t make fun of me. I’m sure I looked like an idiot jumping off the side of an eight foot slide. I know now the purpose of a slide is to slide down it. The park had beautiful tall trees all around and it was magical to get to be with our friends with no school work. Sixth grade was the last year in our elementary school.
Another end of school event was when the lunch ladies would clean out all the freezers in the cafeteria and give us all the left over ice cream bars. What a wonderful way to end school! Those of us (me not included) who were lucky enough to have Ms. Eubanks for a teacher got to have the end of year picnic at her house in Dallas.
I had Ms. McMurray again for the first part of the sixth grade but would you believe that at Christmas time she retired and got married for the first time? We were all so happy for her. Just like the movie “Picnic.” Ms. McMurray was replaced by Miss Young. The year was 1960 with Nixon and Kennedy as running mates for president. The boys in class would tease Miss Young by chanting, “Kennedy, Kennedy, is our man, Nixon belongs in a garbage can.”
We were the oldest kids in school at that time and did we ever think we were great! We even got to walk to the neighborhood hamburger stand called Theo’s and eat lunch. There were probably only two or three classes of sixth graders so we would all be together walking and our parents thought we were safe walking together. Unfortunately, our society has changed now and no children would ever be allowed to leave campus for lunch.
I was a cheerleader and I thought our football, basketball, and softball teams really looked tough. We were the Fannin Eagles and our school colors were Kelly green and white. Our cheerleader uniforms were really a sight. We cut a big circle out of green felt for the skirt and had a megaphone with a big F on it in white. To top it off we wore a white blouse with a green nylon scarf tied around our necks and green tights underneath. We wore saddle shoes and socks. We had a pep squad to help us cheer. My dad had his first of two heart attacks that year and had been sick for a long time. He would come to our football games and watch me cheer. It made me so proud that he was taking an interest in me and what I was doing. There were lots of parents who were taking an interest in the football games. The dads got together and built a field house for the football team. Two of our stars in sports were Brent Skillman and Gary Carter, who went on to be student leaders and sports heroes in both junior high and high school. Different girls in my class would have slumber parties and sometimes boy girl parties and we would dance the “bop” and the “mashed potato”.
We had an amazing music program at our school and I was in a singing ensemble with five other girls. We performed “I was strolling in the park one day”. We had umbrellas and danced and sang. It was unusual by today’s standards that we even had a choir. We had dresses that were green and white check and the boys wore matching green and white checked bowties. We were allowed to sing The Lord’s Prayer during choir as well as recite it along with our pledges in the mornings.
During the sixth grade I had one incident happen that caused me a lot of concern. Ms. Hooks, my second semester teacher, was very young and had never taught school before. She began to tell me that I was not turning in my assignments. This went on for a couple of weeks and I kept trying to defend myself to her that I had indeed turned in all of my work. I began to watch the place where we turned in our papers, and I observed someone get a paper out of the turn- in tray, erase something, then turn it back in. I watched this happen a few times then got a little closer to the person and realized they were erasing my name from my paper and putting their name on it. It was an obvious change. You could see where someone had erased my name and put theirs and the writing was very visibly different. I told the teacher and after investigating, the teacher believed me. I still didn’t understand why I had to be the one that solved the mystery and why my teacher had not noticed it on her own. I have no idea who the person was who was changing my papers; I seemed to have blocked that part out of my mind. I do feel sorry for whoever it was because they must have spent a long time making up the deceit (they certainly were not dumb!) and I wonder what kind of pressures were upon them to perform for them to go to such lengths to make better grades. This was another time I continued to feel like everyone was watching me and thinking I wasn’t doing my work. This was hard for me because I was an “A” student during this time.
Every fall we would have a Halloween Carnival. We all got to dress up in our costumes like Pluto the dog, beatniks with sweat shirts and black tights, or gypsies just to name a few, and go from classroom to classroom to play different games. The most exciting one was the Haunted House. You would be blindfolded and have to put your fingers in bowls with beef liver or kidneys and we just knew that the adults were creating Frankenstein right there in the building! Who could forget the cake walk and winning a wonderful homemade cake to take home and share with your family? I still have a lovely carnival glass plate that Freddy Townley gave me when he won it in the coin toss. We would vote for a king and a queen of the school at this time or Valentine’s Day, I don’t remember which. Each vote cost a penny.
By far my favorite day was State Fair Day. In Texas all the school children got a day off to go to the State Fair of Texas and a free ticket to get in. How we loved the Midway with all the wonderful rides and side shows. When we went with my parents we always had to go see the animals first before we could go to the Midway. As we got older, we took the city bus from Grand Prairie to Dallas by ourselves. We would stuff ourselves with corny dogs and ice cream and then throw them up on the rides. My sister and her best friend Sherry Morgan got on a ride called the “Squirrel Cage”. It was made out of wire and the whole ride went around in circles. Each little cage held two people and each cage went around in circles both horizontally and vertically at the same time. I wanted to ride it with them but there was only space for two. My sister began to get sick at her stomach and when her part of the cage was on top, she threw up all over Sherry. Boy, was I glad there wasn’t room for me on that ride! My sister and I made a record together of our voices while we were at the fair. We said together in our shaky, little girl voices, “Here we are at the State Fair of Texas, then we went on to name all the rides we rode like the Wild Mouse and the Ferris wheel. My brother piped in with “Hurry up, you only have thirty seconds left!” This was really “high tech” for us. We loved the side shows. Most of them were people with deformities, a fat lady or maybe even a deformed animal which, of course, would never be seen today. We would always buy a necklace shaped like a heart, a boy, or a girl that had our name engraved on it in case we wanted to go “steady” with someone by exchanging our necklaces. We never really went anywhere with the steady and I think the expression “go steady” sounds more like a laxative commercial than something romantic. Seeing the lights of the Midway at night was like watching a beautiful fireworks display.
In those days there were no blow dryers or curling irons. Normally we only washed our hair on Saturday and rolled it in pin curls or spoolees for Sunday church. Well, I was so particular about the way I looked that I made my mother roll my hair every night so it would look just so. I don’t think I was alone in making demands of my mother. Most of my classmate’s mothers stayed at home like my mom did. One of my friends, Loretta Christopher remembered that my mother had a white telephone when everyone else had a standard black one. This made my mother seem exotic to Loretta because colored phones were few and far between and my mom’s phone was the first non black phone Loretta had ever seen! I had another friend named Carol Cardwell, and her mother worked at the fanciest store in town named Watson’s and she kept Carol outfitted in the latest fashions. Carol’s mom gave Loretta a ride home one day in her new yellow Buick, and the car actually had air-conditioning! During this time to have a car with air conditioning was unheard of in our circle of friends.
We had two types of clothes: school clothes and play clothes. When we came home from school we took off our school clothes and put on our play clothes. It was not unusual for us to wear our clothes two or three days before washing them.
As I got in the upper elementary grades I still had problems with perfectionism. I was diagnosed with stomach ulcers. Because there was not much medical treatment for them in those days, I always had to be on a special diet. I was sent to the cafeteria every morning at ten o’clock to drink a bottle of milk for my stomach. The bottle was glass and I drank it with a paper straw. No milk ever tasted so good! I ate the same lunch throughout elementary school because of my ulcers. It consisted of a cheese sandwich on white bread and some Hostess Twinkies. The lunch ladies were always being very nice to me, probably nicer than most of the teachers I remembered.
There weren’t a lot of extra activities in those days but I did belong to a brownie troop. During the time I was in the brownies we went to Dallas for a play production of Little Women which gave me a life long love of plays. I really loved my brownie outfit and thought I looked great in it.
I played the piano during this time. I took lessons from a very somber lady who made playing the piano about as exciting as taking a trip to the principals office. I still remember the songs I learned to play like “Little sir echo, how do you do? Hello, Hello” and “Dear little buttercup, sweet little buttercup.” Music theory was taught along with playing the piano and it was miserably boring. Needless to say, I never became a concert pianist!
Skating was another extra activity we all enjoyed. If we skated at home, we skated on the sidewalks which were a real bumpy ride. The heavy metal skates that fit onto the bottom of our shoes and the wheels that had no shock absorbency rattled you all the way up to your teeth. There were not many sidewalks in my neighborhood so skating was extra bumpy in the street or in a parking lot.
As I got older we all started going to a roller rink. You could go Saturday morning, afternoon, or evening. We usually would go on Saturday mornings and skate a few hours. They played records and the music introduced me to and gave me an addiction to the top forty and music in general that I still have. If you were really into skating you had your own white leather skates with colored pom poms on them and a matching skating outfit. I didn’t have my own skates but I had a white satin skating outfit (a hand me down from the Lynch sisters, Rhonda and Patti) trimmed in gold that I loved wearing. The rink was on the other side of town but we had some girlfriends (Rhonda and Patti Lynch) who lived quite close to the rink, so we went often. I can close my eyes now and still see the whirling colors from the colored lights and hear the music floating around us. There were races, couples skate, and the “hokey pokey”. I thought I was really cool because I could skate backwards. Skating left me with good memories for the fifty cent admission price, which got me in and I would have enough left over for a coke and candy. An added benefit of learning to skate was that it helped me later on in life to learn to ski.
If we didn’t go skating on Saturday, we probably would go to the movies. We only had one theatre in town and it was called the “Uptown Theatre.” I don’t remember a lot of movies we saw but I do remember seeing “House on Haunted Hill” because there was a skeleton wired onto the stage and at one point in the movie the skeleton slid down into the audience to scare us all to death. I remember seeing “Rock Around the Clock” with Bill Hailey and the Comets because we all danced in the aisles in the theatre. The twist movies were great because we could dance the twist in the aisles. And who could forget that in the summer that we could go to the movies on Wednesday mornings for a dime and see a different kid’s movie every week?
The memories I have of elementary school are very precious to me and I look back at those years, and at that school, as being a real place of refuge for me. As with most experiences in life, I remember more of the good than the bad and to have a childhood that was normal was a gift in itself. I hope as time goes by that the kids I went to school with from first through twelfth grades will have a chance to be together again in eternity, that is my prayer for all of us.
Contributing Writers
Margaret Coates, Helen Sramek, Charles Redwine,
Loretta Christopher, Dawson Smith
Fannin Students that are now deceased
Linda Jenkins, Douglas Lane, Linda Lantrip,
Freddy Townley, Peggy Trammell, Brent Skillman