a Blow for Colored Kids
By grade three, I was seven years old and all three of us were in school. My brother, Uly Junior, was two grades behind me and my sister, Sondra Juanita, was three grades behind me. We always felt we should all have been one grade apart.
I was required to deliver Sondra to her Kindergarten classroom, where she cried daily when I left her. This didn’t concern me too much because she did it every day. We continued to call Sondra by her middle name, Juanita; but my dad called her Sondra always.
This was also the year of Uly Junior’s name change. The teacher felt his name, Ulysses, was too difficult for the other children to pronounce and declared that he would be called by his middle name, Roscoe. From that point forward, he was Roscoe. Roscoe sounded strange to Juanita and me, as we had seldom heard anyone use our dad’s middle name. Mom and Aunt Lizzie sometimes called him “June Bug” instead of Junior, so Sondra and I continued to use their name for him, sometimes shortening it to “June.” When Roscoe went to High School he declared June Bug dead. He would not answer to it and insisted we call him Roscoe. It took a while, but we finally gave in to his demand.
I vividly remember losing a pretty pink sweater my Aunt Lizzie bought for me on one of our shopping jaunts to Bullock’s. I went to the school office every day to see if it had been turned in; after a while they told me “no” before I asked them. I finally gave up and stopped going. Months later, they called me in to let me know my pink sweater was in the office. I was happy to get it back, but wondered where it had been.
There were about ten or fifteen of us Negro children at McKinley Elementary by the time my sister and brother attended with me. We all came from Carver Manor. The Drakes on our street had four children and there were a few kids from the next street over.
There were a few families whose children did not go to school with us, attending the Catholic school a few miles away. Also, some families had their children attend school in “town,” which meant Los Angeles proper. They left with their parents for work, dropped off at a relative’s home, and went to school from there.
Our little group had about a mile walk to school, directly through a dairy’s cow pasture. Since none of us were from the farm, we had a lot to learn about cows. We learned when to avoid getting too close to the mean cows that would chase us, learned not to break through the herd, and learned how to tell when it was time for calves to be born. We became accurate at identifying the cows that were ready to give birth and planned to be there the following afternoon or morning to watch. We were late to school a few times because of these blessed events.
Contrary to their expectations, I was identified early by my teachers as a child who had some musical knowledge, having been playing for about five years by the end of third grade, and was sent to the music bungalow. Strike a blow for colored kids: they can be accomplished in the arts.
Since this was the mid 40’s, remnants of the industrial training movement were left over from the 1930’s. There was a loom bungalow, where we made rugs on big looms. There was some sort of ceramic bungalow where we worked in clay. There were a few others I didn’t visit. Perhaps this was an elective time or an exploratory activity—but I didn’t elect nor did I explore. I was sent straight to the music bungalow.
Mrs. Blanchard was our music teacher. I remember playing the piano in music class, but also remember being introduced to the violin. Mildred Hasakawa was an excellent violinist so I assume that they put me, the novice, with her the expert, in an intern-like relationship. I finally played a passable violin, and later during my elementary music classes I picked up skills to play wind and percussion instruments. Strike a blow for colored kids: they can learn without too much effort.
Mildred was always first chair in the school orchestra. We became fast friends and neither of us got as excited about music as our parents and teachers hoped we would. The summer after fourth grade, Mrs. Blanchard hired the two of us to work in the music bungalow. I think we did inventory and maintained the instruments that had been turned in at the end of the term. If we worked past noon, Mrs. Blanchard gave us money—a whole dollar—for lunch at a café near the school. We went alone, the two of us sat on stools and ordered hamburgers and cokes.
This was my first job in the “industry”, with music gigs continuing for decades. We were paid each week. At the end of that summer Mrs. Blanchard gave each one of us a lovely green leather-bound book, inscribed by her to each of us. It was Ellison’s Music Dictionary, which I used consistently, even in my college music classes.
Mrs. Blanchard was the first teacher that meant something to me; she respected me by trusting me to do important work, she appreciated me by paying me and gifting me, and she did not distinguish that I was exceptional “for a Negro child”.
Mildred’s home was behind the school, where we went that summer after school for lunch and sometimes just to play. This was a few years after World War II and I now know that her family must have been in an Internment Camp some time earlier, although we knew nothing of these things then. Her house was in a small Japanese village composed of about five homes. The village had a traditional Japanese ornamental garden, complete with a red bridge and a koi pond. We colored in her Japanese-language coloring books and ate her family’s leftovers for lunch. I thought it was a grand adventure. We could never do anything together on Saturdays because she went to school (again?). She explained to me that at Saturday Japanese School they learned language and customs, and that it was mandatory. She also had family obligations that cut into our playtime because she had a “job” at her family’s grocery store in LA. Theirs was a little mom-and-pop outfit located on the street-car route I took to my piano lessons. I sometimes got off the street car before my piano-lesson-stop so I could go in and say hi to Mildred. We remained friends until the end of elementary school, when over the summer her parents closed their store. I never saw Mildred again.
One other memorable aspect of elementary school had an impact on me. Next to our campus was a large library—large to me. It was a county community library, divided in half with a children’s section on the right and an adult section on the left. Each class had a set time for a weekly visit to the Library. I devoured books….always finishing my weekly book allowance before it was time to return them. At around fifth grade, there were no more books for me to read in the children’s section, having read all the series of Clara Barton, Caddie Woodlawn, Nancy Drew and other clever girls, the picture books, non-fiction, everything. Apparently the Librarian did not believe I had read everything and walked me around, quizzing me about various titles. Because I have always had a good memory for details, I was able to respond to whatever she threw at me. It may have been my mother’s intervention or a teacher’s, but somehow I was allowed to check out books from the adult section. Strike a blow for colored kids: they enjoy reading. It felt so good on library day to cross over to the left side of the library and visit the adult section; it felt even better to check out books that no one else in the school could get. Talk about smug!
Elementary school was basically unremarkable, but I must have received a good academic foundation because I always did well in school.
The most memorable aspects of elementary school were my music, my friend Mildred, and my books.
What’s so Junior About Junior High?
During the summer of 1952 I turned twelve. I still read the L A Times with Aunt Lizzie every day. The headlines were about Queen Elizabeth being crowned and I thought she looked so young when we saw her picture in the paper. The sports section reported on the tragic loss of the Brooklyn Dodgers to the New York Yankees. I thought for sure the Dodgers could do it this time, but again they didn’t, and I lost the bulk of my
