later discovered her first name was Victoria—I remember being assigned a part in a play and missing one rehearsal because that school day, my father was driving my family back from New York City where we visited my mother’s two sisters, Clara and Martha. It was a boring and exhausting four-and-a-half-hour trip long before the interstate highway system had been built with Route 80 significantly shortening the travel time. Sitting on a steel railing at the edge of the school property, I stared into the distant window of my first-floor classroom. My watch told me the school day was almost ending. Eagle-eyed Mrs. Bundens saw me and, opening the window, called out, “David, come in, we’re rehearsing the play. We can use you.” I enjoyed being the focus of positive attention as an actor, much better than forced to sit still in my assigned seat. Most of all, however, I recall being kept after school another day for misbehaving. I stubbornly refused to apologize like the bullheaded Taurus that I was. I wore down the teacher until she let me go home without an apology. She whacked other boys on the butt for various misbehavior, but I was spared that indignity. I wondered how girls in the class could sit still and avoid punishment. Maybe girls were given less freedom to act out while, as the saying goes, “boys will be boys,” meaning rambunctious and hard to control.
8
Two Wooden Candlestick Holders
In my living room, on a shelf between the TV and the window, I keep two wooden candlestick holders. A classmate, skilled in woodworking, made them from the ornate and well-worn bannister that led from our elementary school’s first floor, with its six classrooms, grades one, two, and three, to the second floor’s grades four through six. Mementoes were salvaged when the building was demolished after sitting lonely and empty for many years.
The old place had no gymnasium, library, lunch room, nurse’s room, or faculty lounge, in fact, no amenities. There was a back room for the principal, the only male teacher, where he could paddle misbehaving students sent to him for firm correction. His own sixth grade class would await his return, listening through a closed door to the whacks and screams.
In the closing years of World War II, the class that collected the most tin cans and scrap metal to help the war effort got its name on a huge banner that hung at the top of the staircase.
Although the likelihood of a German or Japanese plane attacking a school in a small Northeastern Pennsylvania town was remote at best, our principal held regularly scheduled air raids. At the sound of alarm bells, teachers lined us up by twos and led us down another less ornate staircase into the asbestos-covered jumble of heating and water pipes in the cellar. When the same bells sounded the “all clear,” we were marched back up the many stairs to refocus on the day’s studies.
I was glad for any interruption to break up the boredom of having to sit still for some dumb, uninteresting lesson, putting on the act of paying attention. To pass the time, I would doodle, drawing three-dimensional box houses with sharply peaked roofs, or intricately fold a sheet of paper to make a “cootie” catcher that could nip the hair of the student in front of me, hopefully without the no-nonsense, humorless teacher seeing what I was doing.
For those curious, I never got paddled in grade school—just punished in many other ways, like being denied recess when the others got to go out and play. In junior high school, an industrial arts teacher, an emaciated but sinewy fundamentalist Christian, wacked me with both his own woodworked paddle and a breadboard I was supposed to finish to take home to my mother. Spring baseball fever had me simulating a home run swing with a defective metal file. Its wood handle remained in my hand like the knob of a broken bat while the file flew through the air to hit another student on the back of his head. Thankfully, he was not hurt. I didn’t mind too much being punished, though I felt the instructor should have kept his equipment in better, safe, condition.
Two wooden candlestick holders sitting on a shelf bring back many memories.
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