School Stories (1 of 2)

My old elementary school in rural Ohio was torn down earlier this year. Even if I hadn't gone to school there I'd think it a shame: a large, beautiful 1920s building that, it seems, simply cannot be built today (materials too expensive? architectural trends too changed? I don't know).

But at least it wasn't torn down for, say, a Wal-Mart. Instead, the descendants of the family who'd sold the land to the school system in the 1920s bought it back, and they razed the school so they could go back to farming corn and soybeans, just as their forbears had. I can't argue with their choice, even if I would rather have seen the building restored and put to some new use (if the little town could have sustained that).

To give a very little something back, the family solicited memories of the school; these memories will be published as a booklet next Memorial Day. I wrote two little memories. Here is the first one...

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I was a pupil at Twin Elementary School from 1974 (1st grade) to 1978 (5th grade). Every morning Bus #6 picked up the children in the subdevelopments off Route 28 -- Queen Meadows, my neighborhood of Royal Estates, and Green Acres -- and carried them eight miles to Bourneville, then returned the eight miles in the afternoon. The driver, Bob Marks, waved at every car he met along the way, and I clandestinely imitated the movement and rhythm of his gesture, starting with an open-handed salute and then abruptly flicking closed the lower three fingers while turning the hand to end in a friendly pistol pointing hello. The children on the bus defaced the walls and seatbacks with graffiti, but this act of vandalism was mitigated by our limited tools, the #2 pencils in our book bags. Let the record show that none of the damage we did was permanent.

At school the world was divided into inside and outside. Inside, in second grade we competed in "math races" -- two children summoned to the blackboard to solve an addition or subtraction problem posed by the teacher. The first to write the answer stayed at the blackboard, the slower one sat back down and was replaced by a new challenger. Thirty-three years later I wonder if Tim, the usual winner, can balance his checkbook or figure his taxes as quickly as he used to add 7 and 5. Much of the rest of our time, in my memory, is taken with lining up. Each week different children were appointed Line Leader (for any line, going anywhere) and Lunch Line Leader (for the line that mattered most). Competition was fierce and the outcome unpredictable: was the teacher choosing at random? Was it a reward for good behavior? Was she choosing the children who shouted "Me, me!" the loudest, or ignoring them? We never knew. Another privilege was being selected to clean the chalk from the erasers. This was accomplished by going outside and whacking each eraser against a wooden telephone pole, expelling rainbows of chalk dust until the eraser was empty and ready to return to duty. Eraser detail may sound like drudgery but it felt like a furlough, a free trip outside between recesses where you could spend a few extra seconds daydreaming if you didn't abuse the privilege. The teacher didn't notice the extra minutes dawdling, or she pretended not to. As far as I know, none of us children ever noticed the stately beauty of the building we were in, its brick solidity and tall double-hung windows. They don't make institutional buildings anymore the way they made them in the 1920s. We took the building, its strength and its safety and its bake sales (where I was first introduced to the greatest American invention, the Rice Krispie square) entirely for granted.

The real world, the one that mattered most, was outside, on the playground blacktop and the baseball field and a couple of expanses of grass. (That baseball field was the site of my greatest athletic feat, a bases-loaded triple for the Tigers of summer C-Ball in 1976. We lost 10-3.) On the playground were basketballs and hoops; we would sometimes attempt a real game but usually settled for a shooting contest of C-O-W (our attention spans were too short for H-O-R-S-E). Also popular was four-square, played with the same ball as kickball, a mottled red rubber globe that was ubiquitous in every school I ever knew but that I've never seen anywhere else. Kickball was played on the baseball field, usually with skeleton teams of three or four boys who spent most of the game chasing down errant kicks. I don't remember ever having a full complement of nine for kickball or five for basketball, though there were surely enough children if someone had taken the trouble to organize us. But what made recess recess is that no one organized us. The doors were opened and we were set loose to run around in happy anarchy, to imitate sports heroes or superheroes, to evolve the games we needed. Apart from breaking up fights there was no reason for our teachers to interfere. Because of this outdoor license I remember Twin School as a place of freedom and of creativity, a place where, when the homework was finished and the lunch lines dissolved, we began to invent ourselves.