In the summer of 1943 my parents gave me the most exciting news I had heard in my short life thus far. My father had been assigned to a new church and we were moving from Kentucky to Indiana, where they had looser restrictions on when you could start first grade. You didn’t have to be age 6 until the first of January. I was born on December 29, actually a fact that gave me a lot of grief in my later childhood. I was sure that I never got a real birthday present from my parents, that they just held back one of my Christmas presents to give to me 4 days later! But now this was a lucky birthday date for me. I just got in under the wire and was super thrilled that I wasn’t going to have to wait another whole year to do what I thought would be the most exciting thing a kid could do – start school.
From my first day it didn’t disappoint. I loved going to school, even in the primitive country building that required what seemed to a 5-year-old to be a very long scary walk to an even scarier dark outhouse. I already knew how to read so I was ready for new learning challenges. Back then there were no special “enrichment” or accelerated programs but fortunately that was not a problem; this was a one-room schoolhouse with all 6 grades. I could buzz through all my primers and easy assignments and then soak in whatever upper-grade lessons were being taught.
It wasn’t very many days into first grade that I had chosen my future career. Although my teacher was stern and strict, walking the aisles with a wooden ruler that would come down painfully on the knuckles of any student talking instead of quietly working on a lesson – and I suffered sore knuckles quite frequently – I thought she had the best job in the world. I started playing the role immediately. After school each day I would line up my dolls in little chairs along my bedroom wall and teach them “lessons.” Then when my two sisters were born, I couldn’t wait until they were old enough to sit up in those chairs so I would have live “students” for playing school. And much to their dismay as they got older, I was always the teacher – being the oldest gave me that birthright against which they could not argue! (And when we three now “old ladies” get together they sometimes remind me that they remember how I took advantage of my biggest-sister power!)
My family moved around frequently during my elementary years as my father transferred from one church to another. We left country living after my first grade in the rural Indiana one-room schoolhouse and moved to Louisville, Kentucky. There I went to 2nd grade in a city school – and certainly appreciated the indoor plumbing. The next 3 grades were in the small town of Niles, Ohio. My 4 middle-school years were spent living back in rural territory, but in the modern Pennsylvania parsonage home beside a country church. And I rode the bus to a modern consolidated school in Stoneboro, PA.
Since we usually lived in a parsonage next to the church, I added another play-teacher gig during these years. We’d have a key to the church and go down into the basement classrooms where we could play Sunday School. As my sibling grew older, I even sometimes relented to their pleas and let them be the “teacher.” Our favorite teaching aid was the flannel board where we could tell Bible stories, with people figures and scenery pictures with sticky backing that would adhere on that fuzzy board.
I continued to “teach” my sisters – my version of home schooling before that was a common thing. I still tease them that I gave them their first pre-med and pre-law education, since June became a doctor and Starr became an attorney.
Ages 9 months, 5, and 10
Ages 5, 10,15
