SCHOOL DAYS
Many of you students, teachers and librarians are already back in school and everybody will be back soon.
I miss that autumn transition now that I’m grown up and so are my kids. But I still feel the shift when my school visit schedule starts up again - and this time I’m hitting the road early - September 5 in Waco, TX and September 8 in The Woodlands, TX. Other stops this fall include Lincoln, NE, Vail, CO., Petaluma, CA, and Calgary, Canada.
I get a little nostalgic about the start of school. As I wrote about last year, we’d wear our dark plaid cotton dresses, sharpen up a lot of #2 Ticonderogas and get on the bus. When I go back to visit the St. Louis suburb where I grew up, I usually swing by the high school on McKenzie Road. Just down the road is where I went to Junior High and 9th grade. It was once the high school. It’s not a school any more - just an office building - but it looks the same.
However, I never go back to my elementary school, on the other end of McKenzie Road because it was torn down a long time ago. I guess the fact that my school is torn down makes me seem pretty darn old. The truth is, it was built in 1949 and sold in 1982 - a pretty short life for a school building. It was an office complex for a while but it was eventually demolished.
The school was built just in time to accommodate the first wave of the baby boomers. My class was always the largest class - none that came after could match the huge bubble of kids born right after the war. It was a time of recovery and a time of optimism. Men like my father and many of our neighbors had been lucky enough to survive terrible action in the war. They were determined to build families and careers and put the war behind them. All eyes were forward then.
Just as so many families are disrupted now, my father left behind a wife and two year old daughter to go to war. My mother and sister Janet rented out our house and moved in with my grandparents and aunt in the city. Imagine the joy when Dad returned home and they moved back to their own house. And then of course the best possible thing happened: I was born!
Dad, Janet, Mom - trying to put on a brave face
Mom, Janet, Grandma and me
My sister was in the first class at Reavis School and I followed a few years later. A year after Reavis opened, six rooms were added. A few years later - my second year there - a large addition was put on.
The picture of Reavis (top of page) looks odd to me because of that door on the right. I know what that room was - it was a beautiful, large classroom with big windows and even a stage. That door must lead out from it. But I never saw Reavis from this point of view. I always approached from the other side, left of this picture. If I were in a car or on the bus, we’d turn in the driveway to the left of the school. Sometimes Janet and I walked to school, taking a shortcut that brought us up behind the school, alongside the playing fields. I remember those walks when I was 6 and 7 and I can recall the route in my mind. It was a little over a mile. We also walked to the Bookmobile, next to Affton Pharmacy.
A few years back, my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Bernice Hahn, was living in the same retirement community as my father. I went up to her apartment one afternoon to visit with her - she was a lovely person and I enjoyed my year in her classroom. She said that Reavis was rather shoddily built. In fourth grade, we were in a basement classroom in the new addition. She said that room had a lot of problems. The heat was in the floor, and if a crayon dropped, it melted. It didn’t bother me at all - I had a great year and a great time at good old Reavis School.