6/19/2015 Bottom Floor

On June 19th (2015) I paid my second visit to the school,  entering through one of the doors at the rear of the gym.   The gym was the site of the carnival games for the annual festival.  I have seen plays here,  a pinewood derby,  and science fair.  During school we would gather in here during the lunch period and the school had us playing the Indian Club game,  where two boys would run at a club sitting on the floor (some versions have it sitting under a woven basket) from opposite sides of the gym and try to pick it up on the run.  It was probably the most dangerous gym activity possible but somehow head-on collisions were relatively rare.

The above photos are of the old girls' locker room (after the lockers were removed),  the photos below are of the boys' locker room.

This is the first classroom when you enter the school's back entrance.  During school festivals my parent's set it up and ran it as a  coat room,  with rows of coat racks at one end and numbered tags.  I would hide back there between the walls of coats and read the used comic books I had just purchased upstairs.

These were the original cafeteria tiles,  as this was originally the north end of the cafeteria.   The black border went around the entire room before this portion was partitioned off in the early 1950's and converted to the library.   A really beautiful pattern and chock full of asbestos fibers. 

My 1955-56 kindergarten room was unique in that it had doors on each end.

The backroom functions take up a fair about of the floor space on the first level of the building.  Having a forced air heating system instead a steam required a great deal of duct work,  much of the wall in this gym storage room (above photo) is the cold air return duct and the entire ceiling of the photo below is the primary heating duct to the 1949 addition.

Yeah kids really did look like this in the 1950's.

They used to show a regular movie in the cafeteria each day,  each week a full-length feature film broken into daily 20 minute segments,  for which there was a small admission charge.  Every time I see a movie with "Francis the Talking Mule"  I think of this place because those movies were a favorite of whoever put together this program for the school.

The milk machine was in the corner where that wooden cabinet is now,  with racks of empty glass milk bottles stacked in front of the metal furnace room fire door.

In this little first floor teacher workroom at the front entrance to the school I received speech therapy from Mary Weimer during second grade.   She lived at 104 E. Walnut and she traveled around to all the schools working individually with students on their speech issues.  I would get to leave class for a short period several days a week and she would work with me on pronouncing my "L's".   I think it was more a matter of hearing my "L's" as there was some disconnect between my auditory system and my brain. 

If I had grown up 17th century Massachusetts they would have had me wearing a scarlet "L".

Miss Weimer was very nice (my favorite teacher) and these sessions were a welcome change of pace although I felt a little stigma from being thought so deficient in something so basic.  She had me make this little booklet in which she would write exercises and assignments,   one of which was to paste in small pictures of things with "L's".   Mostly it was about getting me to recognize that such a sound existed.   It seems a little strange now but there seemed to be a short-circuit in my processing which I could will myself to overcome once I knew that it existed.   My lifelong difficulty mastering foreign languages is likely related to this processing glitch. 

In retrospect I should have been red-shirted a year before entering kindergarten in 1955.  I was born near the September 1st cut-off date and I'm sure that the speech issues were not the only adjustment issues that would have been partially mitigated by giving me a year of pre-school instead.   This would again become an obvious issue in 7th grade where I was physically at about a 5th grade level.   I would later do this myself by enlisting in the Air Force and then completing college on the GI Bill;  finding myself more focused when I was paying tuition.

Despite this (or ironically) my primary Air Force training was Russian and much of my work involved the communications coming out of the Paris Peace Talks in FRENCH.