Osborn Festivals

The PTA would hold a school festival each year, selecting a theme which each student in the school would illustrate in a publicity poster. This is my second grade entry. That spring Guy Williams was playing Zorro on Walt Disney Presents.

From 1957 to 1966 my parents ran the PTA Festival coat check room in the classroom just to the left of this doorway. Each year I would burrow in between the coat racks with the foot high stack of used comic books I had just purchased with my book of tickets - the fondest of all my memories. My 4th grade classroom was two floors above it.

My last festival poster.

24 May 2013:

Perfect Day

Yesterday's entry directed the reader to a homemade video documenting a 5th grader's perfect day, which signs off with the statement that they will never top this one. This got me thinking about how many of us have had a perfect day or if not exactly perfect, how many of us boomers can identify the best day (s) of their lives. I count myself lucky not just that I can do this, but that I had more than one perfect day. They were the days of the annual Osborn Elementary School Festival. Although these days may not have been truly perfect, they are the days that I would most like to relive.

The Osborn Festival was a PTA fundraising event held once a year on a Saturday night in late March. At 5PM the cafeteria would open for dinner. Then from 6 to 9 the gym was turned into a carnival midway with traditional carney games like a basketball toss, breaking balloons with darts, knocking over milk bottles with a softball, fishing with a magnet, etc. Unlike those at the county fair, these games were not rigged and it was easy to win a decent prize. I still have a large tin policeman's badge I won, the back of it revealing that the metal came from a Japanese orange juice tin, with Japanese writing and colorful graphics. Those were the days when Japanese goods were considered cheap junk.

The first and second floor classrooms nearest the gym were turned into various festival attractions. There was a bake sale room, a clothes and household item rummage sale room, a toy room with rummage sale items for children, and a craft room where students exhibited their personal hobby stuff for judging. At that time the school was a regular hotbed of matchbook collectors (not guilty) and I recall poster boards of matchbooks on every wall. One year I hauled much of my plastic model collection down there and received an award.

Nothing was sold for cash. Instead we sold books of tickets in advance for $2, these were used for whatever you wanted to buy, play, or eat.

Each year my parents ran the coat check room, a converted classroom just inside the back entrance. They would push all the desks to the back wall and move in enough metal coat racks to fill up the room. There were several teacher's desks by the classroom door and people would pass their coats to my parents and receive a numbered claim check. Then their coat would be hung up on one of the coat racks, with their matching claim check slipped over the hook portion of the hanger. The room would eventually become a sea of coats with row after row of coat racks. Most likely my parents stumbled on this job and found it to be by far the most dignified of anything they could volunteer for, so that latched onto it like grim death and did it every year.

For me the toy room was the main attraction. Each year it had several tables stacked high with donated used comic books. Three books for a ten cent ticket, which was an especially good value if you found a few 25 cent giant size comics. Each year I would help set up the coat check room, then park myself in the hallway outside the toy sale classroom and wait for them to open up. At which time I would beeline to the tables of comics and carefully sort out 60 of them; the number that I could buy for one $2 book of tickets. I would take my stack of comics downstairs to the coat check room and squirrel them away in the back corner behind the last coat rack. If the selection was especially good that year I would return and get another 60 comics.

I always brought some of my own money for another book of tickets which I would use to play the games in the gym and to buy some food. One year I talked my parents into buying me a large metal globe in the toy room. Later that night I dropped it on the gym floor which left a small dent, this carelessness pissed off my parents but did not harm any functional part of the globe. I had it for years but have no idea what ultimately happened to it.

Once my money and energy had run out I would return to the coat check room and huddle in the corner eating whatever food I had left and reading my newly acquired comics until all the coats had been distributed and we could head home. That last hour was absolute heaven.

At some point I acquired a taste for Little Lulu comics, although I would not pay full price for one I did purchase a bunch of them over the years at the festivals.

One fall we visited family friends in Birmingham Michigan and the visit happened to coincide with their neighborhood school's festival. It was very similar to Osborn's in concept but second-rate in execution. Of course my judgment mostly reflected the limited number of comics that were available. It did help me to better appreciate my school. I also recall attending something like this at Grant Street school, where both my cousins were students.

If you are wondering why there all this Lori Martin material on the Osborn School site it is because National Velvet ran while I was in 5th and 6th grade, my last two years at the school. And I just learned that Lori passed away in 2010.

Coincidentally also passing in 2010 was Carole Ann Campbell, from the Hardy Boys serials which were the best part of the Mickey Mouse Club in October 1956 (Applegate Treasure) and Ghost Farm (Sept.- Oct. 1957).

It wasn't that I had a thing for Lori, but National Velvet was one of my favorite shows and its ending coincided with the end of my elementary school innocence. I don't recall the show being rerun so there was no blurring of my association, it was pure Osborn. I did, however, way back in 1957 have a thing for Carole Ann.

Another reason for including Lori and National Velvet is that but for the series of comic books I bought at the Osborn PTA festivals Lori and her show would have completely faded from my memory.

Shortly after starting this page I almost deleted it. But then I stumbled on some particularly good material like these photos which I doubt that many have seen.

Like a lot of stuff that once prominently figured in my life, Lori was there one moment and gone the next. She made "Cape Fear" with Robert Mitchum right after Velvet but that was not a film that I would have been allowed to see. And for a couple years after the show she was regularly mentioned in teen fan magazines, but during that time I was spending my reading money on Edgar Rice Burroughs and Mad. So she was already effectively off my radar. Since the series has never had a DVD release my memories of it slowly faded and about all I can say is that at ages ten and eleven I made an effort to watch every episode.

One of Lori's last films was "The Chase", which coincidentally played in Ashland the same year (1966) we moved away. In the photo below she is shouting to Robert Redford's character: "Bubber, I'm Cutie Bess, remember my sister".

The dwarfish boy in the background is a young Paul Williams.