First Grade
August 25, 2009 (Tuesday)
In recognition of the beginning of the school year, Dale Pogue wrote a very interesting blog yesterday about his first school, He remembers in great detail the building and many things about it. http://www.dalepogue.com/2009/08/first_day_of_school.html
His words set me to thinking about my first day in school, too. It was 72 years ago, three miles from where I’m sitting right now.
I looked and looked for a blog I thought I had written about it, but evidently didn’t write. My First Grade school in 1937 was Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School, located on Fulton Street now in the northeast quadrant of the intersection of Loop 610 North and I45 North. Back then, there were no freeways and the campus was a quiet place with a spacious playground bordered by huge pines with big cones on the ground around them. On my first day at school, when I got back to the classroom from lunch, everyone was taking a nap on makeshift cots on the floor. I never took naps, so I just went out the door and started for home. My teacher, a great big lady named “Mrs. Wind,” saw me walking toward the street, came to the door of the school, and called, “Charles Forest Fake! You turn yourself and around and march right back into this school house!” And I did. Is it somehow noteworthy that I can still hear her voice and her words echoing across seventy-two years?
The school building is still there today, in use. Newer buildings are now attached to it or built next to it, and the campus is squeezed in by development, but if you stand in front of it, and use your imagination, you can see it in your mind’s eye just as it was many years ago. This is one of the few landmarks from my childhood that is still standing. Most of the others have been removed and something else has taken their place. Such are the ways of the city. It is always on the move, leaving the old behind to crumble away, eventually to be replaced by something new and different.
In the fall of 1997, Wanda and I visited upstate New York and saw the little town of Clinton, restored to its look of generations past by an active historical society. It’s where my great grandfather was born. My home town, Houston in the 1930’s and 1940’s, alas, is just about gone forever, and my adopted home town, Rockport, has also changed a lot. Time changes everything ( I learned that from an old country song by Tommie Duncan).