The Long March

It was the only time I ever saw our grade school principal cry. It was a perfect day in early June and the last day of school. My class and I had just finished the 6th grade. I can’t exactly say that we had "graduated," since they didn’t have graduation ceremonies for grade schools in those days, at least not in Granite City, Illinois, in 1952. But we were moving up none the less. We were going to be with the “big kids” next fall. We would be going to Central Junior High School.

So, on that last day of class, we all walked out the front door of our idyllic little school house in the park and waited for permission to begin the march downtown to Central. It was nine blocks away, and the trek would take about half an hour. The principal of our school, Miss Coulter, had come to the front door and stood on the steps to bid us farewell. That’s when I saw tears in her eyes as she waved us off to start our long march into the future.

The first few blocks of our walk took us through Wilson Park and past the sturdy middle-class houses surrounding it. Most of my classmates came from those families fortunate enough to live near the park. Sure, there were one or two “poor kids” in our class, but for the most part we were middle class, contented, well cared for, and naïve. The girls sang and skipped as the 32 of us moved along en masse towards the center of town. The boys, as always, walked behind the girls and joked and occasionally punched each other on the arms as boys that age do to show affection.

One of the first things I noticed when we arrived at Central was an enormous black tube that was stuck onto the side of the building. It ran from the second floor to the ground. It was one of those fire escape devices that were popular during the late 1800s. "Wow," I thought. “This is going to be fun." I could hardly wait for a fire drill. I hoped I would be on the second floor and get to slide down the tube. What I did not realize at the time was that “fun” was not an item in the curriculum at Central Junior High School.

By now, the girls were no longer singing and the boys no longer goofing around. We stood silently outside the main door, and after about a minute or two, a woman who looked a lot like Miss Gulch from The Wizard of Oz ordered us inside and directed us to a room that was already stuffed full of kids from the other grade schools. We were assigned to a “home room” and instructed to march there quickly and quietly.

When we arrived at our home room, the teacher laid down the law. Disobedience of any sort would not be tolerated. We could only enter and leave the building by using the west door. We could only go to the second floor by using the west staircase. Our movements would also be controlled by bells. If we were late for anything, then that would be a violation. Serious violators would have to “see the Coach." The rules were essentially the ones I’d seen in movies about reform schools and prisons at the Washington Theater: don’t cause any trouble, do what you are told, always be on time, don’t question the rules, and maybe you can expect to be out of here in two years, if you’re lucky. Oh, "... and have a nice summer and see you in the fall." It was then that I understood why Miss Coulter was crying as she bade us farewell.

The Welcoming Committee

The day after Labor Day, I reported to Central to start serving out my two-year term. I had ridden my bicycle. A lot of kids had. Even more walked, and a few came in their car. I must say I was surprised to see an old jalopy come rattling down the street and park right in front of the school. Four tough-looking kids got out. They all were wearing blue jeans and tight, white, short sleeve T-shirts. One of them had a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his left shirt sleeve. The Marlboro Boy and one of his buddies then walked across the street and hid behind a large tree. Soon white clouds, like smoke signals, puffed out from behind the tree, telegraphing that they were enjoying their final early morning cigarette before school began.

The two other tough looking guys were standing together eyeing the rest of us with disgust. I was fascinated by them and made the mistake of making eye contact with the taller of the two who had very light blond hair and a pallid complexion. He leered at me, whispered something to his companion, and strutted over and stood very close to me, almost bumping my chest in the process. “Do you want to fight?” he inquired. For him, it was a rhetorical question.

"No," I replied. “I have no reason to get in a fight with you.”.

“Well, I want to fight you.”

"But I don’t want to fight.”.

“What are you, a chicken or yellow?”

I had to think quickly. Being condemned as yellow, or a chicken, on my first day at Central would be a social death sentence. In the alternative, the kid looked and acted dangerous. Attitude was all on his side. I’d surely lose my teeth in any sort of confrontation. Neither choice was acceptable. I needed a “Plan C.”

“We’ll get in trouble if we get into a fight." My mind was working at top speed now. “It’s against the rules. We’ll end up getting sent to see the Coach and be in real trouble.”

“They won’t see us," he replied. “We’ll go behind that house next door and fight in the alley.

“Yeah, let’s go,” his buddy said with glee in his voice. “I’ll get Chuck and the others.” He turned and ran towards the smoking tree.

Things had gotten worse. Now I was going to find myself back in the alley with four juvenile delinquents who were going to take turns knocking my teeth out. In desperation, I tried “Plan C” one more time. “Man, we’re going to end up in trouble if we get into a fight.”.

With that, he pushed me on my chest and, with a big, broad smirk on his face, grunted out, “Well, I think your chicken. Prove you’re not.”

I’d reached the end of my wits. It was all over. I was doomed either way. Just then I was saved by the bell, literally. The bell rang, which commanded everyone in earshot to immediately start towards their assigned doors or else. To linger was a violation.

“I’ll see you later,” the tough kid snorted as he headed toward the east door on the far side of the building. Even the tough kids knew better than not to follow the rules. As I was going in the west door, a kid bumped into me and said, “Boy, you were lucky. That was Otis. He’s really tough. He knows how to box. I’d stay clear of him.”

It turned out that Otis was in the 8th grade, and they moved in different traffic patterns than we 7th graders, so we rarely came into direct contact. I don’t remember ever having run into Otis in the hall or seeing him again, except on one finale occasion... but more about that later. I never saw the jalopy again either. I figured the driver maybe had had a wreck, lost his license (if he ever had one), went to jail, or couldn’t make his car payment.

The School House

Central School was old and dark. My mother had gone there almost 35 years before, when it had been the town’s high school. The floors were made of wood, and the place smelled of a thousand layers of wax and varnish plus whatever animal by-products were being rendered in the cafeteria kitchen that morning. Coming to Central from the little school house in the park reminded me of that enchanted moment in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy leaves the stark black and white landscape of Depression-era Kansas and lands in the Technicolor world of Munchkin Land.
Only my color trip was in reverse.

In the drab, sepia-colored main hallway of the school, there was a picture of Abraham Lincoln outside the principal’s office. I figured he had been president when the building was built. He may even have come there to do the dedication ceremony and given them his signed picture to hang on the wall.

The Grandfather Clock

There were a lot of things about Central that were surreal, but nothing more so than the huge grandfather clock that stood in the main hallway. It was much more than a timepiece. It was the apex of 19th century horological engineering in the days before electric wall clocks.

On the side of the big clock were two large bellows for blowing air. The wall clocks in each room were all connected to this pneumatic wonder by a network of tubes in the walls. Each time the second hand on the big clock reached twelve, the great machine would squeeze one of its bellows. That would send a large puff of air from the mother hen to all of her chicks. When the air pressure reached the wall clocks in the class rooms, the minute hands on each would lurch forward one minute. These movements were accompanied by a slight sound as each clock released its little puff of air. Every clock made a slightly different sound. Some made a squeak, some a tweet, others a poof, and one in particular took several seconds to expel its gas and played a little tune as it flatulated.

The more serious problem with the system was that shortly after the Spanish American War the clocks in the class rooms started to lose coordination and became disorganized so that by 1952 no clock in any room told the same time. Each class room was in a different time zone. No one had ever fixed the system, and during my two years at Central no one ever tried, or for that matter seemed to be concerned.

The clock in my homeroom was the easiest to follow because the minute hand always told the right time. The hour hand, on the other hand, had managed to gain exactly eight hours between the Battle of San Juan Hill and the present. Thus, it always told the right time, providing you lived in Madrid, Spain.

Amazingly, we all adapted quickly to these temporal distortions. We all knew that we had to be at Civics class by 4:13 and at the following class no later than 2:53. We went to PE at 9:45 and then to Shop class at 8:30. The strangest class was Science. It began and ended at exactly the same time, 9:44. It’s not that the minute hand didn’t try to get to 9:45 and beyond; in fact, it tried, very, very hard, every minute. It would almost get there every time, but then it would start to shake and quiver and finally fall back, doomed like Sisyphus and his boulder, to be trapped in an endless cycle of fruitless effort and failure.

There may have been a good reason that no one at Central every fixed the dysfunctional clock system. Dealing with it was a learning experience and a vital part of our education. We had to use a good deal of gray matter to figure it all out. We had to think, calculate, and remember. Like so many learning processes at Central, it involved putting us through the fire. We could no longer take the easy path. We had to adapt or perish.

P.E. (Physical Education)

Central had a room called the "Gym." Since the building had been built before basketball was invented, it was only about half the normal size of a modern regulation court. Almost anyone could stand in the center of the room and shoot baskets to either side. There was not a square inch for spectators since the basketball court took up all the space. Any ball going out of bounds simply hit the wall and bounced back in. Players did the same.

Basketball was the only inter-school sport we had at Central, but since our court was non-regulation, none of our games or records officially counted. It was hard to have much school spirit. One reason for our lack of interest was that it was almost impossible to see a game. No one could stand downstairs since the court took up all the space, so the only way to watch a game was to squeeze onto a narrow little balcony that ran along one wall about half way up the room. With luck, it could hold about 30 kids, or 45 Munchkins.

Every junior high school nowadays has a school mascot, some fierce carnivore like a tiger, a hawk, or a cougar. We didn’t have a mascot at Central. If we had, maybe the most appropriate one would have been a caterpillar. We were, after all, sent to Central during that period when our bodies were rapidly growing and being transformed towards physical and sexual maturity. It was a necessary purgatory. We were mentally and physically becoming too different to be left with the “little kids” in grade school, yet we were still not ready to be thrown in with the vastly more savvy “cool” kids in high school. Yup, we were the Central JHS Caterpillars, the “Fighting Lepidoptera.”

The “Gym” was also used for physical education class. The worst daily schedule was to have P.E. during the first hour in the morning. In the spring and fall, when it was the hottest, we would have to go to the poorly ventilated gym and play basketball or engage in some other vigorous, heat-generating sport. There were no showers, so we had to work out in our street clothes. So, by the time the second period started (6 PM GMT), we were all hot, sweaty, and stinky. We would stay that way for the rest of the day.

P.E. (Psychiatric Embarrassment)

That was still better than P.E. in the winter. During the very coldest months of the year, a couple of times a week, in weather that only Roald Amundsen could endure, we would go swimming—inside, of course—at the YMCA. The “Y” was several blocks away, and we would always walk there. It didn’t matter whether we were coming or going; the wind always blew directly in our faces, and we had to cover our mouths with our coat sleeves to keep the arctic blast from sucking all the air out of our lungs.

I have read where almost everyone has dreams of appearing naked in public. It seems to be a universal, reoccurring nightmare. However, it has been reported in the Journal of the American Psychiatric Association that boys who attended Central Junior High School during the 1950s have that dream ten times more frequently than those in the general population (OK, so I made that up).

When we got to the "Y,” we had to strip off all of our clothes, everything. We then went to the pool. Swimming suits weren’t allowed, only birthday suits. We then sat on several rows of ice-cold marble “benches” that were built into the wall along the side of the pool. We had to sit there and wait for the assistant coach to show up. That took at least five minutes, and then it took him another five to take the roll-call. During that time everyone got to “check out” everyone else. This was every 12-year-old boy’s dream: to be on full frontal display in front of his peers. The refrigerated marble slabs upon which we sat made matters worse since our frigid bodies strove to pull our blood supplies away from our extremities and back towards our warmer internal organs.

Finally, the coach would blow the whistle, and we would all jump in the pool, now greatly relieved that our bodies were no longer visible from the waist down. Our time in the pool lasted exactly five minutes and consisted mainly of splashing each other in the eyes. When we would get back to the locker room, it was time to shower, dry off, and get dressed. The “Y” didn’t furnish towels. You had to bring your own; or, rather, you were supposed to remember to bring your own. Half the time I would forget when it was a “swimming day,” so my towel would still be at home, neatly folded in the towel drawer. This left towel-less boys with three choices, all of them bad. The best was to be able to borrow another boy’s towel. You had to beg him to let you use it before he dried his midsection. Usually even your best buddy would say, “Sure, you can use my towel,” and then he would commence to meticulously dry every conceivable fold and crevice in his body.

“Yuk, no thanks.” The second choice was to use your T-shirt. If you dried yourself off with your T-shirt, you would be cold the rest of the day, but that was better than being cold and wet, which was choice number three. Here you would turn your hands into squeegees to try to wipe the water off your skin. Feet were especially problematic, so you were always putting semi-wet feet into your socks and then into your shoes where they wouldn’t have a chance to dry out during the rest of the day. After getting dressed, we would start the trek back to base camp, moving rapidly so as not to freeze to death and become food for the sled dogs.

P.E. taught us two of life’s great lessons. First, don’t forget your towel, and second, regardless of how much you think you have, there is always somebody who has more. I also learned later that for some kids this was their only opportunity to shower, which is maybe why Central did it.

Winters

At the end of each day, we would return to our home room and wait for the final bell. Its chiming, and our wall clock, would now signal that it was half past midnight in the gardens of Spain and time for us to retire to our own Palacio Real de Aranjuez, where we could sip nectar and experience the enchantments of the opposite sex.

Winters’ Drug Store was right across the street from Central. Within five minutes of the bell, it was as full as a big box store one minute after midnight on the day after Thanksgiving. Mr. Winters was a miracle worker. Within a few minutes, he could somehow manage to dispense a hundred or more, six-ounce fountain cokes while maintaining order and his sanity. Every booth in Winters could hold five or six girls. Only the girls sat down. The boys would all lean over the top of the booths. There were maybe seven or eight leaners at each booth. Everything, and nothing, would be discussed. We talked incessantly, releasing all the pent-up blabber that had been suppressed during our prior hours at the institution.

When we had drained our cups and told our tales, we would walk home, always following closely behind the girls. In grade school, girls had been an oddity, and sometimes even a nuisance. They had their own playground, their own games, their own friends, their own parties, their own phonograph records. Now, quite suddenly it seemed, they had become to us objects of great curiosity, mystery, and desire—a wonderful new necessity. We were invited to their parties; we danced with them; we thought about them incessantly. Our once tranquil lives were gone forever. We had left the boundaries of Toy Land and would never return again.

Don’t Forget Your Towel and …

My dad’s friend owned the Granite City Ice Cream Company. For several years, he took me and my two older brothers to see the Golden Gloves in St. Louis. It was the premier amateur boxing competition. Boxing was really big in the 1950s. Boxing, and especially the Gillette Friday Night Fights, were the equivalent of what football is today.

I don’t remember where the fights were held, but I do know we always had great seats, real close to ringside. I don’t remember a single fight—that is, except one of them. At the start of that fight, the announcer in a tuxedo came out and grabbed the mike that had descended from the overhead darkness. He announced that “so-and-so” would be fighting “Otis so-and-so." Otis!!!!! Sure enough, it was the Otis, my Otis, the frightful dragon that had haunted me in my sleep every night. I had devoted countless hours trying to determine what my strategy would be when I would next run into Otis.

Otis came into the ring wearing an enormous pair of white boxing shorts that said “EVERLAST” on the front. They covered his knees and went up onto his chest. If he had chosen to pull the top of his shorts up over his head, he could have completely hidden himself from view. His arms, which were almost the color of his shorts, stuck out from his body like thin anemic rods, and his legs looked like two little bean poles with baseballs taped on them for knees. He looked like a scarecrow that had lost its straw or that someone had forgotten to stuff. On the end of each of his arms were boxing gloves that looked to be the size of bushel baskets. He seemed to have trouble lifting them as he practiced swinging his arms in his corner.

Otis’s opponent looked like a young matador. His perfect musculature was complemented by his well-fitted boxing trunks. When he warmed up in his corner, his gloves moved so rapidly that they became a blur. The bell rang, and after touching gloves, the fight began. For five or ten seconds, the young Don Juan used Otis’s body like a punching bag …wack … wack … wack! The referee separated them, and then Otis’s tormentor came in for the kill. With all the grace and skill of a bullfighter, he landed a perfect punch onto the center of Otis’s face. Besides the loud thud, there was a cracking sound followed by Otis’s face turning bright red as blood poured from his nose and ran down his chest, splattering his burka. Otis’s manager immediately threw in his towel to stop the fight. The referee picked up the towel, and he and another man used it to try to staunch the bleeding. Others came and mopped up the ring.

I felt sorry for Otis, but I no longer feared him. I thought I might even be able to make a good showing for myself if I ever did have to fight him. At school, he looked terribly threatening in his blue jeans and rolled-up T shirt, but once those props were stripped away, he looked weak and even sad. Life has enough real dragons, and it was good to be rid of one that I had mostly created myself.

From a Distance

Central School is gone now. It was torn down long ago, and nothing remains. Nothing, that is, except what we took away from it and were able to become, and credit for that goes to the teachers. They were all exceptional. I never had a bad one at Central. I never had a burn-out or one who wasted the students’ time or allowed any of the kids in the class to waste our time. They taught us lots of stuff, but more than that, every single teacher was convinced that we could be improved. They knew that bad English, ignorance, poor hygiene, and sloppiness were handicaps that would mark us like a brand on our foreheads. They were fully committed to getting the best out of each one of us, and we were treated equally. It didn’t matter to them whether we came from a home where the maid had made the bed that morning or whether we had spent the night sleeping on a cot with our siblings in a rented basement with a dirt floor. By God, they would do everything they could do to help us... and they did. Thank you. Thank you!

Tempus Fugit

The building is long gone, but I would bet, however, that there is one solid, physical thing from Central that might still exist: the Great Clock with its ticking heart and breathing lungs. No one in their right mind could possibly have destroyed such a complex, magnificent, almost divine creation. If it could be found, it would be the only member of its race still alive. If anyone has seen it or knows where it is, please let me know. I would love to see it again.

Ah, if it could only use those lungs to speak. What tales it could tell.
 

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