Edgewood

There are teachers that everyone remembers. You remember them for their good qualities or their bad.  Or maybe what they wore. Or if they spit when they talked. Well, I had a boat load of  the good, the bad and the ugly throughout my academic career.

I already mentioned Sister Maria, who was my first teacher at that stupid Catholic private school my mom sent me to because I flunked the early entrance exam. Right off the bat I was scarred for life. And had an unhealthy fear of nuns.  I was at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Juana Academy for three very long years. I finally talked my mom into letting me transfer to Edgewood for fourth grade.

In fourth grade, I had a teacher by the name of Melvina Emler. I can’t really picture her at all, except that I have her looking like Aunt Bee on the Andy Griffith Show. Someone please set me straight because I am sure she didn’t look like that.  I was a bit nervous starting fourth grade because I was the new kid. I knew most of the students in my class, since I lived by so many of them. But, it was still hard. I got teased for being so skinny, so that was not good. And then there was the dumb row.

Miss Emler’s room consisted of rows of those desks that our attached to each other. Written on the front of the first row was a sign that said, DUMB ROW. I am not kidding.  Now, there were kids who lived in the Dumb Row.  Names like Mickey and Willie I remember specifically. The object of fourth grade for me was to survive the dumb row and to quietly murder the kid who made fun of me (a la Rhoda in the Bad Seed).  I think his name was Kenny, and God sure punished him later on in 5th grade. He was rushed to the hospital for swallowing the blue lid off of his Bic pen. Yeah, the big blue part that had the long thing on the end of it so it would fit in your chest pocket like a dork. Poor Kenny. (See, I felt sorry for him.)  I went steady with him for about 5 minutes after a dance a year or two later, until he bought me a milkshake at Elby’s and then I broke up with him. I think we went to dances pretty early back then.

Anywho, fourth grade was scary for me. I guess one day I pissed Miss Emler off and she put me in the dumb row.  We had to make up spelling sentences every week. My God, that was so frickin boring. So, I guess one day I decided I had enough and made all of my sentences  stupid. I will never forget that we were doing compound words that week and the one I got thrown into the slammer with was “cardboard.”  My sentence was, “I live in a cardboard box.” Shit, that is a sentence. She never ONCE said they had to be true sentences.  I didn’t write, “Me live in cardboard box” or “I life in a carboard boxes.”  I wrote it correctly, damnit. But, she threw my ass behind Mickey and in front of Willie (who by the way always ate his scabs). My life was over.

I need to backtrack to Willie before I can move on. Seriously, how does a kid accumulate so many injuries? He always had scabs on his arms and legs and he was always picking them off when they were nice and hard and he ate them. I know this because I watched him everyday. He ate scabs and boogers. If my husband would have suggested a baby name years later when I was pregnant and said, “How about the name, Will?” I would have had to say, “No, I once knew a Willie that ate his scabs and boogers.” That’s how baby names are so easily dismissed.  Scab eaters.

5th and 6th grade must have been boring, because I don’t remember much. Mrs. Garrity and Mrs. Tucci. Mrs. Tucci had huge breasts. Are girls supposed to remember those things?  She also yelled at us if we wore hose. “You are too young to wear hose!” 

Now, junior high was a hoot, mainly because of our Science teacher, Miss  Ethel Caldwell. I remember the first day of  school, when  she told us that teacher’s aren’t supposed to have teacher’s pets, but she did. Then she held up a framed 8×10 picture of her pomeranian, Ponty. She talked about Ponty every day. Ponty did this. Ponty ate food. Ponty went for a walk. Ponty rolled over. Oh, dear God, please stop. She didn’t. But, she did something that interested me very much. She lied. She was a bonafide liar.

Besides the small daily lies she told, Miss Caldwell announced one day that John Glenn was going to come to our school soon and we were going to have hot dogs.  Yes, that would be John  Glenn, the astronaut. All year long John Glenn was going to come and talk about space. We were going to have a picnic with him.  And eat hot dogs. Well, one day near the end of school, we put Doug up to asking Miss Caldwell when John Glenn was going to come to our school. She just looked at him like she was hoping we forgot that one and replied, “Doug, John Glenn is a very busy man.” And that was the end of the John Glenn story.

Miss Caldwell would start the day every day saying, “Today is the first day…..of the rest of your life.” She said this every day.  And then would just smile. I think she had dentures. Dentures were weird things to me. Taking teeth out and scrubbing them and then putting them back in your mouth. I watched her mouth daily to see if they would ever fall out. I wanted to be there when they did.

Dorp was another thing. Dorp was a bat that she brought to school. “I named him Dorp. Dor for Dorothy, my friend, who had the bat in her house, and P for Pete, who captured it so I can bring it to class today.” I think Doug let it out of its cage, because then Dorp was gone. Come to think of it, did we ever see Dorp? I don’t remember ever seeing Dorp. I just remember it being loose in our room and about once a week Doug would make noises and she would say, “Shhhhhhhh, everyone be quiet. I think I hear Dorp.” We never found Dorp.

Every Friday we had to bring in a fact. There were always little facts in the Weirton Daily Times, those little snippets, like “Did you know that the closest planet to the sun was Mercury?” They were buried all over the paper. But, Ramaine and I had other ideas. We found that most of the facts came from Ripley’s Believe it or Not. So, we made facts up for every kid in class to say. Every Friday. We would get together and make up the most absurd facts up. And then we went around the room, taking turns reading our  Friday facts.  That’s when we realized that Miss Caldwelll didn’t listen to a damn thing we said during fact day. She was using it to plan lessons, or to look at her dog’s picture. So, we could go crazy with our facts. “In India, two catepillars crawled toward each other, and crawled up and turned into a flower.” or I woman in India had 24 children named Barney, Billy, Barbara etc. etc. etc. (listed them all) and Joe, who was retarded.” We worked our friend Joe into most of the facts. He would just sit there and smile. She never heard any of our facts. We cracked up and she never lifted her head. I wish I could still remember some of those facts. One I sort of remember was, “A man in India once walked ….” thats how a lot of them started, and we would change the country.

Ramaine and I had fun in Home Ec class. I don’t know how we got out of it so often to go help in the kitchen. And we usually left the kitchen to get into other kinds of work…When the kids would come downstairs for a downstairs class or lunch, everyone put their books and purses, etc. on a big long table. That’s when Ramaine and I got to work. We got a ball of yarn and ran yarn through everyone’s purses, and binder notebooks, through anything that could be threaded. And then when the bell rang, the kids came rushing to pick up their gear, and everyone ‘s stuff was on a string. My God, that was a funny sight. Finally, someone thought with their brain, and yelled out for scissors instead of unthreading everything. That was so much fun to watch though. Another time, everyone was supposed to be making a simple a-line skirt, and Ramaine and I sewed mittens. Out of cotton material. Little cotton mittens. We had a fashion show with the stuff we made. I was afraid to wear my skirt for fear that it would fall apart. I should have worn the mittens.

Now, Mr. Dunn was unbelievable. He was our Social Studies teacher. He had a very short fuse. He screamed daily. Screamed.  He would pick up a couple of books and then slam them down onto the desk as loud as he could. One time he opened the window and threw books out of the window. “If yous guys don’t want to learn, I don’t want to waste my time teaching” and he threw the manuals out the window. He did this often. He came to my dad’s funeral, years later, which I thought was nice. I was never scared of Mr. Dunn. I watched him in awe, wondering if tomorrow he could possibly be any louder.

Mrs. Alberti was a great English teacher. I loved her class. Grammar was so much fun to learn with her. “I remember her always correcting us if we asked, something like, ”Where is that at?”  She would simply say, “Behind the at.”  I went to college aspiring to be an English teacher, mainly because of Mrs. Alberti. She was a gem.

Of course, I can’t close out this blog without a “I peed my pants story.”   In gym class we learned all kinds of dances besidies the usual gym stuff. One day we had 2 lines formed to learn some country dances, and there’s a part in the song where they say, “Now swing your partners”, and then we had to go from person to person. Well, as I was swinging around, I came to Ramaine, who came at me with this crazy laugh,  like she rode the short bus, and I cracked up. I had to get out of the line, which messed up the whole dance and had to be stopped. “Where are you going, Vickie?” yelled the gym teacher. “Ohhhh, I peed my pants.”  I laughed and ran to the bathroom. I am so surprised that I wasn’t teased for peeing my pants so much.  Vickie the pee-er….Vickie PeeHead…..something, but no one ever did. Maybe because I was the first to laugh at myself. I think that helped a lot.

All in all, my years at Edgewood were great. I did get called to the principal’s office because someone saw me put pieces of carrot sticks in all of the ketchup bottles.

But, that wasn’t me. I only hid food I didn’t want to eat at home. 

Just Picture "Dumb Row" written on the front