Ramblings

GROWING UP - BERWYN

Ours was an untypical family. My sister and brother and I grew up without cousins. Dad had been the only survivor of several siblings on his side; Mother’s brother Andy never had any children by his marriage to Aunt Aletta. When he was growing up, Grandma Moran had allowed young Frank to have only one playmate at a time in their house, usually Andy, his best friend. Grandma Kramer’s house was often full of neighborhood kids, I was told, and she plied them with Dutch treats; tea or hot chocolate, cake and cookies – and, when they were in season, her specialty: fresh strawberries crushed with a fork on a thick slab of buttered homemade bread and sprinkled with sugar. Those children in the old neighborhood around the turn of the century were all well behaved, mannerly, properly dressed and respectful. My parents, therefore, couldn’t quite understand what they had brought into the world in the form of their eldest son.

I wasn’t a bad kid, just curious and a show off and – because I was smaller than the other children in my class at Emerson Grammar School (except Mary Dilly who never quite reached five feet) – I was usually out to prove something. My mother never quite got used to the phone calls from Mrs. Barton, the banker’s wife across the street, "Mrs. Moran, Roger’s walking around your roof in the rain gutters again."

It was about a five city block walk from our house at 3034 Maple, up to 31 st Street, along it across Winona Wiscosin and Home Avenues to the school yard. You could save, maybe, a half block by cutting across the south end of the Berwyn Park, but that was the turf of Frank Koller, a big overstuffed dummy of a bully (who later became a cop, the Berwyn Police Chief, and back to cop). It became a challenge to out-fox or out-maneuver or out-run him. Most days I could; my last resort was to leap the seven or eight foot wide creek that idled through the park. Frank was a lard-ass and couldn’t jump it. But, sometimes in winter when the creek was frozen and the park bushes bare and provided no screen to hide, he’d nail me and punch me the only place I wasn’t covered with jacket, gloves, scarf or hat – smack in the kisser. I suffered my first bloody noses and fat lips from Frank, but that didn’t keep me from my daily short-cutting.

I liked school, and I and my sister and, later, Owen had some very special teachers, the foremost and best remembered was Miss Elizabeth Jones. Jane’s and my grades were always tops. In the Depression days, radio was hardly a distraction and TV was still years away. Anyway, mom had been a teacher and had graduated from her high school when only 16. She was a no-nonsense mother: a snack after school then turn to the books. A broken arm would have been an unacceptable excuse, believe me, for not studying.

Yet, between school and studying, church and Sunday School and choir, later Boy Scouts and high school "extra curricular activities" I was rarely out of trouble.

The Emerson Grammar School was old when we attended it. Billy Arnold found his father’s initials in one of the desk tops. The wooden stair treads were worn hollow by the tens of thousands of small feet that had climbed them. The old gymnasium on the top floor has been closed and unused for years. The boy’s and girl’s bathrooms were at opposite corners of the school basement, and anyone who raised his or her hand and asked to be allowed to go faced a long, lonely march to and from the classroom.

But, Emerson was a great learning institution. The classrooms were huge and humbling with wide aisles between the desks and with blackboards on the two inside walls. There were two large windows on each of the two outer walls with shelves or bulletin boards between them. There were thick glass shields angled out at the bottom of the windows so that in the spring and fall, the wind was deflected upward and wouldn’t blow papers off desks. There were big radiators beneath the windows that were sizzling hot in the winter. After class chores included not only cleaning blackboards and beating the chalk dust out of erasers, but topping off the metal pans which rested on two of the radiators and heated water to evaporate into the room to dispel winter’s dry air.

The desks were massive oak and iron affairs bolted to the maple wood floors. Each seat was attached to the desk behind. We kept our books and tablets under the desks hinged tops most of which had initials and signs carved in them, so it was often difficult to find a smooth place to write. There was a slot at the top front to hold pencils and pens. Our most disliked class was in "Palmer Penmanship" when we dipped our pens in the recessed ink wells and did circles and swirls and tried to duplicate the Palmer Letters engraved into the top section of the blackboards. (I always admired the handwriting of my parents and grandparents and wondered why I, my sister, my brother and others of our generation had such comparably horrible handwritings! But, we could be worse. I have grandsons whose letters I cannot read).

Bad as Palmer Penmanship was for most of us, it was pure torture to the left-handed student. Imagine trying to write – dipping pen in ink – from above by circling your hand down over the paper. (No wonder lefties feel the invention of the ball point pen ranks right up there with the transistor and the silicone chip!)

The glass ink well with their black bakelite screwed tops and the hinged gimmick that slid over to close the hole were held in a recessed cavity at the upper top right corner of each desk (another bit of awkwardness for lefties). On hot summer days when the teacher was dronning lessons at the blackboard, Trev Edwards and I would try to catch flies. Once captured, we would pull the wings off, pinch the fly between the prongs of a pen and dip it in the ink well. If the coast was clear, with teacher facing the blackboard work, the trick was to flip the crippled, ink-snaked fly onto someone’s exercise book.

Unless the victim saw what was happening immediately, he or she ended up with a lesson paper tracked over with ink trails made by the staggering fly. That was great fun and well worth the risks involved.

But, ink well antics had their down side too. Vivian Seymour sat in front of me, and on one bad day when she knew the lesson cold and I hadn’t completed my homework, I was angry and frustrated. It seemed justifiable to dip one of her long blond curls in my ink well – which I did. She didn’t realize what was happening at first. When she did and started to rise and snap her head around, the tip of her hair caught in the blamed inkwell top. Her movement flipped it up out of its recess, around her right shoulder, and back again like the crack of a whip. The nearly full ink well caught me on the cheek and knocked me nearly senseless. I was laying flat on my back on the desk seat with ink all over me when Miss Hoffman came down the aisle. She took a long, careful look at things and – before returning to her desk – announced, "Ah, you see. There is justice in this world after all!"