Fifth Grade at Lattimore Elementary for GrandPat

Fifth Grade Class Picture
This must have been in cool weather, we are wearing sweaters.  Front row, far right am I. 

Fifth Grade

Letters to My Grandchildren:

Grade 1947-48

Our classroom that year was on the second floor looking out to the east and over the playground.  Our fifth-grade teacher was new to Lattimore—it was Mrs. Nota Whatley, and she was from Alabama.  She was a very tall lady and a kind teacher with a marked southern accent.  I remember we were studying the Catawba Indians and she pronounced it Cat’a’baw with the accent on the Cat’, and I knew it was pronounced Ca-taw’-ba , and I almost laughed out loud at her pronunciation.  I went home and told my parents, but they said I should not correct her.  I was glad when we stopped studying about those Indians because I was having to mispronounce their names with the emphasis on the Cat’.  I was afraid she would correct me if I pronounced them correctly.   After that whenever we visited my Grandmother in Statesville and had to cross the Catawba River, I would say this is the Cat’-a-baw River, and we would all laugh. 

Martha Mason was supposed to be in our room that year, but she told me many years later why she wasn’t.  She went into the room with this new teacher with a funny last name and a funny accent so she decided she would go up to the third floor to the other fifth-grade class.  As she was bounding up the steps, along came Mr. Padgett, our principal.  He asked her where she was going and when she explained where and why he let her change to the other class.  Martha admitted to me that she had made a mistake because Mrs. Whatley was the better teacher as she found out later.

I had my appendix removed during this school year—in the spring of the year as I recall.  Anesthesia back then was Ether administered with a mask over your face.  I felt like I was suffocating!  As I was drifting off I could imagine a large saw as big as a Ferris wheel coming toward me.  I woke up in my room with my parents there, and my roommate was another little girl about my same age who had had an appendectomy too, but several days earlier than I.  As we chatted she told me the worst thing was when they removed the adhesive tape from your belly.  She had already endured that.  I recall my whole belly was covered in tape, and I kept dreading when they were ripped off.  Sure enough, it was extremely painful.  Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!

The one bright spot of that appendectomy was when Mrs. Whatley came to see me in the hospital and brought me this beautiful purple flower.  I thought it was the prettiest flower I had ever seen.  It was a Fuchsia plant, and that plant and her visit was the highlight of that hospital stay. To this day a Fuchsia plant reminds me of Mrs. Whatley, a teacher I dearly loved.

While I was in the hospital, I missed the yearly achievement tests so I had to make up the tests during our recesses (play periods) when I returned to school. During one such recess, I was taking the spelling component part of the test of fifty words that Mrs. Whatley was calling out as I wrote them.  Spelling was so easy for me, and I was sailing right along writing down the words as she called them out, when suddenly she called out “who”.  My mind went blank, and I couldn’t for the life of me think of how to spell “who”.  I left it blank.  After the last word was called out, I asked her to go back and repeat the one that I had left blank.  She said “who” and I remembered how to spell it, and I thought how could I possibly have forgotten that word---she must have wondered too.

I began taking piano lessons this year from Mrs. Selma Withrow who taught in a small room on the third floor of our building.  I had permission to leave class for a half-hour each week to go take the piano lesson.  Piano was not my interest, in fact, music was not my forte.  More about me and music in another letter.

*Of these thirty students, there are only seven I recognize as being in my graduating class.  Of course, there were students in another fifth-grade class some of whom would have been in our senior class. Some children would have moved away, many others would have failed a grade or dropped out, and other children would have moved into our school district and entered our class after fifth grade.