Hanging Out in the Sixth Grade

Letters to my Grands

April 26, 2020

Still Quarantined because of the Covid 19, so I will continue writing letters to you.  Last night Grace missed her Senior Prom and I was so sad about that, but I sent her a little nosegay of flowers which I think boosted her spirits.  Brooks is home from Austin, and I am waiting for him to come over for a social distance visit. 

Nosegay I sent to Grace on the night she missed her Senior Prom because of Covid 19.

I thought I would continue to write about elementary school.  Sixth grade in 1948-49 was a very new experience for me because our class was a combined class with the seventh grade and our classroom was in the basement of the Lattimore High School just across the way from the Elementary School.  One of the sixth grades remained at the Elementary School. I do remember there was no summer Session that year because of the Polio Epidemic.

Our teacher was Miss Sarah Blanton from Lattimore, and I remember during that year she became engaged to Hal Dedmon. I knew most of the seventh graders that were in my room but being in the same class with them was different.  When they were having their classes I would listen in, and by the time I entered the seventh grade much of the material was not new to me.  And I was bored.

Sarah Blanton was the one that got me interested in basketball.  She would take our class over to the Tin Can, that's what the gym was called, on the grounds of the Elementary School to play basketball during recess. Actually, the gym was made of tin except for the frame and the floor.  The gym was heated with two wood-burning potbelly stoves at each end of the building,  and it was where the high school basketball team played. It was not heated when we were there for recess. 

I became to love basketball, and I went home and found a metal ring (hoop) from an old barrel and asked my Dad to nail it up for me.  He nailed it up to my Grandma's barn,  and I played basketball with Martha and Betty Jo or many times I just went out and kept shooting by myself.  I can’t remember if we had a real basketball or perhaps we played with whatever ball we had around the house.  I got where I could hit that “basket” with no trouble at all.  

The first basketball goal I had when I was 11 was a very stiff metal ring from a barrel, called a hoop. 

So Daddy bought a real basketball goal and mounted it on a post at the proper distance from the ground out in the space between our house and Grandma’s.  Now I had a basketball, a goal and a dirt court.  I could then play to my heart’s content, and I did with a passion.  When I reached the ninth grade I was ready to make the basketball team, and I did.

When we weren’t playing basketball during recess, we played Kick the Can or later softball.  I liked Kick the Can, but never really caught on to softball.  For the life of me, I can’t remember the rules for Kick the Can.  But I know it involved running very fast which I could do.

My memory of what we were doing academically that year fails me. Basketball was what I remember most.