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. 

Easter Eggs and Easter

Letters to my Grandchildren: Easter When I was Young

As a young child, I remember we always dyed eggs using Paas Egg Colors.  We mixed the dye in with water and vinegar, I still sometimes think of Easter when I am using vinegar.  A dozen was the number we usually dyed.  I remember there was a wax pencil with the set of dyes that we could use to write on the eggs before we dyed them.  Since there were only two of us, I suppose I would hide them and my little sister Martha hunted for them, and vice versa.  Once Betty Jo was our neighbor, there would be three of us to hide/hunt for the eggs.  Hiding and hunting probably continued long past Easter until the eggs were probably a bit on the rank side. New Easter Baskets were out for us on Easter Morning usually filled with candy eggs filled with marshmallows (they were awful).

Even in my 80s I still enjoy dying eggs, but I haven't done so this year.  Once when we were in Shelby for Easter, I went over to Lattimore on Saturday night before Easter to Martha Mason's, set up a card table, and dyed eggs as Martha watched and gave me instructions on what colors to use.  That was one of my many fun visits over the years with Martha.

Easter Sunday I always had a new outfit to wear to church.  As a teenager, when I began wearing hats to church (That was the style back in the 50s.) I would always have a new hat, and I enjoyed seeing what others were wearing.  Once I remember when I was sitting in the Youth Choir and looking out over the congregation, Dr. and Mrs. Hunt from Lattimore, brought their five little girls all decked out in their Easter outfits. The seven of them took up almost an entire row.   I thought they were adorable.  Mrs. Hunt's family was from the Double Springs Church community so I guess she was visiting with her family because I don't remember the Hunts being members at Double Springs.

Easter 1955 was special for me.  I was a senior in high school and it was the first Easter I had a serious boyfriend.  Back then, girls who had serious boyfriends would get a corsage for Easter from their boyfriend.   So I proudly went to Church that Easter sporting my very first corsage from a boy,  but my mother had made corsages for me when I was in piano recitals as a child.

This Easter, April 2020, is sad for me because I am separated from my family, and usually, I would see them over the Easter Holidays.  The Covid 19 virus and the "stay at home" orders are making Easter unusual for a lot of people.  Let's hope we will be able to have a normal Easter in 2021.

p.s I  made little Easter treats for the children on our street, and I hid them in their yards last night for them to find this morning.  Fun, fun, fun for me playing Easter Bunny!

Hanging Out with Grandpat in the Fourth Grade

Letters to my Grands:  

Fourth Grade at Lattimore Elementary School

Miss Lyda Poston, a tall and lanky woman who had once played basketball in high school was the, shall I say, notorious fourth-grade teacher.  She was well-loved even though she was known as a rather strict disciplinarian. Over each of the two doors that one would enter or exit the room was a chinning bar, and each time a student passed through the door, she would have to chin.  Even going out for lunch or recess, we had to line up and each person would chin and then go through the door.  We could do it pretty fast after a few weeks of practice.

 

Miss Poston's coupe except it didn't have white-walled tires. 

Miss Poston drove a black coupe with a rumble seat in which she would arrive each morning.  I often wondered how she with her long legs could fit into that car.  How I hoped that one day I would miss my bus and Miss Poston would have to take me home.  “Please may I ride in the rumble seat, Miss Poston?” Never happened.

Geography was introduced as a subject in fourth grade and we had a book devoted just to geography.  The one thing I remember was we studied the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and Mesopotamia the Fertile Crescent that lay between those two rivers.  We even put on a program in the auditorium of the high school where we were dressed as Arabs and we ate dates.  I had never eaten dates before, and as a fourth-grader, I did NOT like them.  (I like them very much now.) When the Iraq war happened and I read about the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers it reminded me of my fourth-grade geography class.

Polio was running rampant during the 1940s, and President Roosevelt himself had polio.  He started a campaign to raise money for research into finding a vaccine for polio.  He figured that even during the depression anyone could afford a dime.  At school, we were given little cards, with slots for placing dimes, and we would collect as many as we could.  I would get a few from my Daddy, and maybe one from Grandma and maybe one or two from Aunt Emma. I would always try to fill up the card before I turned it into the teacher.  These would be mailed to the March of Dimes headquarters.

 My little sister, Martha, entered the first grade this year, and she was assigned to a teacher that I thought was not the best teacher. So every morning I would take her to the other classroom and would tell her to stay there in Miss Magness’s room.  Of course every morning she would be taken back to the room to which she was assigned.  For some reason, I thought Miss Magness was the better teacher and I wanted Martha to be in her classroom.  Finally, I saw that she would not be in Miss Magness’s room so I gave up.

 Martha was very unhappy with school during the first days and because her room was diagonal across from my fourth-grade class, frequently her teacher would come to get me to go sit with Martha when she was upset.  I hated that.  First of all, I did not want to miss what was going in my classroom.  Secondly, I had outgrown the small chairs that were used in the first grades and it was very uncomfortable for me to sit there.   Finally, she became accustomed to school and I was relieved of my duty as a big sister comforter.

Grandpat Misbehaved in Second Grade

Dear Grands,  The last letter I wrote about school I was finishing first grade.  Now here is what I can remember about my second and third grades. 

Aerobics with Miss Nina in the Second Grade

Second grade found me in the room of Mrs. Nina Toms, known affectionately as Miss Nina, although she was a Mrs. Nina.  What stands out most of my memory of second grade was what perfect posture Miss Nina had.  She always stood up very straight and urged us to do so as well.  In fact, every day we did a regimen of a sort of calisthenics where she had us stand up and go through different exercises.  One exercise required that we stand up on our toes and reach for the ceiling, and we would take deep breaths and exhale.  She was way ahead of her time in that respect.  Second graders doing aerobics in 1944-45, perhaps unprecedented!  This was in addition to our recess which was held outdoors.  There should be more of this in the classrooms of second graders today IMHO.

She was a rather strict teacher, and if someone misbehaved she would make them go to the blackboard and draw a circle a bit higher than their head on the board, and then the naughty child would have to stand on tiptoes and keep his nose in the circle.  Maybe that was why she had us doing exercises every day. I watched jealously as I saw my classmates, mainly boys, going to the board for this “activity”. I was usually a very obedient and polite child, but once I thought it might be fun to have to plant my nose in a circle on the blackboard.  So I deliberately did something for which I was chastised, and bingo I was up at the blackboard with my nose in a circle.  I would sometimes try to look around and face the class while still standing on tiptoes, but without my nose in the circle, obviously.  I giggled quietly and tried to get my classmates to giggle too.  I had to be quick, because as soon as I saw Miss Nina turning around towards me, back in the circle went my nose. I have to tell you standing on tiptoes and keeping your nose in a circle was not easy.  I didn’t misbehave again. 

Third Grade and Changing Classes: Not students but teachers

My first cousin, Virginia Greene, who was eighteen years older than I became one of my third-grade teachers.  I guess you would say she was my “homeroom teacher.”  She was a talented musician in voice and piano and had recently graduated from Meredith College and had studied at the Julliard School of Music in New York City.  Her father was my father’s oldest brother, and his family lived across the railroad tracks from our house, but in the summers when she was home I could sometimes hear Virginia going through her warm-ups for singing.  “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah”, and then a key higher “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah” and so on.  Then she would burst into song that carried beautifully through the air to where I was outside climbing trees or chasing butterflies.  Music was never a talent of mine. 

I had to call her Miss Greene, which seemed unnatural to me, since I had always called her Virginia.  She was actually hired as the music teacher for the school.  So off she would go to some other class to teach them music while their teacher would come to our room to teach us some subject.  I can’t remember all the teachers and what subjects they taught, but I remember the math teacher, I think a Mrs. Brown.  We were learning our multiplication tables and she would divide the class into two teams for arithmetic “baseball”.  The first person would go to “bat” and they would be given an arithmetic problem,  like 5 x 4.  If the student got it right she would move to first base, and this would continue until there were three misses (or outs) and the home scores would be tallied.  During that arithmetic class, we also learned to count money using play money we had made.  A “store” was set up in the room where we would be pretending to buy things.  Students had to take their turns as clerks and shoppers. 

In the spring of that year near the end of the school term, all the classes participated in a program out on the playground that parents could attend.  We third graders were Chinese and our Mamas made us little pajamas that resembled kimonos, and we had some kind of black   “rat” in our hair to resemble a Chinese hairstyle.  We performed some kind of dance and song.  

Love, GrandPat

April 7, 2020

Cleaning the Back Porch/Patio in Early April

To My Grands  
From Grandpat

Saturday, April 4, 2020

I’m trying to stay busy during the “stay at home” orders, because of the COVID, and I am certainly obeying orders.  As an 82-year-old I suppose I fall under the category ELDERLY, which makes me more susceptible than most to the virus.  You know our beloved long-time friend and biweekly housekeeper Bea has retired.  My friend, Boguska, who sometimes helps me is staying away per my request, so there are things I will have to do myself.  So be it. Now I have the time. 

With trees producing an unusually high amount of pollen this spring, the back porch and everything on it were covered in yellow. As you know our back porch is an open-air porch in a recessed area at the back door that is covered with a ceiling and the wide eave of the house. It is completely open to the outside. Every spring that porch needs a thorough cleaning! Rain early in the week washed away most of the pollen on the patio, but the porch remained covered in pollen. Since I prefer working outdoors to house cleaning indoors, I tackled the porch this week.

Cluttered back porch covered with pollen.

Move everything to the patio. 

Now isn't that spotless? That's Maggie's tail.

The weather prediction was for at least three sunny days with no rain.  That permitted me to transfer everything under the porch out on the patio so I would have three days to work on this project. How nice it would have been to have some or all of you helping.  I remember each of you helping around the yard from time to time when you were just young kids. Did I pay you? I can’t remember, but I always appreciated your help.

Open-air porch cleaned!!! Boguska and  I made each curtain from a painter's dropcloth some years ago, and should I have a backyard party, I can close them and hide things. The curtains need to be thrown in the washer.  On my bucket list. 

The area on the west of the patio where I stored the wood for the firepit which I no longer have, I also cleaned. I stored the tools where they belong. I gave all the wood away on Next Door Neighbor.  It was gone within 20 minutes of my posting. 

A messy pile of wood and tools on the west side of the back patio. 

Wood and tools gone. 

Tools stored like Dan would store them. 

The patio was next.  There were lots of male catkins from the Southern Red Oak in our backyard, so I swept and hosed that area off.  I also cleaned the Adirondack Chairs and put the bright green ones out in the side yard so I can sit under the dogwood tree there. Brunch under the umbrella is now possible since I've cleaned all the pollen off the table and chairs.

Oak catkins all over the back patio.  This is where much of the pollen came from. 

Chairs in my side yard where I can now sit under the dogwood tree. 

Table and chairs and umbrella up ready for an outside meal. I just noticed my outside speakers.  If I can remember how to turn them on to the stereo seat, I'll play some outside music, a little loud, and see if I get any response from my neighbors. 

I’ve attached a few pictures to show the before, after and a few of the steps in between.  Each day I devoted a couple or more thirty-minute sessions to the PROJECT!!!  Did I enjoy it?  Actually, I did and I think all the moving around has improved my balance.  I finished up today.  I estimate that I spent a total of 8 hours over the three day period.  Not bad for your 82-year-old Grandpat. I hope you will keep the photos so you can remember our backyard when you are old like me.  My grandmother had a lovely open-air front porch where I visited many, many times.  What I would give for a photo of that.  But I have a pretty clear memory in my mind of that porch. 

How I wish you could come to sit on the back porch with me now!!!  God willing you will be able to visit before it becomes covered with pollen again next season.  Love, love, love you, GrandPat

p.s. Dang, I worked hard!