My hubby tells stories of him pooling his change with his buddies on Friday and Saturday nights to put a dollar's worth of gas in his friend Johnny's old car, so they could drive around and hang out together. They would go to Sky Castle's and one of them would order a coke while they sat and talked, and when the waitress would be about to shoo them out, another one of them would order something. It was all like a scene out of Happy Days! That was way back in the 50's, before we met and started dating.
I was reminded of his stories when I saw this in the newspaper the other day:
When I was in high school in the 60's, I could fill up my car with $2 worth of gas. Interestingly, I couldn't afford a tank full of gas back then, either.
So, is gas really all that high even now? I'm not so sure. Our first apartment was $52.50 a month. Our first home cost us $101 a month, and it was all we could do to qualify for the payment. My first teaching job paid a whopping $265 a month, after paying for college to get it. When you put the prices of everything else from way back then in perspective with what those things cost today, gasoline probably is right about where it should be. Not that I like paying $4.00 a gallon, mind you. But considering how much money everything else costs, I think our reaction to gas prices may be more emotional than intellectual.
Any thoughts???Labels: 1950's, first home, gasoline prices, High School Memories, home buying, inflation, mortgage, nostalgia, teaching
Photographer William M. Gallagher won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for this photograph of Stevenson on the campaign trail in 1952. The image of the "Man with a Hole in his Shoe" remained with Stevenson and served as a symbol of his efforts during the 1956 presidential campaign.
copied from the Princeton University Library
This 1952 election is the first one that I was old enough to get interested in, plus that's about when we got our first television. That year Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon won over Adlai Stevenson and John Sparkman, from my own state - Alabama. We learned about the democratic process in school that year, and our teacher made it all fun, mock election and all. Of course, those were the days when the national conventions were really interesting, as there were sometimes many, many ballots of delegates before the Republican and Democratic candidates were chosen.
Obviously, there is no way that the Republican convention will be like that, but it is possible that the Democratic Convention could be very interesting this time, particularly since the Democrats have what they call Super Delegates. These power brokers are not committed to any candidate, which can make for an interesting convention.
Now add in the Ralph Nader Green Party candidacy, a situation that many Democrats believe cost Al Gore the election last time, and we could be in for some great convention watching.
And it's been a long time since I watched either convention, because they have been very boring to me for years. Just like some folks enjoy a stock car race more if there are lots of wrecks, I think I will enjoy the Democratic Convention more if there is some drama in the candidate selection process. Talk about Reality TV!!!Labels: candidates, childhood memories, delegates, Democratic Convention, elections, nostalgia, President, Presidential elections, teaching
Now that we've had a little fun with my one and only time to try out dating more than one boy at a time, it's time to pick up my story again where I left off. We had moved to a small rural area, not too far from Birmingham, with our newly adopted baby daughter, and not long after, I had gotten pregnant with our second daughter.
When the next school year started, the High School principal came to me, all but pleading with me to come teach Chemistry. It was two weeks before school was to start, and their Chemistry teacher had quit to join the faculty of the newly opened "White Flight" academy in the next town. One of the ladies from our church agreed to stay at our house with the girls, so I took the job.
That turned out to be a harder year on several fronts than I had ever expected. We were too new to the community to realize just what had been going on the year before. Things had been moving at a much slower pace out here in the country than I had realized. It seemed that this year that I had so easily agreed to teach in was only the second year that the "Black High School" had been closed and turned into an integrated elementary school. This was the second year that the "White High School" was totally integrated, and they had had boycotts and riots the first year! You'd think somebody at church would have warned me what I was getting into, but it was such a touchy subject, with many church members being those who founded the Academy, and others being public school teachers, that I guess no one wanted to discuss such matters.
Anyway, I walked in blind to a hotbed of high school hormones and racial hatreds, ready to find offense at the least remark or slight. Besides that, the Chemistry lab was in horrible shape. To say the least, I was not impressed with the skill of my predecessor, based on the terrible condition in which the chemicals were stored. But the lab was a minor problem, compared to the ill prepared students and the generally pervasive anger on the part of Black and White students alike.
Because this was a small rural area, there was only one class of Chemistry one year, and one class of Physics the next. So what did I teach the rest of the day? Anything and everything that nobody else wanted to teach! I ended up with a different preparation each period, ranging from 7th grade up, as the Middle School was attached to the High School.
The classes were all over crowded. One class in General Science, a required subject for graduation, did not have any text books until the second semester. I improvised with units about the way automobiles worked and such, for these students were not the brightest in the world, as they could not pass Biology.
Just as I had been at my other High School, I was stuck off on the end of a corridor, all by myself. This seems to be a common place to put Chemistry rooms. I guess it's in case of fire, etc. It did mean for me, though, that I'd better be able to handle these big country kids, who were filled with hate for all things connected with school, all by myself. Thank goodness I'd had a few years of teaching under my belt!
I survived the school year with only a few major incidences. One of the girls in that General Science class got into a major knock down drag out fight with another girl outside my classroom one day, which I had to try to break up. They were surrounded by a ring of boys by the time I got out there to deal with it, and when I broke through the ring, I saw why! They had shredded each other's clothes down to their bras!!! I don't know how I did it, but I did get them to stop, and I pulled them into the nearby gym locker room, sending for help. It turned out that they were fighting, because one of them had aborted a baby by the other one's boy friend.
The other incident actually happened to a girl on the way to my isolated class, and I only had to deal with the aftermath. When she came to class, she had been stabbed in the arm. Did I mention these were rough kids???
One student, who sticks out in my mind after all these years, had come back to finish High School after serving in Vietnam! Smoking was allowed at that time in this county, and of course, being isolated, the designated smoking area was behind my classroom. Some days he would shake so badly in class that I would let him go get a few puffs of a cigarette just to get him through. I was naive to drugs at that time. It would never have occurred to me that he might be smoking something else. But I felt sorry for him. He was obviously emotionally damaged, didn't fit in, and yet wanted to make something of himself. I don't know what became of him, but I hope he turned out OK.
The worst part of the school year for me, though, was leaving my own house every morning. Our older toddler would cling to my legs and beg me not to go. This didn't just happen at first, but it lasted off and on for the whole school year! She never got used to me being gone. Of course the little one couldn't have cared less. Anyway, between the teaching situation being an absolute nightmare, and our own child being so miserable, there was no way I was going to go through that again. I gave my notice at the end of the year, leaving the principal plenty of time to find a proper replacement.
From a student, myself, locked in the auditorium of Phillips High School while a Black man was being beaten for daring to try to enroll his children in a White school, to watching my Governor step aside as the first Black students entered the University of Alabama, to teaching the first Black children a school had ever had, to teaching in a school the first "peaceful" year it was fully integrated, I saw the whole cycle of the Civil Rights Movement up close and very personal.
I did go back to teaching full time when our children went to Kindergarten, and I taught at that very Elementary School that had once been the Black High School, some years before. Things had changed considerably by then. The White Flight Academy was flourishing, and the parents who had stayed with the public school system, for the most part, had reconciled themselves to integration. The children were generally used to it, unless their parents poisoned their minds, and I enjoyed teaching there, with Black and White children together, for 25 years.Labels: Civil Rights Movement, High School Memories, Integration, nostalgia, Segregation, teaching, White Flight Schools
When I graduated from college my first teaching job was not in a situation I particularly liked, but teaching jobs were not easy to find at that time, so I was glad to get it. I taught 8th grade science all day long, without any help. They gave me a textbook and an empty classroom and said teach. That was it. I felt totally isolated, as this was long before new teachers had mentors or any help at all.
So I jumped at the chance the next school year to get out of my contract two weeks before school started to take over as Chemistry and Physics teacher at the school where I had done my student teaching. I was already familiar with the lab and the textbooks, and I knew my way around the school and liked the faculty. So what if school was just two weeks away. I was tickled to death. And the year passed very quickly, with no hitches at all.
The next year, however, had a slightly different start. When we had the faculty meeting before the students came, I found out that, because I taught college prep subjects, I would be one of the teachers to have the first Black students to ever go to a White school in this city. This particular country town was one with a strong KKK influence, and everyone was expecting trouble. Mind you, I had finished college in a hurry, and had only been teaching two years, so I wasn't much older than these Juniors and Seniors I was teaching. This was quite a responsibility they were putting on my shoulders, and I was very nervous about it.
I had some very good reasons to be nervous, too. The plan was that at each class change, every teacher would step out into the hall, to watch for any problems as the Black students moved from one room to the next. That worked fine for most classrooms, but it didn't help me at all. The Chemistry classroom was on the second floor of the old school, on a wing that only had one other classroom on it, with its own stairwell, stuck way off on the backside of nowhere. To make matters worse, there was an outside door at the bottom of the stairs. It was decided that the outside door needed to be chained shut. I was not to let the Black students out of my sight for any reason at all while I had them in my class, hall, or stairwell, so there were a few times that I actually wet my pants!
The four students I inherited were all the top of their class and could handle the work with not problems at all. They were scared out of their skulls most of the year, and as I recall, none of the white students spoke to them the whole school year.
The police were able to deal with the trouble makers outside the building, and we were able to continue on with the business of education inside the building, but it was anything but a normal year. It was certainly a year I won't forget, and once again I was there when the clash of the old ways and the new ways met full force.Labels: Civil Rights Movement, Integration, KKK, nostalgia, Segregation, teaching
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Dirty Butter,
help?
