TheBanyanTree: Class of 65

[Theta Brentnall]

Carolyn stirred some memories of school daze with her Class of 55.  I could 
not have had a more different experience.  I started kindergarten on Misawa 
Air Base in Japan (as result of which, if someone is speaking in Japanese 
and I am not paying attention, I know what they are talking about, but if I 
listen it sounds like, well, Japanese and I have no idea what is being 
said; and an innate ability to fold origami cranes.)

First through fifth grades were in Huntsville, Alabama, where the school 
system profoundly disapproved of me being "too young" by 2 months for 
starting first grade, but face with my intractable, immovable mother, they 
let me in on a test basis for a month.  At the end of the month, there was 
a conference, where the teacher's only 'problem' with having me in class 
was that I memorized the reading assignments and when she called on me to 
read I just stood up without the book and recited the passage.   The school 
in Huntsville was underfunded, overcrowded and still trying to operate in 
the 19th century.  The most memorable moments of the next 4 years were the 
teacher who loved Elvis and played his records for hours in class; and Pearl.

Pearl was a sharecropper's kid who had nothing .  She had been passed along 
to the fifth grade, despite the fact that she couldn't read a word, so one 
day, probably as punishment for being a 'smart mouth' (I got told that a 
lot) Pearl was assigned to me to teach to read.  I told my mother that 
Pearl didn't buy lunch and never brought one with her, so she tried to 
arrange with the school to pay for Pearl's lunch, but they just couldn't or 
wouldn't figure out how to do that.  So for that year I stood in the 
cafeteria line, bought lunch, gave it to Pearl and then got out my sack 
lunch.  And she did learn to read, if not well at least well enough to get 
through a second grade reader.  I don't mean to sound like she and I became 
best friends across a vast cultural gap.   I suspect that I just decided to 
out stubborn the teacher's indifference and Pearl's ignorance and I just 
bulldozed through the girl's life.  I think she was too terrified of me not 
to learn.  I wonder whatever became of her.

The next summer my dad got sent to Germany, so we spent the next three 
years in Landstuhl Army Medical Center.  What a different world from 
Alabama!  The school was small and the teachers were first-rate, young and 
interested in everything.  Our biology class got to do our experiments in 
the lab at the hospital under the tutelage of the techs who worked there, 
we learned German and took week-long "field trips" to Paris and Rome.   It 
was a constant adventure.  My parents had no qualms at all about taking me 
out of school for a trip and we had great times wandering around the 
countryside, usually lost because my dad was following some strip-map a 
buddy of his had drawn on the back of an envelope.  We met some really nice 
people that way.

Dad's next assignment was to Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland, where I 
began high school.   Like all high schools, there were cliques, but this 
one had two distinct groups - the local kids and the Army kids, and never 
the twain did meet.  Even at the school dances, it wasn't the boys and 
girls sitting on different sides of the gym, it was the local kids on one 
side of the center line in the gym, and the Army kids on the other.  The 
only teacher I remember was the Algebra teacher, a retired Army colonel who 
carried a swagger stick under his arm which he used as an 
attention-getter.  He never struck a kid with it, but it woke everyone up 
right smartly when he whacked the desk of a dozer or daydreamer.

After two years, we got to go to Seoul, Korea.  At first my dad was going 
to take the assignment as a one-year remote, leaving us in Maryland so my 
high school wouldn't be disrupted.  I pitched a royal fit about being left 
behind, so we all went and I finished my last two years of high school in 
Korea.  Like Germany, it was a small school with a first-rate attitude, 
even if it didn't have first rate facilities.  Some of the classes were 
held in Korean War vintage Quonset huts with the stove in the middle.  It 
encouraged you to get to class early in the winter, because the teachers 
didn't believe in assigned seating, so the early birds got to sit next to 
the stove.   The chemistry class had an after-school lab, where we built a 
distillery and distilled rose essence and made our own perfume.  Then some 
of the kids started getting into the lab on the weekends and distilling the 
essence of potato and the lab got shut down by the Military Police.   Great 
fun.

We had a memorable field trip in our last year.  It was Saturday morning 
there and we were going to the DMZ.  I woke up early, turned on the radio 
and heard the announcer say, "The President is dead."  What?  What 
president?  It was like a shock of cold water when it finally dawned on me 
that he was talking about our President, John Kennedy.  I remember going 
into my parents bedroom like a sleepwalker and telling them that Pres. 
Kennedy had been assassinated.  Then we had breakfast and I went to the 
school for the field trip.  I look back on that and can't imagine actually 
holding that field trip on that day.  Today, it would be immediately 
cancelled and the base would be on full red alert.  But back then, our 
parents let us climb on a bus and go stand on the line between North and 
South Korea, with a major part of the North Korean army two miles 
away.   My mother often wondered what they were thinking of in following 
years.  The DMZ is a really weird, scary place under the best of 
circumstances, but the tension that day just zinged.  We were divided into 
pairs and each pair had an armed MP shepherding us every step we took.  The 
North Koreans kept their distance and no one was in the conference room and 
we were almost hysterical with relief when the trip was over.

So what did my school years leave me with?  A love of travel; an ability to 
talk to almost anyone about almost anything; a math phobia that took years 
to recover from (courtesy of the Alabama school system);  a strong sense of 
self reliance;  and a good ability to handle change.  Not bad, for a 
rolling stone.

Theta