I had to be vaccinated against smallpox before enrolling in school at
La Feria. That done, I was placed in
the Junior High’s 6-A class. (La
Feria’s system was composed of elementary grades one through three, junior high
grades four through seven, and high school grades eight through eleven.)
Faster
students were placed in the ‘A’ section of each Junior High grade, slower
students in the ‘B’ section. Twila says
the A/B sectional placements probably resulted primarily from differences in
language facility; many Mexican-American students started school knowing only
Spanish, thus were slower than Anglos in assimilating material taught in
English.
School
administrators had faced the problem of bringing Spanish-speaking students up
to speed in an English-only environment by establishing separate elementary
schools (grades one through three) for English-speaking and Spanish-speaking
students. (Mrs. Moran, a lady in our
church and mother of Robin, one of my classmates, was principal/head teacher of
the school for Mexican students; Miss Leola Green, our church pianist, also
taught in that school.) Immersion in
English was a major objective of the school for Latin-American students, so as
to enable their ready integration with English-speaking students by the fourth
grade; only English could be spoken on school grounds from the fourth grade
onward.
Twila says
concentration on learning English tended to prevent Spanish-speaking students
from learning as much subject matter as the English-speaking students did in
grades one through three, so some Mexican-Americans might well have been behind
most Anglos when they entered fourth grade level, even if they were equally
competent mentally.
One’s
native language wasn’t the only A/B factor, however, for the ‘B’ sections of
each grade had Anglo students who were slower learners; furthermore, ‘A’
sections had some Latin-American students, so the segregation wasn’t ethnic.
The system
was a logical, workable approach to a real problem, but I can’t imagine its
standing the “discrimination” test today.
Mrs. Edith Buck was my homeroom teacher; she taught English to both sixth grade
classes (6-A and 6-B) and the two seventh grade classes (7-A and 7-B).
“Outside
assignments” caused me to learn at least two new words in sixth-grade
English. One assignment, as I
understood it, was to write an “S.A.;” I had no idea what an “S.A.” was, and
don’t remember how I learned Mrs. Buck meant “essay.” Another assignment required an oral report
on some current event. I chose to
report on a Harlingen parade, taking my material from The Valley Morning
Star. Mrs. Buck’s comment following
my report was that I probably mean “streamers,” instead of “steamers;” my
opinion of the parade, which I hadn’t seen, was diminished when I realized its
components were much less impressive than I had imagined.
Windows of the 6-A classroom faced the
sunny south, so the room was sultry on warm, humid days of fall or spring, and
gnats swarmed around sweaty faces. I
heard no complaints, for neither teachers nor students had known any other way
of life in those days before widespread air-conditioning.
Mr. Philip Murray was
the 6-B homeroom teacher, taught sixth and seventh grade math, and was the
school system’s band director. (Mr.
Murray was killed at Normandy during WWII.)
I
acquired a nickname from sixth grade math class. During our study of metric measurement, most of the class
pronounced the word “kilometer” with accents on the first and third syllables
(kill’-a-me’-ter), instead of the second as most people pronounce it today
(ki-lom’-e-ter); some of the boys perceived a similarity between “Kenneth Miller”
and “kill’-a-me’-ter,” so I became
“Kilometer” to them.
Mrs. Willie Magee Bolander, the 5-A homeroom teacher, handled Junior
High music education; she provided my first exposures to (1) classical music,
through recordings she played and listening to Walter Damrosch on Friday
afternoon radio and (2) sight reading music.
I had little difficulty learning to recognize classical and semi-classical
pieces, then providing names and composers, or recognizing instruments by sight
and sound, but sight reading music was
beyond my comprehension. Mrs. Bolander
must have thought me hopeless as I attempted singing, using the do-re-mi names
for the notes of the scale, what I’m sure were quite simple tunes, but note
names and positions on the staff were “musical Greek” to me. My sight reading deficiencies didn’t cause
me to fail music, but I received ‘C’s all year, while making mostly ‘A’s in
other subjects.
Mrs.
Bolander, a talented pianist, often played at our church (First Baptist). In later years she was an accompanist at
University United Methodist Church in Austin.
She died in Austin on December 12, 2001, at the age of 93.
◊◊◊
I
was promoted to 7-A for the 1938/39 school-year. After years of having been the shortest member of my classes, I
lost that distinction in seventh grade; Ernie Martin was shorter than I, although he
outweighed me by several pounds. He was
in La Feria only that one year (temporarily living with his grandparents), so I
was the shortest again when the next school-year rolled around.
Ernie was one
of only three people who have regularly called me "Kenny;” my grandmother
Miller called me “Kenny-boy” when I was small, and many years later Jack
Girone, a co-worker in Little Rock, often used the “Kenny” diminutive.
Mrs. Stella B. Mitchell, who
taught history, was my seventh-grade homeroom teacher. Mr. R.E. Morris had the B section of seventh grade, taught arithmetic and general
science, and was the Junior High principal.
Science as a specific subject was new to me. I remember few scientific facts learned that year, but recall
three projects we undertook:
·
Each pupil made/displayed a butterfly collection. Seventh-graders, nets in hand, could be seen
running around the open spaces south of the school in search of victims.
·
We each made a leaf collection. My aunt Sue in Acton sent me leaves from
North Texas trees to include in my collection, so I had a greater variety than
most of the students, who only collected leaves from trees grown in the Valley;
my collection included leaves from oak, pecan, catalpa, chinaberry, and fruit
trees not found in the Valley.
·
We had a flower garden just outside the classroom’s
windows; each student worked a small plot, within which he grew flowers of his
choosing. I grew marigolds.
I risked grade disaster when Mr. Morris declared a person would no more
do a certain thing (I forget what) than he would wear overalls to church. I raised my
hand, was recognized, and said that several men (e.g., Mr. Jim Massey) wore
overalls to church at Acton. Mr. Morris
apparently excused my unintended impertinence, for I suffered no grade damage
in general science, but I’m sure my “sharing” branded me, like the farmers I
described, as a country bumpkin.
I recall no other near-disasters (or triumphs) in seventh grade, but I
always wondered just what Mrs. Buck meant by her “very good” comments as she
walked around English class looking at students’ papers; taken literally, “very
good” was complimentary, but she sounded as if she deemed the work merely
acceptable.
I was salutatorian of my Junior High class, so was asked to recite a poem (modeled
after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life”) during graduation
exercises. I don’t know who revised the
poem to make it fit Junior High graduates, and remember none of its wording
except that ”School is real, school is earnest” replaced Longfellow’s “Life is
real, life is earnest” in the first line of the second verse. I wish I could recall the wording replacing
his next line, “And the grave is not its goal;” I’m sure it was quite different
from the original. The final verse I
recited was much like the original, “Let us, then, be up and doing/With a heart
for any fate/Still achieving, still pursuing/Learn to labor and to wait.”
Mr. Longfellow’s poem was comprised of nine four-line verses. The version assigned me was comparable, but
I managed to memorize and recite it without embarrassing myself.
I entered La Feria High my
eighth year in school, 1939/40. I was
almost thirteen years old, but weighed only 72 pounds; I may have been both the
shortest and lightest in my class.
Eighth
graders were high school freshmen in the 11-grade public school system Texas
had back then. I was unaffected by the
addition of a 12th grade in 1941; technically speaking, I suppose I
was never in a tenth grade, but my report cards don’t show that; my LFHS report
cards were designated Freshman/Sophomore/Junior, with no grade numbers.
I took English, general math, general science, library science, and
social science as a freshman – much the same as during my last year in Junior
High. The biggest differences between
LFHS and previous schools I’d attended were (1) I was in a multistoried
building, (2) we had no morning or afternoon recesses, and (3) teachers stayed
in the same places from period to period, while students moved from room to
room.
◊◊◊
Mr. Alvis B. Webb was one of two teachers I had each of the three years I attended
LFHS, and was responsible for several memory-producing activities. The most outstanding from General Math (my
freshman year) occurred when he asked class members if they would be willing to
go to work for one cent per day, have their pay doubled each day, work for a
month, then quit employment. Most of us
said we wouldn’t be willing to do that, so our homework assignment was to compute
the amount of money we would earn each day and cumulatively if we did go to
work under such an agreement. We were
astounded to learn we would earn nearly eleven million dollars on the
thirty-first day, and would have earned over twenty-one million in total.
We had to compute our prospective earnings “by hand,” using pencil and
paper, inasmuch we had no mechanical or electronic devices to aid us. However, after we made our calculations for
each day, then added them to arrive at total earnings for the month, Mr. Webb
gave us a formula that would have greatly shortened our work. That exercise preceded the introduction of
compound interest computation methods.
I don’t
remember how long it took me to calculate each day’s earnings and add the
thirty-one individual amounts to reach a grand total, but I’m sure it was a
number of minutes – certainly a lot longer than the minute or less it took me
to compute the total on an electronic calculator as I wrote this account of the
event.
I had to face the long-dreaded algebra my sophomore year at LFHS; I still harbored fears engendered back
in fifth grade at Acton, when I observed Mr. Browning teaching algebraic
mysteries to eighth-graders across the room from me. I didn’t catch on quickly, but my mother helped me, for she loved
mathematics. Algebra ultimately became
one of my favorite subjects; I took Algebra II before finishing high school,
and later took college algebra.
After all
my years of dread, it is interesting to note that the only year I ever made
straight ‘A’s during both fall and spring semesters of a single school-year was
my sophomore year in high school, the year I took Algebra I.
I took Plane Geometry as a Junior, and had no major problems. The outside projects Mr. Webb assigned were
interesting but sometimes time-consuming:
·
He required each student to submit a book of drawings of
geometric patterns. He suggested
linoleum patterns, but I selected tile, inasmuch as my dad could show me the
array of patterns available. I used
colored pencils to make the drawings attractive, and was awarded an ‘A’ for my
efforts.
·
Each student built a sundial. Most used plywood for all components, but I
used marble and copper. My dad cut a
round base from a one-inch slab of marble, upon which I scribed the dial’s hour
markings; I cemented the triangular gnomon (cut from copper stock) into a slot
in the marble. I remember nothing of
mathematical principles involved or the calculations required, but I received
an ‘A’ for the project – the thing most important to me at the time.
·
Mr. Webb brought a transit to class, showed us how to
measure horizontal and vertical angles, then asked us to compute heights of the
school building and the flag pole using ground measurements and angles read
from the transit. That project wasn’t
as time-consuming as the drawings of geometric shapes and sundial construction,
but it was both interesting and practical.
Mr. Webb ultimately quit teaching, to become a meteorologist/weather
man. I’m sure he did well at his new
profession, but LFHS lost a good math teacher when he left.
I wished
Mr. Webb had been single when he came to La Feria, so he and Miss Ruby Cobb, the 4-B homeroom teacher
in Junior High, could have married and had a bunch of little Cobb-Webbs.
Kids
devised humorous combinations of other names.
For example, the student body included a young fellow named Shelton
Stohler, who was a classmate of David Kiester.
The play on their names was that “Shelton Stohler and David Kiester.” I don’t know who they “stole and kissed,” but I’m sure she enjoyed
it.
◊◊◊
Miss Doris Griffin taught English and was my homeroom/English teacher all three years
I attended La Feria High. She was an attractive
young lady from Mercedes, had a great smile, and a boyfriend named Gus Fossler;
Gus owned a sporty Chevrolet convertible, which we boys coveted.
Gus, as
did most other healthy young men of his age, entered military service about the
time our family moved from La Feria. He
returned from World War II to marry Miss Griffin and raise a family; I suspect
their kids grew up to speak English correctly.
Students had to memorize fifty lines of poetry during each year; Twila
says the requirement was imposed by the state Board of Education. I can remember only four lines of the 150 I
learned during my three years under Miss Griffin’s tutelage:
John Gilpin was a citizen
Of credit
and renown;
A
trainband captain eke was he
Of famous
London town.
Actually, that may have been only two lines, but I’m going to claim
four, inasmuch as Miss Griffin isn’t listening this time.
◊◊◊
Miss Clovis Hickman taught Social Sciences, as did Mr. Harry
“Pop” Mohrman after he came to LFHS. I
took “Civics” and “Occupations” under Miss Hickman my freshman year, then
American History under Mr. Moorman as a junior.
Mr.
Mohrman wouldn’t give a grade of 100, because, he said, ”No student is perfect,
and 100 means perfection.” He said he
could find something wrong on any paper.
We asked him if that would be true even in the case of mathematics,
where answers are either right or wrong – he said he would be able to find
something erroneous. Fortunately, one
didn’t have to receive any grades of 100 to make an ‘A’ under Mr. Mohrman – at
least I didn’t. Twila says she made an
‘A+’ in one of his classes; I didn’t do that well.
A
native of San Antonio, Mr. Mohrman always spoke of that city as “heaven.” Now that he has arrived at the real thing, I
trust he is willing to award the Lord a ‘100’ for His efforts at “preparing a
place for him.”
◊◊◊
Miss Frances Tillman taught my first-year Spanish class. She had grown up on the King Ranch (where her
father was a foreman), had lived from birth among both Anglo-Americans and
Mexican-Americans, so learned to speak English and Spanish simultaneously. I imagine the Mexican-Americans in our class
appreciated her fluency in both languages, and the rest of us envied it. She was a very good teacher.
Anglos in
the class (except for Dolores Hardesty, whose family had just moved
to La Feria from Sioux St. Marie, Michigan) knew a smattering of Spanish,
picked up on the playgrounds and in other associations with the sizable
Mexican-American population. Spanish,
however, was new to Dolores. The class
had a big laugh at her expense early in the term, before she had absorbed the
rules for pronouncing Spanish vowels, when Miss Tillman had each student read
aloud one sentence from a story in the textbook. Dolores’ turn came with the exclamation, “Mira! Mira!” (Look!
Look!) by a character in the story.
Dolores used English phonics instead of Spanish, so the words came out
as “Myra! Myra!” instead of the correct “Mee-ra! Mee-ra!” The class erupted in hilarity; the
embarrassment caused Dolores’ face to match her brilliant red hair.
The
Spanish consonant "erre" (double "r") must have given
Dolores fits; Miss Tillman provided a little poem to assist
us in learning to “roll” the sound of that consonant, but it was probably a bit
difficult for the recently arrived Michigander:
Erre con
erre cigarro, erre con erre barríl,
Rápido
corren los carros, los carros del ferrocarril.
At some point during my year in Spanish I, Miss Tillman suggested a
class outing at a small Mexican establishment on the north side of town;
several class members liked the idea, and gathered at the restaurant on the
appointed evening. My previous experience
with Mexican foods had been limited to tamales and canned (or brick) chili, so
I enjoyed the new tastes of enchiladas and tacos. I still like both.
During that same year Miss Tillman married a gentleman whose last name
was Till. (Looking at her changed name,
one might think she lost a “man” by marrying, instead of gaining one.) She left her teaching job at the end of the
year; her place on the faculty was taken by Miss Crystal Smith, who had
just graduated from Baylor University, so I had her for Spanish II. Miss Smith taught only a few years before
marrying a local man, Marshall Durham; they
became Southern Baptist missionaries, working in both the United States and
South America.
[Marshall had a
younger, but larger, brother who was still in high school; we called him “Bull”
(Bull Durham was
a popular smoking tobacco). Richard
Hoverson, one of my ex-classmates at La Feria, says Bull’s real name was
“Oscar,” a fact I didn’t know at the time.]
◊◊◊
Coach C.E. Vail was high school principal, taught general science, coached the
football team, and taught in the Intermediate Sunday School Department at First
Baptist Church. I took his general
science course at school and was in his Sunday School class for a time, but not
during the same year, if memory serves.
Students did a lab experiment each week in general science,
then had to prepare a report describing the procedure and its results,
including an illustrative drawing. The
only experiment I remember was one proving that air has weight, in which we
compared the weight of an uninflated basketball with its weight when inflated.
Coach Vail played football at the University of Chicago (before the
school discontinued that sport). He was
short and round, and was called “Toady” by his fellow coaches and in the sports
pages of The Valley Morning Star. Some of the boys called him “Frog” behind
(way behind!) his back. I wondered
whether he knew about that name, and what he would have done had he heard
someone use it; I suspect the paddle kept in his office would have been used.
Mr. Vail
became superintendent of La Feria schools some years after we left the Valley;
C.E. Vail Elementary School is named in honor of the educator/coach.
◊◊◊
I took library science under Miss Ulva Dee Chamblee; she was
also the school librarian and monitored study halls. (Students in study hall sat at tables around the perimeter of the
third-floor auditorium, which also housed the library, so Miss Chamblee could
perform two of her three functions simultaneously.) She was young, trim, attractive, and very blonde; some of the older
and bigger boys (football types, such as Tommy Burchfield) had crushes on her.
◊◊◊
Mr. Magnus Bolander, husband
of the Junior High music/5-A homeroom teacher, taught business courses
(bookkeeping/shorthand/typing), coached the basketball team, and supervised
boys P.E. (rather unstructured times during which we played seasonal sports –
touch football in fall, basketball in spring).
I took typing under his instruction, and was successful enough that he
entered me in various competitions around the Valley – at which I never did
very well.
I would
have liked to have been a member of Mr. Bolander’s LFHS basketball squad, but
my lack of height and size precluded that, although I seem to remember having
asked him about the possibility of my “going out for” basketball; I don’t
remember his reaction, but I’m surprised he didn’t laugh.
◊◊◊
I studied enough to make good grades at LFHS, but wasn’t concerned
about preparing for further education or future vocational pursuits; I was
really more interested in activities outside the classroom. I went to school early enough each day to
join in recreational activities, played volleyball, pitched horseshoes, or
basketball after lunch, participated in P.E. activities, then after school
played tennis or whatever sport was in season.
Other students also demonstrated non-educational interests (some less
than wholesome) through their activities outside classrooms:
·
Two or three of the larger boys enjoyed grabbing a smaller
boy and pulling his trousers down (on the open schoolground). The guys called themselves
"depanzers," an appellation derived from the then-familiar panzer
(i.e., armored) divisions of the German army.
·
Several boys (probably the aforementioned
"depanzers") stuffed one of the girls in a large trash receptacle,
creating mirth for bystanders and humiliation for her (both from the incident
itself and her resultant nickname, "Trashcan").
·
Upper classmen with access to their family cars (no one I
knew had a car of his own) would, together with a couple of friends, cruise
around town looking for freshmen afoot.
A lone freshman was likely to be grabbed up, hauled south to the Arroyo
Colorado, dropped off, and left to walk back to town. The distance was only a couple of miles, so the experience
damaged only one's pride. I avoided the
experience as a freshman, but the next year was snatched one Wednesday evening
outside church (after prayer meeting) and put in a car with two freshmen
already aboard. When I protested,
"I'm not a freshman!" the abductors said, "You're fresh to
us!" so I got a ride to the Arroyo with my freshman companions, then started
walking back to town after being dropped off.
Somehow my parents learned what had happened, drove out to meet us,
picked us up, and brought us back to town, shortening our walk.
The
perpetrators (or one of the freshmen) apparently thought the sophomore snatch
was amusing, so reported the deed to other students; I was kidded at school the
next day about my ride to the Arroyo.
Albert
Hardesty (brother of Dolores) was one of the two abducted freshmen. He and I spent a lot of our free time
together, either playing table tennis at our apartment or hanging out at his place. His family’s living quarters were in the
rear of the building in which they canned popcorn and potato chips
commercially, for distribution to stores throughout the Valley. Aromas of popping corn and frying potato
chips were almost irresistible, so we sampled the wares regularly.
[I learned
during an October, 2004 reuion of LFHS ex-students that Albert was severely
injured in a football game the year after we moved from La Feria, and was never
able to function normally again – very sad.]
I don’t
remember the identities of the three guys who abducted Albert, the other
freshman, and me – nor do I remember the identity of the other freshman.
I’ve recalled those long ago events in recent years as gun violence in
modern schools has been attributed to victims’ rage following humiliation by
school “bullies.” I can’t explain the reasons “victims” in our
day could accept humiliation without resorting to violence, but it’s good they
did, for guns were as accessible then as now, if not moreso. I suspect the difference is cultural.