There's gonna be a War

Third grade was one of the worst grades ever. Mrs. Kauch had this neat trick of grabbing a kid and throwing him under her desk. Sometimes she’d pinch your cheeks with her lobster claw, sometimes she’d grab your earlobe. But you always ended up under her desk. Mrs. Kauch was a 50-something lady who looked like Maggie in the Bringing up Father comic strip. Some days she had a longer fuse than others, but if you lit the short one, watch out brother.

Most of the time, Mrs. Kauch just seemed perplexed and annoyed at our class. No doubt we were trouble. We ranged from dopey bad to precocious bad, and we usually gave Mrs. Kauch the full range all at the same time. Take Beth Ann, for example. Beth Ann lived in my neighborhood, about a block east of Johnny Kotlarczyk. Like me, she had a tendency toward smart mouth. One time in first grade, we goofed around after school, singing in the hallway, taking our time getting to the bus stop. I have no real idea why, but we were singing that old song, “Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage.” And the next thing we knew we’d missed the bus. My mom was called and probably she had to borrow a car to come pick us up. In other words, she was not pleased.

Anyhow, Mrs. Kauch usually ran out of gas about 15 minutes before dismissal. So she’d ask if anyone wanted to sing a song. Beth would always volunteer and sing some damn dumb song she’d learned. We hated it, but at least we didn’t have to work. So one day she starts singing “Oh Boy, that’s where my Money Goes,” which I think was a song about a prostitute. But without any explicit lyrics, Mrs. Kauch could only sit there and listen to the umpteen verses Beth had learned.

One of the coolest things to ever happen to me at Oxford happened in Mrs. Kauch’s class. Mrs. Shay, the librarian who would later turn against me, announced some speech contest around the topic of “the wonderful world of books” or some similar librarian lingo. Kids were supposed to prepare a five minute speech on this, and they’d choose one finalist from each class. My chief competitor in Mrs. Kauch’s class was everyone’s would-be sweetheart, Barbara Hanson. At the first practice session, there was little doubt she had the best speech. I was becoming more and more a lazy ass kid in school, with little interest in doing anything I wasn’t interested in.

But a funny thing happened the night before our final try-out. I found an old Archie comic book with a 3-page thing about why reading Archie Comics was better than watching TV. It had about 4 or 5 good gags, and all I had to do was change “Archie Comics” to “books” and I was all set. I cracked up everyone in the room, got picked to represent our class, and made Barbara Hanson cry. No, that’s not true. Barbara was always a good kid and a good sport. The next day I delivered the talk on the auditorium stage in front of all the kids in grades K-3. They howled and howled. Even Mrs. Shay laughed. I won the contest and won a book—a first edition copy of Henry and the Clubhouse, by Beverly Cleary.

One sunny October morning, I walked into Mrs. Kauch’s class and saw the boys gathered around Ronnie Baronowski, a real emotional kid with a good sense of humor, a big mouth, and a thin skin. Anyhow, as I walked over to where they were jawing near the windows, I could hear Baronowski claiming, “We’re gonna have a war with Russia! There’s gonna be a war!”

Now, I knew there was something going on in the world because the night before I’d sat watching TV with my parents and noticed a lot of news bulletins about Kennedy, Cuba, and missiles. I was a pretty “news aware” kid for my age, and would always be so. But if there was really “gonna be a war,” I knew my parents would have told me. So I told Baronowski he was crazy. Suddenly he and some of the other guys turned on me.

“You don’t think there’s gonna be a war?” demanded Baronowski.

Sam chimed in, “Ha! Shouse doesn’t think there’s gonna be a war! What an idiot!”

Well, as we all know, there was no war. But I did end up having to fight Sam again. I just never learned to keep my mouth shut.

Coming soon: Why fourth grade was a little better; learning the F-word; Nov. 22, 1963.

The Dumb Kid

It’s pretty clear that except for playground fights and other wildness, my middle years at Oxford were a little boring. Mrs. Rattigan was a swell second grade teacher who never slapped me or anything. She did get really mad at me one day when I basically didn’t do a damn thing all day. Why not? It was kind of weird.

I’d come in that day feeling fine. I sat down in my usual seat. Mrs. Rattigan had written like 30 sentences on the board and was explaining what we were supposed to do. It was at that moment my brain just went blank. The only thing I remember Mrs. Rattigan saying was, “did everybody get that? Good! Start your work.”

Ok, so I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I just sat a while and goofed around with my desk, my pencil, and the people sitting around me. The one thing I refused to do was ask anyone what I was supposed to do with those 30 sentences. So after an hour, there I was with a blank sheet of paper in front of me and a scowl that had been baking and hardening for about 45 minutes.

By lunch time, everyone but me had moved on to math. After lunch, my paper still blank, Mrs. Rattigan walked up to my desk, bent over and whispered menacingly, “Roger. If you didn’t have to catch the bus, I would keep you after school.” After all that time, how could I tell her I just didn’t know what to do?

I continued to just sit there, hoping I could just drag it out until 3:00. I know. It makes no sense. Only to a dumb kid. Mrs. Rattigan had moved my seat to keep me quiet. She sat me next to Janet Murphy, a nice girl who everyone liked. She must have figured out my problem because she shook her head and just said, “Just copy the sentences! Isn’t that easy?”

All I had to do was copy the sentences off the board. It was like handwriting practice or something. Jeeze, I don’t know. All I knew – and remember well now-was that it was a hard, hard dumb day for a dumb kid.

Stories to come: The Cuban Missile Crisis. The Kennedy Assassination. James Bond. The Teacher who Told us we could All Go To Hell.

Finding New Enemies (a Ginn Basic Reader)

I got taught how to fight at Oxford School. I mean, I didn’t really learn how, I just got taught to. Kids need to be taught how to fight. They don’t all need to learn how – it’ll suffice if a good number do. But all kids need to be taught about it. Some kids need to be taught to fight more, others to fight less. And the best situation occurs when they teach each other.

I was a kid who needed to fight more. It was either that, or learn to keep my mouth shut around the kids who needed to fight less. I was often a real smart aleck, and smart alecks don’t like each other. A bigger more aggressive one will typically pound on a weaker one, unless that one is short and funny, in which case he will become the bigger ones sidekick. That wasn’t me.

All this fighting business started around the second grade in Mrs. Rattigan’s class. I don’t remember exactly how I got on Sam’s bad side, though I remember the first time he shoved me down and dared me to do anything about it. Sam was a thick boy in both senses of the word. Some of my worst days at Oxford were those days when I knew I’d have to fight Sam. I always lost. But each punch stayed with me and made me long for that day when I would, in my dad’s words, defend myself. Eventually I did. I didn’t win every fight, but I won some good ones, including my last one, on a dark Georgetown side street at the age of 33.

More about that later. I didn’t mean to dwell on the fighting business.

Mrs. Rattigan was a nice lady, probably in her late 20s or early 30s. But second grade boys see all their female teachers as old women, maybe because second grade boys bring can turn the sweetest flower of a 30-something girl into a yowling growling grouch.

But Mrs. Rattigan read to us a lot. She read us Little Annie Rooney and Angleworms on Toast. She seemed to like me most of the time. When our cat had kittens, she came to our house and took one home. She gave us free time in class to talk or draw (something most of my Oxford teachers did, and something that few teachers do today).

One sunny spring day, Mrs. Rattigan knew that a lot of us guys were thinking about baseball. She asked us to figure out how many players were on a baseball team. The “fellas” and I were trying to figure this out when she suddenly says, “well, why don’t you all go to the library and find a book on baseball?”

Being allowed to go to the school library was like having a “get out of jail free” card. For me, most of the time, the school library was an oasis. I loved the smell of the books, the feel of the magazines in their heavy clear plastic binders, the World Almanac with all its longest rivers and biggest cities. I loved that library for a long time—until the time came that the kind old (30-something) librarian, Mrs. Shay, turned against me.

Once at the library, we found out how many players were on a baseball team. Not from a book, but by asking some fifth grader who happened to be hanging out there. Mrs. Shay had asked him to help us find a book on baseball, but he just puffed his lips and said, “well I can just tell ya about it!”
So we played baseball (softball, actually) just about every day at recess. We’d choose up sides by doing that thing where you put your fists on the handle end of the bat and top fist wins unless one kid pinches the top with his fingers and you can’t kick it out of his grip. We let some girls play. Barbara Hanson could play anytime even though she wasn’t good because she was cute and Johnny Kotlarczyk had a huge crush on her (which lasted until the last day of our last year at Oxford).

But no one really wanted to let Ruth play. Ruth was pretty good at hitting the ball. But she was what you’d call a handsome girl (i.e., “ugly”) with a Delaware accent so strong it sounded like a speech impediment. Ruth was always nice to everyone, and I hated how the guys made fun of her.

“You love Ruth!” they’d taunt whichever kid was on everyone’s shit list that day.

One day Sam didn’t want her play. Neither did Ronnie Baronowski. Hell, I really didn’t want her to play either, but I couldn’t stand all these jerks telling her she couldn’t. So I picked her on my team and insisted that the others let her play.

“You love her!” Sam mocked me with one of those sugary sweet sing-songy voices, sort of the way Bluto would talk to Olive when he was first trying to pick her up, before he revealed his true psychotic nature.

Ruth smashed the damned ball nearly all the way to the monkey bars—a home run. Now she did love me. I was toast for the rest of the day.

The Battle at Katy's Hill

Back to the frontier. The Mason’s lived on Whitier Place, the same street as Johnny Kotlarczyk, but across the street, further north, and nearer the golf course. There were a bunch of Mason kids, Charlie, a younger brother Johnny, another younger brother Jason (who would one day burn down their garage), and a little girl we seldom saw. I never saw any Mr. Mason. Don’t know if there was one. I remember Mrs. Mason as a woman with a permanent frown (think "Margaret Hamilton") who seemed to always be either shrieking at her kids or any parent who dared to challenge their behavior. Johnny Mason was a likable and funny kid, but everyone suspected that scratching him too deep would reveal his psycho mode. As will be revealed later, he was a key figure in our yearly Devil’s Night escapades.

But Charley was way twisted. Like a hyena, he’d linger at a distance from the rest of us kids, waiting for a stray. When he found one he’d act so quickly that no adult could stop him. He’d have a knife, a piece of barbed wire, or sometimes just his fists. Then we’d hear the screaming cry of a victim trying to make his way back home, with Charley nowhere to be seen. This didn’t happen every day or every week, but probably at least once or twice a year. The strange thing was that once you learned to stand up to Charley, he’d back off with a crazed grin. I remember Johnny Kotlarczyk shouting lots of times, “Get out of here, Mason!” He’d heard his mom and dad say it enough times.

The day eventually came when Charley Mason was murdered in Jackson State Prison. Johnny Kotlarczyk told me this a few years back when I spoke to him after the death of his father. I was not surprised, but somewhat satisfied to learn of this. I told Johnny that the last time I had seen Charley was one cold day at the bus stop at Outer Drive and Michigan Avenue. I was coming home late from high school. He was standing at the corner. I wasn’t afraid, maybe I should have been. We exchanged looks of brief recognition, a few words maybe. A moment later, a late model car pulled up driven by a really creepy dangerous looking fellow. Charley took off with him.

Roll the tape back eight or nine years. It’s winter time after a big snowfall. Kotlarczyk (by then we were all calling each other by our last names), one of the March kids, and I headed with our saucers to Katy’s Hill. Katy lived at the edge of our subdivision, nearly as far as you could go before passing over to the next. We called it Katy’s Hill because it was her hill, descending from her back door down to the golf course. Next to the smoothly flowing Katy’s Hill was a drop off, sort of a cliff, about 20 feet high.

We spotted Charley on the way to Katy’s Hill. He didn’t seem particularly threatening that day, but it was hard to tell with Charley. As he came closer, someone packed a snowball and beaned him with it. Then there was another. We all either hated him, feared him, or both. More snowballs. He started running away from us toward Katy’s. We ran too, and as we got nearer to the hill snowballs changed to rocks. Closer to the hill, closer to the cliff, I was swept by a feeling that this was our day of great revenge.

He had nowhere to run. He was screaming at us, “Cut it out, you fuckers!” As if duty-bound, we maintained our attack. Our dads had told us all stories about “The Bulge” and “Pork Chop Hill.” Each rock had meaning. Charley fell over the cliff. He managed to pick himself up and run toward the river. I never saw him again until that time at the bus stop.

I guess it sounds cruel. But if you asked me, even now, to describe what happened that day at Katy’s Hill, my answer would be “justice.”

Early Risky Behavior

I don't mean to say that I was always safe and secure in the strip between the Marches and the Shaders. I remember a summer evening when a bunch of us, my brother Steve, my sister Mike, and Tom and Jerry, the older Shader boys, were playing in our front yard. I think I was four.

I was waiting for my mom and dad to come outside, for they'd told me we’d be going to Kresge’s soon. Kresge’s (pronounced “Krez' gee’s) was the dime store. With its toys, soda fountain, live animals (turtles, parakeets, and goldfish), and its “Ring for Service” bells, it was a place I truly loved. And I was growing more and more impatient with mom and dad. They should be out here by now. Dad’s 1953 Ford Sedan sat in our driveway. Maybe I’d just have to go to Kresge’s myself.

Maybe someone saw me climb into it. Sitting behind the wheel I reached up to the stick, just like I’d seen my dad do. I remember saying, “start up the car!” I remember yanking the stick down.

A bunch of stuff then happened real fast. I felt the car roll backward. I heard my sister Mike yell “Roger!” She somehow opened the driver’s side door, avoided being knocked to the ground by it, and pulled me out. We watched the car roll down the driveway, across busy Gulley (how was it not hit?!), and onto the lawn across the street.

I wonder if most people can remember the first time they felt that terrible onrushing fearful feeling of being in big, big trouble? For me, this was it. My dad would be out soon, showing his hot Kentucky temper, no doubt whipping his belt from around his waist. I wanted to run, but my sister held on to me. Though I expected that this worst sort of behavior would draw my parents’ worst possible punishment, my mom and dad acted in a totally unexpected way. I suddenly sensed their relief that I had not been killed. So, instead of the belt’s sting, the next thing I remember was being sat down at the end of the dining room table. My dad sat at the other end, brother Steve, sister Mike, and my mom sat around it. Dad gave us not a safety lecture; not a “Roger, you could have been killed” lecture, but a lesson in how a car gearshift worked and what the letters PRNDL stood for. I guess I had mastered the N.

This was neither the first nor last time my parents felt relieved that I hadn’t been killed. In fact, I was barely born; sick and in and out of the hospital for the first three months of my life. Years later I would learn about my “subdural hematoma,” my collapsed lung, and how my brother and sister, hearing my mom’s tears, used to hold each other and cry themselves to sleep. Around the same time as the driveway incident, I fell through a weak board in my Aunt Orie’s living room. I remember how after falling into her basement, my aunt, dad, cousin, brother, and sister rushed down the basement stairs - and I remember their amazed faces when they saw I'd landed on a cushy sofa. In later years, there’d be the living room fire, the car crashing into my bedroom wall, the gun on the dorm room floor (though I don’t think they ever learned of that one), and various other incidents.

But back to Gulley. Another drama—much less dire, but nearly as scary for me as the car rolling backward—unfolded one day when I pedaled my tricycle two doors down Gulley, just past the house of the old bachelor. Pausing, I stuck a few small twigs into a bare spot at the corner of his lawn. Without warning, the old bachelor came out of his garage. He was a gruff gray haired guy who worked for the Wayne County road commission. He had a rough sort of voice that today makes me think of a carton of Chesterfields.

“Looks like I’ve got some grass growing!” he growled. I just sat and smiled. He came closer “Sticks!” he bellowed. “Those are sticks! Don’t you put sticks in my yard! You go put sticks in your own yard!” Other than my parents, I don’t think I had ever been yelled at by a grown up before. I was shocked and embarrassed before I even knew what those words meant. And it seems kind of funny now, but for the next 20 years, the rest of his life, despite the fact that he lived so close and was always sitting on his porch, despite the fact that I continued to cut through his back yard to get to the Marches, I never spoke to him again. I don't think I ever even looked him in the eye again.


Next: Mason - The Final Battle

My Neighborhood

The homes expanding out beyond our back fence were older than ours, and the Kotlarczyks had lived in this neighborhood longer than we had. They had a son, Johnny, who along with Donna Shader (two doors up Gulley from us) was to become my first best friend. Yes, you can have two best friends. Johnny told me stories about Charlie Mason.

“He put a puppy on the tracks,” Johnny said. He meant the railroad tracks that ran along the other side of nearby Michigan Avenue. That a little boy was allowed to cross Michigan Avenue and play on the tracks didn’t phase me much then, but I knew that my eight-year-old brother and eleven-year-old sister could never do that. “He has a knife,” Johnny added. We were barely four years old and talking about this stuff.

Donna Shader didn’t know anything about the Masons--yet. Donna lived two houses up from us on Gulley. I usually just watched her across the backyard fences, but one day she came with her mother, Lu, to our new house.

“It looks just like ours!” Lu exclaimed as she passed from my parents’ bedroom, through the bathroom, past the basement stairs, and into the kitchen. Meanwhile, Donna wrestled with my stuffed toy dog (I still have him) while I played with blocks. I wanted the dog back. But I had to share. It turned out for the best, though, because Donna and her family shared a lot with me over the years. I’d go up there for “tea parties” where we’d drink warm sugar water in plastic toy tea cups. During summers I’d go there for the Koolade Donna or one of her three brothers would make, usually with extra sugar. I remember the sound of the metal spoon stirring and scraping against the inside of the aluminum pitcher and I remember how extra sugary Koolade tastes when served in an aluminum tumbler. The Shader family and the Shader house were to be darn near my second family and second home for many years.

Sometime that year, or maybe the next, Johnny Kotlarczyk and I figured out how we could catch a rabbit in my backyard. It was so easy. We’d both seen it on TV. All you had to do was get a box, a stick, a carrot, and some string. Tie the string to the stick, use the stick to prop up one end of the box, put the carrot under the box, then “hide” about 20 feet away in plain sight. The rabbit would, of course, smell the carrot and hop under the box at which point one of us would pull the string. That we had never seen a rabbit anywhere in the neighborhood made no difference. The reason we hadn’t seen one was that no one had ever put a carrot out on the lawn before. We waited quietly for a while, but soon began to wonder why something that always worked on TV failed for us.

To get to Johnny’s house I had to hop the back fence. Hopping fences was always the fastest way to get to anyone’s house, even if it meant cutting through people’s yards. Apparently, as the first several families moved onto our block, there was some discussion as to whether backyards should even have fences. Mrs. March (the Marches had two boys and a girl and lived in the last house on Gulley before you got to Michigan Avenue) wanted no fences so that the backyards would be like a park for all us kids to run in. I think my folks liked fences, so thats what we got; aluminum chain link fencing around our yard. Most other families followed suit. Hopping fences became like hopping a creek. We made paths of convenience all over our neighborhood.

Hopping the fence to Johnny’s opened up a whole new wide-open space. But before I explain that, let me offer a geographic description of my early world. There was Gulley Road, named after farmer Gulley, who once had a vast apple orchard spanning a few dozen acres of what was once known as Dearborn Township. Gulley was a busy street and you couldn’t cross without your mom or dad. If you walked south down Gulley past the Marches, you got to the rock pile, the place where the builders had dumped a lot of concrete and brick.

Beyond the rock pile and running east along Michigan Avenue was “the field.” Michigan Avenue was a wide and intimidating boulevard separated from the field by a simple dirt path. Only the oldest, bravest, or meanest kids crossed Michigan without their parents. Beyond it ran parallel the Michigan Central Railroad tracks. Beyond the tracks was only mystery.

If you walked north up Gulley, toward and beyond the spot where I met Charlie Mason, you’d come to the Lower Rouge River (AKA, “The River Rouge” or just “the Rouge”), a slow stinky polluted stream even back then (they say it’s much cleaner today). On the Inkster side, the Rouge meandered through the woods, to and beyond mythical places that only kids knew with names like “Motorcycle Hill” and “Car in the Water.” Without a parent, those woods were off limits to me. On the Dearborn side the river ran through a golf course whose hills we’d sled down in winter (and yet woe to the kid caught by its “Rangers” any other time of year).

Hopping my backyard fence and walking east out into Kotlarczyk’s front yard opened up another vast expanse of homes and families living on safe-to-cross streets. That was the rest of “our subdivision.” Beyond one of its dead end streets was the “other subdivision,” another mostly off-limits place with kids who liked to fight. In reality, despite the fences, my neighborhood was very much like a park, sans swings, slides, teeter-totters, or equipment of any kind.

Maybe a better way to describe it would be to say that the strip of Gulley from the Shaders to the Marches (including Johnny’s backyard) was a little kid’s familiar hometown. The rock pile, the field, and the rest of the subdivision were his frontier, a place to explore and discover stuff. The frontier was where he learned things. What is mumbly peg? Do girls have doojiggers? Why will only Catholics go to heaven? Grasshoppers spit tobacco on you. A dandelion can tell whether or not you like butter. Some girl got stabbed over across the railroad tracks. Who likes him and how much? Who can he trust? Who will hurt him and how badly? The frontier is where I would again meet up again with Charlie Mason.

Next: Hazards on Gulley

Early Lessons on the Homefront

I was three years old when I met Charlie Mason. It was early evening, down near the corner of Gulley Road and Fairway Street, several houses beyond the point my parents told me not to go. He was a dark-haired boy, about five years old, with a voice and a smile that made me want to be his friend. And he wanted to be my friend. He told me so. He told me his name and asked me mine. Then he said, “Roger, you and I are going to be good friends!”

We had just moved to South Gulley Road (or just “Gulley,” as we called it) a few months earlier on February 13th, my third birthday. Gulley was a two-lane street, the dividing line between Dearborn and Inkster. We lived on the Dearborn side, in a new home in a new subdivision. The first day I entered our new house my big sister Michael took me by the hand and led me up and down the hallway showing me the bathroom, the linen closet, and the room where my brother Stephen and I would sleep. It was a simple three-bedroom ranch house with a large basement and a big back yard. I don’t remember anything else until that first warm pleasant evening I met Charlie. He was the first sociopath I ever met.

“Roger, you and I are going to be really good friends,” he repeated. This was great. I knew the word “friend” but I don’t think I’d had one before. A friend was someone who wasn’t your brother or sister, who smiled at you, and played with you.

“But there’s just one thing I want you to do for me,” Charlie said. I beamed at him waiting for his next words. “I want you to bend over and stretch your arms way back between your knees.” It didn't seem unreasonable. He’s my friend.

I bent down and reached my little arms between my knees and waited. “Will he spank me?” I wondered. He grabbed my hands and pulled them hard.

My parents say that a neighbor found me stumbling slowly back toward my house. I don’t remember that. I think I was crying, and I do remember being rushed to the hospital. “Rushed to the hospital” was a new phrase for me, one to be repeated many times during my youth along with “take him to Oakwood,” the name of the hospital where I was born. I remember throwing up five times on the way to Oakwood. I remember doctors and bright lights and throwing up more.

I don’t remember much after that. I don’t think my parents called the police. I’m not sure whether they really grasped what happened to me. Maybe they thought it was simple kid roughhousing. I mean, I don’t remember Charlie or the Mason family being called to task for my concussion. It wouldn’t have mattered. The Masons, as I learned over the next few years, were a bad family. Sometime during the days following this event, our neighbor across the back yard, fence, Mr. Kotlarczyk, gave my dad and me some stern words of advice—“keep away from Charlie Mason.”

Next: My neighborhood

First Grade Wrap Up

Let me clarify a few things about me, first grade, Mrs. Helman, and Oxford School. First, I was no angel. It's true, I was elected by my classmates to serve as student council representative. (Barbara Hanson, coming in a close second, became the alternate, a word I often got confused with "astronaut.") But I could be annoying, and sometimes downright bad. At one of our student council meetings, for example, eager to talk, eager to impress the big kids, and eager to make an impression with our wonderful and kind principal, Mrs. Cotter, I raised my hand and announced the following:

"I heard that at recess, someone peed on a tree!"

Everyone laughed. Even Mrs. Cotter could barely keep a straight face, and to this day my mom grimacingly recalls the glee with which Mrs. Cotter related that story to her at a parent teacher conference.

Now the mean part. Haven't we all seen movies, TV shows, or cartoons where someone sticks out a leg and trips someone? I remember seeing either Jimmy Cagney or Edward G. Robinson do it in some old movie. Do you suppose some little kid might be fascinated by the physical logic of such an act? Maybe even copy it in real life?

I was seated at a desk on the aisle next to the bookshelves running along the windows. A little girl, one of the few whose name I don't remember, was running down that aisle. On sheer impulse -- there was no time to really think! -- I slid my leg into the aisle, tripping her solidly. Dramatically, she flew and crashed down the aisle and arose crying terribly.

"Roger tripped me!"

I felt doomed. A world of yelling, spanking, and shame was in store for me. And it was only a moment away. Mrs. Helman spoke.

"Roger didn't trip you. You were running."

"No! He tripped me!" the little girl sobbed.

"No, you were running. That's why we don't run in the room."

I think the was my first "dodging the bullet" feeling. But it was relief drenched with guilt. On TV, say like on Leave it to Beaver, Beaver would go see Miss Landers the next morning and confess. Not me, brother. Chalk it up to fear and an undeveloped conscience.

Oxford School may not have always been a safe haven for kids. But I learned a lot of stuff, inside and outside, formally and informally. Mrs. Helman taught be book stuff, but she also taught me about trust--that is, who not to. In two years at Oxford (and there are more stories to come!) I learned that teachers could be kind, fair, stern, unfair, wrong, and even mean. I guess, in other words, Oxford started me on a path toward exercising judgment and understanding justice.

Next: On the Homefront

The Dark and the Light at Oxford School, Part Four

I can't say that my first grade experience was a total wreck. There was that one time Mrs. Helman taught me something. She was talking about weather and evaporation and made this crazy claim that water was always somehow invisibly floating up into the air. Well, it just sounded incredible to me, until she proved it by setting a glass of water on the window sill for a few days. I watched each day in amazement as the water floated invisibly up into the air.

I also learned things on the playground. One day I found an envelope full of Savings Stamps, about $2.50 worth. For you younger folks, Savings Stamps were cool little US government issues that we bought each week. Once you filled up a little book with stamps, you could trade it in for a $25 US Savings Bond. Anyhow, I thought I hit the jackpot on the basis of "finder's keepers, loser's weepers," a phrase heard commonly on kid street back then.

Johnny Kotlarczyk disagreed. A good Catholic boy, he chided me on the way home from school, telling me that I needed to turn them in to the teacher. Ha, I thought. Does he not know the "finder's keepers" rule? How pleased my mom would be, I thought, to learn of my fortune!


Mom was not pleased. She wasn't angry, she wasn't irritated, she just wasn't pleased. "Roger," she asked, "if you lost these, wouldn't you want someone to return them to you?" How can anyone argue with that? I turned them in the next day. Mrs. Helman went on about what an honest boy I was. I felt kinda crummy. Ever see Theodore Cleaver when he's feeling a little guilty crummy? That was me.


But one of the worst and most negative playground lessons I ever got was delivered like a lead pipe massage by Mrs. Helman. You won't believe it. You'll think to yourself, "stuff like that only happens in old Mickey Rooney movies."

It had been a rainy morning. But the rain had stopped and Mrs. Helman figured she could take us outside for afternoon recess. I swear I never heard her give the usual admontition about staying on the blacktop. I guess my buddy Mike didn't either because the two of us wandered off onto the somewhat muddy playground toward the swings. I mean, there was like "nuthin happnin" on the blacktop, and we both had boots on, so like what's the problem?

We found out 15 minutes later when Mrs. Helman called us all in. Mike and I got to the door and she howled out about the mud on our boots!

"Don't you dare come inside! You two stay out here and scrape the mud off your boots! You should be ashamed to disobey me like that!"

I don't know how long it took Mike and me to scrape off the mud. But apparently it was enough time for Mrs. Helman to figure out and carry out a really devious awful plan.

Mike and I put our boots in our lockers and headed toward the classroom door. I remember walking in, seeing grins on everyone's face, except for Mrs. Helman, who was seated at the piano. She began playing, the class began singing, and Mike and I suddenly heard and read the words written on the chalkboard.

"Two little pigs named Michael and Roger went to play in the mud."

There were several more lines to the song, one with the words "oink, oink, oink." I don't remember them all clearly. But I remember Mike's face, full of hurt and shame. I don't know if Mike was alright before that, but I know that he was never alright again during the next five years I knew him at Oxford Avenue Elementary School.

Next time: First grade wrap up and my first encounter with a sociopath.

The Dark and the Light at Oxford School, Part Three

There's no question that I could be a little problem at times, at home and in school. One day back in kindergarten, I crawled into the play house during nap time and stayed there after Mrs. Jennings turned the lights back on. The rest of the class gathered in the usual circle and after five or ten minutes Mrs. Jennings boomed out, "Where's Roger?"

I popped out of the play house expecting a good laugh from everyone, but Mrs. Jennings was not pleased at all. I got as stern a talking to as she ever gave any child.

This mischievous spirit stayed with me into Mrs. Helman's class. Hell, it's still with me today, but I've learned to avoid irritating people. Not so in first grade.

That year, after a battery of tests that kept me in the classroom during recess, it was decided that I would walk down the hall to Mrs. Demery's second grade class each morning for my reading lessons. Fine with me. Snip, Snap, and Snur turned out to be a bit more challenging than Tom, Betty, Susan, and Flip. Anyway, one day after my reading lesson, feeling on top of the world, I walked down the hallway back to Mrs. Helman's class. Instead of simply walking in, I jumped through the door and yelled "Boo!"

The class seemed to enjoy it, but Mrs. Helman was not amused at all. I think this incident led directly to my earning my first "poor citizenship" mark on my first report card. Mrs. Helman put a check next to "Is Courteous," and that check meant that in her opinion I was definitely not.

The day came when Mrs. Helman, having enough of me, lost it. I was at the back of the room, at the table where all the "free reading" books were. I was allowed to be there, along with a couple of my classmates. I don't quite remember the details, but a boy and I exchanged words over who had picked up a book first. They were mild words, like "I had it first"..."no, I did," but for some reason, even though she was seated all the way up at the front of the room, Mrs. Helman heard them as "fighting."

"Roger, sit down," she barked.

"Why?" I asked.

"You were fighting!"

"I was not!"

She trotted to the back of the room.

"You were fighting!" she repeated.

"I was not," I defended.

Suddenly, she raised her hand and stung my face with a quick flick of her wrist. I can't remember if I cried, though it's likely. I'd been slapped before (I told you I could sometimes cause a little trouble at home), but never in front of a classroom full of kids.

Today it seems funny, because although I remember going home that day and telling my mom, she claims to have no memory of this. In fact, she's told me, "If I ever heard that a teacher had slapped you, I'd a been down to that school the next day!"

I tell this story to the students in my college classes. Even those who went to Catholic schools with mean nuns are amazed. Of course, most of them are years younger than me.

Next time: Mrs. Helman's "Two Little Pigs" song.

The Dark and the Light at Oxford School, Part Two

So many first grade stories. Hell, I'm 55 years old. How can this be? I mean the stories, not the age.

One of my first memories of Mrs. Helman's class is writing practice. Giant pencils and, like Mr. Cosby says, paper with chunks of wood and lines three feet apart.

"Do not use erasers!" Mrs. Helman would sharply remind us. One day she caught Danny using one. This was the first time I saw any adult other than a parent or a friend's parent yell.

"What do I have to do?" she shrieked, "walk around with a tape recorder on my back that says 'do not use erasers!'?" What a strange thing to say.

Mrs. Helman was trained to be a music teacher, but somehow got switched to first grade. Many years later, as a teacher in another Dearborn school, I would see her again. She was teaching music. Sitting across from her at lunch, I said, "Mrs. Helman, I'm Roger Shouse. You were my first grade teacher!" I said it sort of loudly. She seemed irritated. I was pleased.

My next first grade memory is of the "threatening note" incident. Nancy and I were the smartest kids in the class. She was pretty, blond, and always smiling at me. So, of course, I had to keep bothering her. I sent her a note that read, "Dear Nancy. You'd look good like this."

What was "this?" Well, on numerous cartoons (one Betty Boop cartoon in particular) I'd often see a grave stone with the letters "RIP" on it. I had no idea what RIP meant, but I knew what a grave stone was. That was the "this" - a simply scrawled upside down "U" shaped grave stone with the letters RIP on it. Not to bad for a first grade kid, eh?

Mrs. Helman grabbed the note as I tried to pass it to Nancy. I didn't think much of it at the time, but either later that day or the next day, while swinging on the swings with my buddy David at recess, I saw my mom walking across the blacktop.

"Hey, Mom! What're you doing here?" She waved back, but seemed irritated.

Though I don't even remember the subject coming up again, my mom now claims that Mrs. Helman had called her in for a conference over this note. My mom says she thought it was so silly at the time. Eleven years later, after Congress passed the open records law for schools, my high school counselor showed me my "secret file." In addition to lots of foolish piccayune crap written by my fourth grade teacher, there was one other item of note -- the Nancy note.

Next time: The Slap.

The Dark and the Light at Oxford School, Part One

I remember Mrs. Jennings class and my first day of kindergarten. We lined up. We went inside. We saw the coat room. Our moms went home. We were in school.

The days passed. We sat Indian style in a circle around Mrs. Jennings' piano. We marched in a circle. Some of us got cymbals and triangles, though most got rhythm sticks. We had playtime, a long sandbox, a playhouse, a huge tricycle. There were big fat crayons and we all wanted the new ones.

One morning there were two big easels set up in the room, each with a set of poster paints and brushes. Mrs. Jennings asked our morning circle, "who would like to paint today?" Twenty eight kids raised their hands and shouted "ooh, I do, me, me, me!" But two kids just raised their hands quietly. Roger Shouse and Cheryl Peters. Mrs. Jennings chose us because we didn't shout.

I remember the first day of first grade. We marched into Mrs. Helman's room (not her real name) and sat down. No more half day stuff. This was all day school. Mrs. Helman told us we'd all learn how to read. I said out loud--"I already know how to read!" It was true. "I'll teach you how to read better!" she replied. That was also true. But I couldn't help notice her irritation.

Mrs. Lowman was easily irritated. Man, do I have stories to tell! And tell I will, next time. Suffice for now to say that Mrs. Helman was the only teacher who ever slapped my face, and the only teacher who ever wrote a song specifically intended to ridicule me.

Do I have your attention?

Freedom on Oxford's Playground

The four trees was just one symbol of freedom on the Oxford School playground. We also had the "snowball area." Imagine such a thing today! This area was just north of the main blacktop. You went there if you wanted to throw snowballs and didn't mind being hit in return. We had two rules: everything below the head and no iceballs.

Of course some kids got hurt. There'd be bloody lips and black eyes occasionally. It's called kid life and we'd learn how to navigate through it. Who to trust, who to keep away from.

We played other rough games. Mr. Berry was a, oh, what would you call him? We called him Mr. Berry, but I guess today you'd call him a paraprofessional. He wasn't a teacher. Just a guy who patrolled the lunch room and playground. Later on he married one of the fifth grade teachers, who thereby became Mrs. Berry. She was my fifth grade teacher, and she once told our whole class we "could all go to hell." But that's another story.

Anyhow, at lunchtime recess, Mr. Berry would organize these massive games of tackle football. Imagine 30 to 40 boys on each team, all crammed up over the scrimage line. Mr. Berry was always the quarterback. He'd get the snap and toss it off to one of the sixth graders. We'd smash each other like crazy; seldom did anyone move the ball very far, let alone score a touchdown. I don't think we even had a goal line.

Red Rover was another game we played. Miss Mary organized that one. She was another parapro, and the mother of one of the girls in my class. In Red Rover, you've got two teams lined up facing each other about 20 yards apart. Boys and girls. You grab on tight to each other's elbows. At the start of the game one team would all yell, "Red Rover, Red Rover, let Jimmy come over!" or Roger or Linda or Sam or Barbara, etc. Whoever was called would have to run full force through the opposing line, breaking the arm-bonded chain, usually at its weakest point. If you broke through, you got to take somebody back to your side. If you didn't, you had to stay with the other team.

Of course, the smart thing to do was not to call the biggest or smallest kids to come over. The big ones would smash through and the small ones wouldn't do much to reinforce your line. But eventually, you had to call the biggest kid over, for often he was the only one left. Usually that was Sam. One cold late winter day we called out, "Red Rover, Red Rover, let Sam come over." We had doubled our line to the point where sam would have to break through not just one but two human chain links. Sam was big, not fat. A muscular kid and a borderline bully. He ran like a bull toward our ranks. When he hit, the whole chain burst backward like the ropes in a slow motion boxing movie. Our entire line, dozens of kids, fell to the ground beneath Sam's force.

But he didn't break through. End of game. There's the bell. Back to class.

Go to the Four Trees!

"Go to the four trees!"

It's a phrase we'd often shout running out the doors to recess at Oxford School. We had three recess periods each day; 15 minutes in the morning, 15 more in the afternoon, and one lovely 30-40 minute period after lunch. Oxford had a massive playground of blacktops, monkey bars, swings with hard seats you could launch from, fields and wooded areas.

The four trees were located at the farthest reach of the playground. Four massive elms growing from the same set of roots. You could hide inside them; hell, three or four of us could hide inside them! The four trees represented freedom, our freedom to run away from school and all its confinement and regimentation, if only for a short time.

I dedicate this new blog to those trees and to their spirit. And thanks to Jin'ai Sun for tipping me off to "Blogger."


(I attended Oxford Avenue Elementary School, in Dearborn Michigan, from 1959 to 1966. The school was torn down in the early 1980s to make room for condominiums.)