Somewhere In My Memory

 

I don't know the future, but the past keeps getting clearer every day  - Theme from The Goldbergs

Lately, my mind has been wandering to days gone by. I don’t know if it is the stress of 2020 that is the impetus for this, or just the fact that as I get older I am getting closer to the end of my life. Maybe the days of yore remind me of a time when my life was still ahead of me instead of in the rear-view mirror.

Don’t get me wrong. These are pleasant memories. Sure, I can recall unpleasant ones if I try, since there were a bunch of those, too. But I reminisce on the memories so meaningful that I can still see, hear and even smell them today.

My school as a kid was actually pretty large, and for good reason. I grew up on Wheeling Island, a part of the City of Wheeling, WV. There were about 3,200 people living on the Island when I was growing up, so the population of those 374 acres situated in the Ohio River between West Virginia and Ohio was more than a lot of the rural towns where I live now. Madison School was the public school where the Island’s kids were educated from kindergarten through ninth grade.  The county high schools back in those days only housed student is grades 10-12. That has changed, and Madison is now an elementary school with only students in K-5.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Madison School was comprised of the original 1866 “red building,” and the newer “white building.” Calling the white building newer is a stretch, since it was built in 1916. To be fair, it was only 50 years old at that time. In grades 1-3, my classroom experience was in the red building.

Just the mention of the red building brings back a lot of memories, even though I was obviously pretty young. The building had a massive wooden stairway, accessible from two sides of the main floor. First and second grade rooms were on the first floor. That stairway had a little bit of a creak when you walked on it. You could only hear this if the hallway was nearly empty, since there were usually lots of kids around making the sound that lots of kids make.

The smell of old wood, school paste and wet raincoats is vivid in my memory. Upon entering our classroom, we would immediately hang our coats in a long, narrow room referred to by our teachers as the cloak hall. I don’t know how many people can remember details from first grade, but several are live in my mind. I remember the thick, blue pencils that we wrote with. Those things seemed like telephone poles at the time. Maybe little kids can’t hold normal pencils. I’m not sure if they still use those, or if it was just a ‘60s thing.

I remember the reading books with lots of pictures. We used those giant pencils to do arithmetic. It wasn’t called math in first grade. My first grade classroom had a toy house for the girls to play with when we were given free time, while the boys had a metal barn to play with. The house was ranch style and even had a pool. There were no homes on the Island that looked like that, though a couple did have pools. One day, our teacher had the boys play with the house and the girls experience farm life. Funny how that one experience was memorable for me.

It was an honor to have the task of opening a new stick of clay when we were doing art. The cellophane-wrapped clay sticks were about the size and shape of a stick of butter, and to me they always seemed to be gray in color. Some were light gray and some were darker gray. There were no bright colors of this stuff. I hope that there were other colors, but this was definitely not Play-Doh. It certainly didn’t smell like Play-Doh, either. Still, it was must nicer to use a new stick of clay than a clay blob that fifty other kids had already handled!

Once a student entered fourth grade, he or she was introduced to the wonders of the white building. As I got older, previously unknown portions of the white building were discovered yearly. Finding your way around was pretty straight-forward for the most part, but explorers could find some cool areas off the beaten path.

One Madison School tradition that I will always treasure was the singing of Christmas carols every morning the last week of school prior to Christmas break. The entire white building student population would gather on and around the center stairway just after the Pledge of Allegiance and announcements, and we would sing Christmas carols from lyric sheets. The fourth through sixth grade were on the steps and second floor landings, and the older kids were downstairs on the main floor. Madison’s music teacher would play the piano as loudly as she could to accompany those hundreds of singers. We did that every year that I was at Madison, and I believe that this tradition continues today with the elementary kids that now call Madison home.

There were a lot of memories in that white building. I like to keep these posts sort of short, so some of those memories will have to wait for another time. The old red building was torn down a year or two after I left Madison for Wheeling High School, and the spot where red building stood became a playground area. The playground is still used today. No matter how much it changes, Madison School still feels like home to me in my memory.