The Thread # 1, Education Is Everything

I started school in 1950, one year early, because there were not enough babies born during the war to put together a class. Beth Varda and Brenda Pressley also started early to help make a class of about 12 students.
Weddington Elementary was only seven grades then with two grades per class, except the class taught by the principal, Mr. Houser, the seventh grade. Mary Katherine Kell, later to become Mrs. Simpson, taught the first and second grade. It was her first year on the job.
I can still name most of the students that were in that class. There was me, and the two girls above, plus Walter Monday, Avery Helms, Wayne Orr, Bobby Simpson, Ann Ezzell, and a few others that escape me now.
Wayne, my brother, was in the second grade. Donnie, my oldest brother was in the fourth grade. We lived on Weddington Matthews Road in a big house that was torn down long ago, less than a mile from the school.
Weddington school was a great place then. Mrs. Carpenter, the dietician, fixed good meals and you got to choose between white and chocolate milk in returnable glass bottles. We had two unsupervised recesses every day plus play time at lunch.
Our buses had to go to and come from Waxhaw, which gave up play time in the morning and the afternoon. We rode bus #23, which had a center seat and two side seats running the length of the bus, front to back. Mr. Jule Gordon, the school custodian drove the bus.
The first couple of years that I was in school, we had outdoor toilets just like at home. We had a well with a drink fountain attached, in the school yard. The fountain was a long pipe that had a hole about every foot. The favorite game was for everybody except one person to cover their hole and really squirt the one unsuspecting drinker.
Most of us who went to school there also went to church across the road at Weddington Methodist Church. In fact, the church and the school were interconnected in many ways in our lives. The preacher at the church was a regular at the chapels that we had at school. Mr. Tom Matthews, who played the piano for us in chapel, on occasion, was a highly respected member of the church.
Marbles and softball were big time ways that we entertained ourselves during recesses. We played a lot of pop the whip and red rover also. I remember Steve Harkey pitching softball and someone hitting the ball directly back to him and hitting him in the head. Later, Steve got a brain tumor and died. I thought that the pop on the head by the softball had given him the tumor.
Sonny Jones was the best athlete in the school while he was there. He could throw curve balls when he was in the third grade. When we were choosing sides for ball, Sonny always got chosen first.
I was in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania last week for the first day of school of my first grandson, Logan He is going into the first grade, reading better than I could read when I was in the fifth grade. He has been places already that I did not see until I was a middle aged man. He will know very little about recesses, playing marbles, and unorganized activities, however.
I just hope that when he is my age, that the first grade and the rest of grammar school will have been, as it was with me, an experience that so affects his life that he can remember as much as I can remember. I hope that it is filled with days of experiences that gives him the chance and the desire to excel at the things that he does in life.
Education is everything, and those first years set the tone for all that is to come. School was always the best part of my life because I learned early that it could be as nurturing as a mother's love, as exciting as a ride on a roller coaster, and as fulfilling as seeing your own grandchild read a book for the first time.