First grade for me was at St Joseph’s Academy, where my mother and her sisters went to school, and my grandmother and her sisters and brothers went, also. My memories there are of nuns, and long, super shiny halls, and walking single file on the right side of the hallway. Everything was orderly and there were lots of rules. The desks were the same ones from when my grandmother went to school there. They were hooked together in a long strip and bolted to the floor. They had a hole in the desktop that was supposed to hold an inkwell. I always wished we had inkwells, because I strongly desired to own a fountain pen. We had fundraisers quite a lot, and once I won a plastic crucifix with glow-in-the-dark squares on the four corners of the cross; and one glorious time I won a fountain pen!
My best friend at St Joe’s was Alicia. She was in my class, and we had great times at recess. One time we rubbed pencil lead on a piece of paper and then applied the smudge under one of our eyes and returned to class with black eyes. I don’t remember the punishment for that, but I’m certain there was one.
Our playground had blacktop and gravel, and the big, round pipes that had held seesaws when my mother was a little girl. There were empty frames where swings used to be, also. The girls liked to put their hands on the underside of the big seesaw pipes and flip over them kind of like a big somersault. One day I did that and landed flat on my back and split my head open. My dad was called and he took me to the doctor’s office. Lying face down on the table with a cloth over my head while the stitching was performed, I kept sniffling. My dad thought I was crying, but it was really just because my nose was running. My dad kept telling me not to cry. I tried to convince him I wasn’t crying. I had on a plaid skirt and a white nylon blouse, and the blouse was almost all red when we took it off at home.
I remember playing lots of “Farmer In The Dell” on that playground, and sitting in the bottom of the huge tube that came all the way from the third floor window of the convent down to the playground. Two or three girls could sit there, and we would talk and laugh until a stern voice would yell down the tube that we were not allowed to sit there.
Alicia and I used to sit on a railroad tie at the back of the playground and draw with a stick in the dust. She would draw all the parts of her grandparents’ farm, and we would talk and plan and dream about spending time together there.
The new, modern Catholic church in Galesburg built a school and I was enrolled to attend there for 5th grade. My little brother was starting 1st grade. My brother’s first-grade class was 35 kids and had a first-time teacher. Our cousin, Pete, was in the same class. My brother’s behavior changed drastically as the weeks wore on. Eventually, he was extremely withdrawn and toned down from his usual rambunctious self and was vomiting every morning before the bus picked us up for school. My parents were later able to get details of my brother’s experience. He was left-handed and the nun forced him to sit on the floor whenever he would write with his left hand. Then he would be in trouble at home for getting his dress pants dirty. Children were denied trips to the bathroom when they requested to go, and things were definitely not going well. My brother and my cousin hadn’t talked about any of this and, by the time Christmas was approaching, the doctor told my mother to get my brother out of that school. We transferred to a public school not too far from where we lived for the second semester. The nun who had been my brother’s teacher was diagnosed with a brain tumor not long after that.
My brother was assigned to Mrs. Shoemaker’s 1st grade class at L.T. Stone School, and recovered from his traumatic 1st semester under her kind and compassionate care.