Our High School Reunion at age 85!

Except for one or two among us,  the  400-plus  high school graduates of St. Paul’s Central High School  of 1952 were born in 1934……. the year of the lowest birthrate in the nation’s history.  It was our Depression in America  time and then suddenly  World War time before America itself  became Great economically,  morally, culturally, and financially until  the 1960s.

I was one of those 1934 babies.  Graduation had been celebrated every five years after until this “off” year.  Too many of us  are dying in far greater numbers than in the past….a natural condition, of course,  but not popular among yesterday’s high school stars, may God Bless Them!

They  decided to gather us together this coming August 27th….for our collective 85th birthday gathering.

Since the 1960s we know there  has been  rise  in our once Godfearing America,  a fascistic, atheistic   collective USA  led by a new generation of  fascistics,  ‘scholastics’, feminists, and socialists……a wave of millions of college unlearneds, all gathering  to do good by destroying   that  religious  American dream for democratic freedom for all of our citizens  initiated by those male patriots of 1776.

Americans  used to be  taught to worship seeking  TRUTH in the public schools I attended.

I was born to  be energetic and curious.  I felt it from early on.    I wanted to know everything outside of  engineering, building buildings, and sweeping.

At age eight I became a person in wartime to be in  charge of a quarter acre  “Victory Garden” across the alley from our “five room bungalow” where I was raised.  It was a part of the World War effort to help feed the neighborhood since so many millions of men were over seas.

I became the garden’s planter, it’s caretaker, weeder,  insect controller, waterer, harvester.  The city provided plowing that first year of “the Victory Garden”.   I learned to love plants, to be outdoors, to be gardening, even weeding.    I was born to be curious.

I was also dyslexic.   I couldn’t read books…..novels especially.   But, I was gifted by having visual memory.   What I could see, wanted to see, and until a few years ago, needed to see, I visually stored things, actions, events.  I was lucky to live long enough to discover and appreciate the issue.

I was born curious to a fault.   “Mom, why  are you doing that?”…..”Dad, what’s this for?”  And, at age 8,  until the end of Summer, 1945 I loved that Victory Garden.   I was into my own precious world.   I could see and enjoy my produce.   I was ‘bombing’ evil insects as if I were helping the war effort.

The War made me love maps.   I could read cutlines attached to the pictures of the rotogravure Sunday newspaper section of the St. Paul Pioneer Press already in June, 1942 covering the Battle at Midway.   I can still see by memory its layouts, maps, pictures, headlines of the war action.    What I saw, I’d remember….especially trees, shrubs, flowers, birds, rodents.   I wanted to know every things’ names.

It drove my Mother nuts…so she’d send me out doors to get rid of me….even before the War began….even in Winter where, during the War, I’d build igloo type structures in the Victory Garden and then I’d bomb them with ice chunks, pretending I was helping the War effort…..After all the Japanese had invaded some of our American  Attu islands of Alaska!

I loved learning at school.  But,  I couldn’t read.   Teachers knew it…I did not, consciously.  I wanted so to do what adults  asked of me throughout my school life.   I loved algebra….working those quadratics was like putting 2,000 piece picture puzzles of beautiful American gardens of those days together with my mom.  The Joy of Finishing the Visual Problem!!

I didn’t socialize much with my St. Paul Central school mates.   I had  a paper route to ‘pay my way’ of the day.   At school I  mostly had great teachers.   My favorite was a Mabel Wicker for Freshman English, 4’11” at age 68 going on 100 in her last year before retiring.   I learned years later that she is the person who allowed me to be permitted to enter college after high school graduation.    She taught Shakespeare!

How in hell was I going to read, learn anything Shakespeare?   I knew there was going to be trouble.  And it began the first day of class that September!   We were ordered  to read and study “Merchant of Venice” beginning immediately.   By then I could read most newspaper articles, but never a novel, and NOW I had to read a play?

No sweat….It turned out, after handing out a book to me and my classmates…which we had to pay 15 cents for that first day of class….that Mabel Wicker, being the great old made school teacher she was….and despite  wearing her red wig, she began her rule over the class by  reading  most of the play itself, underscoring, ever tastefully acting out some of  the most beautiful, the most important passages herself.

I remember going home after school that day so excited.   I knew the words and caught their purpose…and almost immediately  I knew I could read the entire play….and that is what I did when I got home….after my paper route, of course.

I got a failing grade the first marking period, nevertheless.   It didn’t happen again!

Thirty eight freshman kids, mostly boys, sat in that red-wigged  Wicker’s classroom in God’s world, 1948-49, and in my presence, NEVER MADE A SLUR OR INSULTING REMARK ABOUT THAT TEACHER AND HER RED WIG.

Three years later when I was supposed to read something William Thackeray, another English teacher, again an excellent one of the College Prep Program, suspected I was having  some reading problems.  She asked me who my Freshman English teacher was…..”Oh, Miss Wicker!”, and then followed with “Good for you!”

Miss Wicker, she told me,  was THE  teacher deciding which  freshman students  who read poorly might still be placed into the College Prep stream at the school.

Miss Wicker failed me with a red ink F in big print on my report card that first marking period  so everyone who’d come close to the card would notice I was in trouble!  Her’s was the first class of my day.    It also would be open broadly for every one of my teachers  see the  RED “F” I had earned.

I was so very lucky to have lived in that St. Paul school district which still hired such great teachers when seeking Truth mattered.

They aren’t around anymore, folks.   Feminism, fascism, antiAmericanism and other drugs  reign.