16 Grand Boulevard

In the fall of 1964 I started fourth grade at Thomas Jefferson School, and in 1965 I was there for fifth grade as well. We still lived in Binghamton, New York, but we had moved house again, for reasons unknown to me, to an old prairie-style duplex at 16 Grand Boulevard. One year we lived upstairs, and the next year -- maybe the landlady moved out -- we moved downstairs. Or maybe it was downstairs and then upstairs, but I think not. The house had dark wood trim, and some interesting old furnishings, like the dining room display cabinet with curved glass doors that seemed very classy to me.

There was never enough shelving for all the books. Thousands of books. My dad began to acquire black industrial metal shelving units (years before high tech became any kind of style), from the Sears catalog I think, and let me help him assemble them. This was a step up from the grad-student bricks and boards shelving. He had a taste for avant-garde design well beyond any professors' salary. The butterfly chair got a wild sixties orange floral print stitched over the black canvas. He disassembled he dining room chairs we had acquired in 1961, covered their beige plastic seats with squares of bright blue-green prints using a staple gun, spray-painted the metal legs and back supports white, and reassembled them thus transformed. The round formica table that came with them had its legs replaced with short ones, to make a coffee table. For a larger dining table he attached legs to a hollow-core door from the lumberyard. There was another coffeetable he constructed from a narrower door. He took me not only to bookstores but to haunt Scandinavian modern design stores. In Ann Arbor no doubt on sale he had purchased a set of Dansk stainless tableware. So our humble functional furniture accumulated through the moves, beyond the minimal box springs, mattresses and metal bedsteads required.

At Grand Boulevard I had a middle bedroom, off the dining room, and a double bed as my parents had purchased a new one for themselves. Pigeons cooed under the eaves. I had a desk and small dresser that had been purchased unfinished (Sears again) when I was in first grade and painted light blue. In Binghamton I also acquired from some second-hand source a dark wood deco-style vanity, with a tall mirror between two small cabinets, and a large trunk. Eventually these things were painted. We were continually slapping coats of white paint over our new habitations. My mother constructed simple curtains for each room from lengths of fabric, with simple sleeves run over standard curtain rods. The long windows of these old houses required a lot of measuring before we went off to the fabric store.

This was a roomy house, that my little brother learned to walk in, emptying and and crawling through the kitchen cupboards. At that early age he had the nickname Zoopy. In those days egg cartons were constructed of folded cardboard with dividers inserted to divide the trays into rectangular compartments, and he tore these cardboard dividers in half and collected them by the hundreds, calling them "dibs", a word he had mysteriously come up with himself. His bedroom was in the back of the house, behind my parents' room.

My mother was still at home, working as an editor on galleys that she was still getting from Ginn. I learned quite a bit about copyediting by observing the red ink marks she made on these. I also collected the galleys (which were printed in very long columns, not yet paginated), cut them into lengths and pasted them into scrapbooks to make my own editions. She was working on an eighth grade reading textbook at this point, an anthology of stories that greatly impressed me, like "The Most Dangerous Game", Leacock's "The Night the Bed Fell", and as a sample of drama, "Twelve Angry Men."

At the same time she was occupying herself with a spasm of domesticity. She sewed clothing for me as well as for herself, collected recipes and learned to bake yeast bread. She and George had collaborated on making a simple cocktail dress for her from an elaborately embroidered kimono he had brought back from his service in the Far East, and the scraps from this were also used to make clothes for my cousin's Barbie. For Christmas she sewed a whole set of clothing from the doll pattern collection included in the envelope, which went off to my cousin. I have no idea what happened to the silk dress, or the rest of the scraps. I got the pattern, and began to teach myself how to sew, using the old black Singer portable she had always had. The doll pattern gave basic procedural instructions, but I could read and follow instructions for the full-size patterns too, and began to take more interest in what was available in the fabric stores.

My dad took a big part in housekeeping, which was unusual at that time, as well as with cooking and childcare. I still associate the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcast with memories of him running the vacuum cleaner, a Eureka canister vacuum.

My fourth grade teacher was named Mrs Houlihan. At some point in the year she had us cramming for the Iowa Basics, which are achievement tests still given nationwide to fourth-graders; and it must have been after we had already covered quite a bit of material, because for a while she had us outlining a chapter from our Social Studies textbook every night as homework. It began with the Pacific Northwest (60 inches of rainfall per year) and went on to describe the lives of children in different parts of the U.S. I was keeping up with this work, barely, and there was much indignant discussion among the class, surreptitiously, about how impossible it was. My parents agreed that cramming for such a test was not the point of the test at all. So one afternoon I left on her desk a carefully-composed note suggesting that this was too much work -- and boy did I catch hell the next morning. I walked in, and "boy are you in trouble" my classmates informed me.

The teacher walked in, and first I was in trouble for not having signed the note. (As though there were any doubt who had written it, whether from the evidence of handwriting or my fellows having already given me up.) First she humiliated me in front of the class. Then she took me out in the hall, cast more aspersions on my character and made me cry. Then she took me to the principal's office. There was not much more trouble you could get into in those days, short of being beaten. The principal, who I saw on that one occasion only, showed me a shelf of large books and asked paternally if I knew what a curriculum was, and explained how important it was for the teachers to follow the curriculum. I promised fervently never to obstruct the pursuit of a curriculum again.

This was the same teacher that I got into an argument with when I asserted that apricots were not the same thing as dried peaches. I was pretty sure they were a different fruit, not that I had ever seen or had any. She was drawing a parallel between prunes and plums, grapes and raisins. I was attempting to make a point of information, which was clearly a mistake. She was a bit of a battleaxe. I always liked my teachers, though, so it was fairly painful when they apparently didn't like me.

This was the same teacher who hit Joseph Barr on the head with his dictionary, when she found him reading it behind the raised desk lid instead of paying attention in class. Probably looking up naughty words, knowing him. Joseph Barr was a big boy -- actually not any larger than the rest of us, but one year older was a big deal at the time -- who had been held back a year to repeat the grade.

OMG, this means that this was the same year that I got in another nine kinds of hell from my classmates when the girls were all taken off to see a health film (courtesy of the Kimberly Clark corporation) on Becoming A Woman. "The fun is just beginning!" It was a great secret, that had involved all the girls taking home sealed envelopes explaining to our parents what was up, because it required their signed permission. Times being what they were, the boys were mystified, except for Joseph Barr, who teased me into revealing that the subject of our private girls' lesson was Growing Up. He apparently already knew the word menstration, or something close. This made me a traitor to the girls, because this subject was of such acute embarrassment all around.

I still have in a collage the front page of the little booklet we were given, "Growing Up and Liking It", with the photo of the perky girl in a flip hairdo. Let me not even begin on the stringent procedures required for hair care in those bad old days. It is a subject my hairdresser and I have fun with. Oh, okay: the brush rollers. The hair picks. Trying to sleep on them. The dryers, which cost money, or the putting a big scarf over your head full of curlers and going out as though no one could tell what was under there while your hair air-dried. The permanent wave that would make the set stay in your hair for more than a single day. My mother was going through the whole rigamarole. Fortunately all that was about to change. I had a babysitter who set my hair one night, and it produced nowhere near a big enough improvement in my personal appearance to make me want to go through all that regularly. I already had braces, and glasses. Like Ugly Betty, only it was not considered in any way cute or a joke: it was just ugliness.

The next year I was at the same school, in Miss Jablonsky's class. Miss Jablonsky was a nice pretty young teacher, with blonde hair she wore in a chignon, a French upswept thingy. Unfortunately Miss Jablonsky was in an auto accident in the middle of the year, a fairly serious one, and we spent several winter months in the care of Mrs Tyler, who opened the windows every day for calisthenics by our desks while she played the record "Chicken Fat". A quasi-military ditty, Go you chicken fat! go away! go, you chicken fat! go! with push-ups and so forth. I was informed by a classmate that Mrs Tyler not only had favorites, but I was not one of them. What? what did I do?

Well, I did not win any flashcard competitions in math. This was a common educational technique, and maybe still is in places: making a competition out of simple drills. Two students compete to answer the card first, the one who loses sits down, eliminated, and the other continues on to the next student's desk for more fun. General cheering, commentary and verbal mayhem encouraged. I hated flashcards on the times tables. But I was still winning spelling bees.