Third grade at Alexander Hamilton School

In the fall of 1963 I started third grade. This has always been a handy memory hook for me, for my life through the sixties. We had moved to Binghamton, in southern New York State not far from the Pennsylvania border, where my dad had an Assistant Professorship at Harpur College. My mother was staying home to take care of my newborn brother, with a little copyediting work on the side from her former employers at Ginn & Co. Our first house there was a gray-blue saltbox in a fairly new subdivision, at 11 Giles Street.

So much occurred in the course of that year that it seems a year could hardly accommodate it.

I had to take the bus to school, by a route I did not at all understand, to Alexander Hamilton School. My teacher was a small kindly older lady, named Mrs Benkovic. Of that classroom I recall ransacking it for books, and reading even the textbooks we were not studying, so that Dick and Jane as well as Tom, Betty and Susan became familiar to me.

One day each week, I think it was Friday, the class constituted itself as a Reading Club with a strange formulaic recitation to open the weekly program of someone's book report. The elected President of the club chanted, "The meeting of the Room Something (203) Book Club will now come to order, the Secretary will read the minutes of the last meeting." Then the Secretary would read a longer boilerplate report on the last dated meeting, and a motion to accept the report would be made and seconded; all of these events constituting the report for the following week. The book report read by whichever student had been volunteered for the task was clearly only a pretense for the exercise of Robert's Rules of Order.

I don't recall getting out of the classroom much. Recesses were not much fun for me, although skipping rope was still as common of an activity as it had been in Newton. There were new rhymes to learn, and new customs. I was once again the New Kid.

This was the class where I learned something of local history, by copying it neatly from the blackboard where the teacher had written out the text. It struck me as a peculiarly old-fashioned method of learning. Binghamton was named after a Mr James Bingham, who arrived to settle at the confluence of the Susquehanna and Monongahela Rivers with a Mr Cole, no first name apparently recorded.

Another feature of Friday afternoon was art class, with the art teacher arriving in our classroom to conduct her lesson. It was on one of those afternoons that the janitor entered the room, and whispered to Mrs Benkovic, who then called the class to attention from our noisy art activity (something involving construction paper) to announce that the President had been shot. This was sobering. Who was the President? why was this important? A few minutes later she announced that the President was dead. We were dismissed from school an hour early that day. On the bus all the discussion was of what had happened, and what it meant.

Over the next week of course I found out all about the Kennedy assassination. We all learned how to spell the word, for one thing, which was a prize word with much plainer import than the longest word we learned to spell (which was antidisestablishmentarianism). I started collecting news clippings from the paper about the Kennedys, the family, the photographs, the funeral events, and pasting them into a loose-leaf scrapbook. The children were much of an age with us, and Caroline Kennedy was of course greatly admired, John-John greatly pitied, and Jackie Kennedy the glamorous young widow.

In the house I recall my room was upstairs, a sunny room, where I must have had a friend over to play, because I recall the ponytail Barbie I had. I spent several days reading Uncle Tom's Cabin all in a single marathon in that room, over several days when I was sick with a cold. In the warmer weather we played outside, and the friend I had found in the neighborhood (I am thinking her name was possibly Debbie) had a large family around the corner. We had a long stretch of making mud pies in the back yard, lining them up on the rudimentary back porch. That year I also acquired a blue bicycle, probably at Christmas, and learned to ride it once the snow was gone. This was the kind of neighborhood where a pack of kids roamed around, and when the boys played war the girls were allowed to play as nurses. This mostly involved them evading us, and sneaking around the houses to surprise each other with noises of shooting and explosions and occasionally dying horribly, according to protocols the girls were not involved with.

One of the boys in my class, Kevin, lived down the block the other way and across the street, much too far off to be a regular part of our group, although he was on the same bus. Another of the boys in my class, Paul Z, who I had a bit of a crush on and chased around the school building unrelentingly that spring, was the son of my orthodontist. I was soon to have serious braces enter my life, to correct an overbite, although the full horror of the headbrace didn't come into play for another year or two.

This school system had a string program, which my parents allowed me to participate in, I think beginning in that year. The next year, for fourth and fifth grade, we moved again and I was at another school, Thomas Jefferson, but the string program remained, and the string teacher I think may have been the same instructor at both schools. I had a violin hired for $5 the semester from the school, and free small-group lessons, which I got out of class once a week to attend. We were learning what must have been an avant-garde method called the Bornoff method. Fun for Fiddle Fingers: we learned the hand positions on the neck, and how to read and play music from the staff, and the names of the notes, but nothing of key signatures or scales.

Missing class was never a problem for me, as I was still consistently turning in papers early that received grades of 90-100% correct, Excellent, Very Good, gold stars and such, really quite boringly consistent, with Extra Credit assignments too when these were available. My mistakes were of only academic interest to me, you might say. Clearly my teachers were unable to provide me with much of a challenge.