“When you go back to school, you’re going to be in the 4th grade.” It was March of1958, and I was home sick for a week from the 3rd grade. This was probably just another symptom of my rapidly worsening performance in school, Second grade, I had won an award for not missing a day. I loved school. I was a king in the classroom. I had taught myself how to read when I was four, sitting on the toilet humming along with the “Hymnal 1940” which All Saints’ Episcopal Church used for its weekly services. I could hear the words in my head, and I already knew numbers. So coming home from church, I would turn to the pages with the hymns that had been used that day (there were only three each service), and start saying the words as I looked at them on the page, beneath the trebles and clefs denoting the melody. Something somewhere in my brain clicked, and I realised those little squiggles were words which were the same as the words I’d heard sung. Enough time with that, and I was reading before I got to Kindergarten.
So my mother enrolled me in various kids’ book clubs, and by the time I got to first grade, I was the star pupil. Other kids would come to me for help with their stumbling literacy, and the teacher always had me be the first to read out loud when we started a new “Dick and Jane” book. I thought I knew it all.
Then one day, during a read-aloud, I saw a word I’d never seen before, one which could not be guessed from the context or the pictures. “Uh, umm, tur…kwa…zee?”
Mrs. Williams gently corrected me. “No, thats ‘turquoise’. It’s a color.” One I did not know, much less the stone from which it derived. I was devastated. There were things in this world which I had not yet learned!
But it was a minor setback, and Mrs. Grimes in the second grade kept pushing me along, almost a student teacher for her, so I loved showing up every day. But early in the third grade, my grandfather, who lived out in the Bay Area, died, and my life at school underwent a tumult. Not from depression, but a new-found clarity. My father brought back a few of his possessions, to give to my sister and me, to remember him by. Mine was a Hamilton watch, one of those rectangular affairs with faux-gold plating on the strap and case.
I started wearing it everywhere. One day in class, I took it off and fiddled a bit with the case – the crystal popped right out! I almost dropped it on the floor, but managed to secure it between my thumb and index finger. I thought I’d give it a closer inspection, and held it up to my eye. Looking at the blackboard, I realised that those white blurs I had been seeing were actually numbers and words, the gist of the daily lesson the teacher would write for us each day.
Apparently, up until then, I had been sort of guessing what was going on in class, and that had made me pay very close attention. Once I got glasses (for when I told my mom about the discovery, she took me immediately to an ophthalmologist to get my eyes checked, then an optician for corrective lenses. She also made me start eating bunch of carrots in the vain belief it would cure my myopia.) life in school became a lot easier. And therefore, boring. My grades plummeted. That, coupled with my disgraceful handwriting (“chicken scratches”), led to fevered discussion among my parents, the teacher, and principal. My mother had a master’s in psychology, working on a doctorate, and so I was subjected to a batch of IQ and other assessment tests, which must have convinced all involved I was not a dullard, but simply bored due to the ease with which I could handle the third-grade work. So off to fourth it was!
While I was small, I was still one of if not the smartest kids in class. I discovered this about a month later, when the arithmetic teacher held her annual “baseball” tournament. We were divided into teams, and each kid had to solve a problem. Getting it correct moved you to first base, and you could make it all the way around to home if those following you solved theirs. But miss, and you were out; three outs, and the other team got to play.
The teams, like those on the playground, were selected by “captains”, alternating one at a time. The captains were chosen by the teacher, basically her pets. I, being late to the group, was not one of those. But once the captains were selected, there was no doubt among them whom they wanted first – me!
I also discovered something else that spring, which lay dormant for another 40 years or so. In addition to the math baseball, there was talk of the “track meet”. The school system had some arcane method for selecting members of a 4/5/6th grade track team for things like the 50 yard dash, the triple jump, the rope climb, etc. It was based on not only on absolute time and distances, but also on age and size. The gym teacher shocked me by saying I was on the track team. My 7.2 second dash was there right along with kids a year older who did 6.4 and 6.7 or 8 seconds, whom I thought were the real athletes. Probably to my knees’ great relief, I did not pursue a running career after grade school, until I turned 50.
There were two playgrounds at Pleasant Ridge Elementary School, the only one I attended from K thru 6th grade. The upper, and older, was for the 4/5/6th graders. I suppose that’s because it was closer to the four-lane highway, Montgomery Road, state highway 3, which ran right next to it. We could be trusted not be be dumb enough to run out into the street after lost balls or other ephemera. Back in the old days, there had been a swing set on one end of the hard asphalt. I suspect that when the playground was paved, the swings themselves were removed when kids started leaping from their parabolic arcs and skinning their knees, or worse, on the unyielding surface.
But the A-frame steel supports remained, and served as the hitching post for kids’ bikes. We lived a mile from school, and walked most every day there and back. But once you were in 4th grade, you were allowed to ride your bike there, and you’d leave it slid into one of the bike racks (no locks needed!) where the swing seats used to hang. I had a small bike, maybe 20-inch wheels, but I was rapidly outgrowing it. Not only was it growing increasingly uncomfortable to ride, it also would take forever to traverse the route from home to school and back. Basically, I could mosey along at my sister’s walking pace. And once I got there, I’d feel ashamed for my baby bike sitting in amongst all the “real” 24 and 27 inch bicycles.
As part of an attempt to help me grow into my 4th grade maturity – and to help my sister learn how to manage money, I think – my father sat us down one day and said, “We’re going to start giving you $5 a week allowance. But don’t come to us asking for money to buy clothes or anything like that. If you want something, you’ll have to save for it.” I don’t know if my eyes bugged out or not, but I suddenly felt – RICH! We’d been getting 50¢ a week up to that point, to cover candy now and then, but certainly not enough to do any real budgeting.
It was way more of a challenge for my sister compared to me. She actually cared about clothes, and looking fresh, up-to-date. I didn’t need to change anything unless it wore out, or I outgrew it. The only thing I did covet were…motorcycle boots. I thought they would be very cool, black, leather, high-topped, with a strap and buckle. I got a few strange eyebrows when I showed up in them, but since I already felt like such an outsider, being a year younger and smaller and smarter and everything, that taunts and stares had little to no impact. I was always quite sure of myself and what I wanted.
So after I had saved for however many weeks – three? four? – to get the boots, I was left with a rapidly accumulating pile of cash. From which my father would borrow every now and then if he were a little short. I realised this was not only ironic, but also dangerous. I needed to find more consistent ways of spending the money, at least enough of it to not be conspicuous.
My first foray was into baseball cards. Come spring, Topps would start issuing packs of 5 cards with a sheet of bubble gum, for 5¢. Kids would buy them when they had a spare nickel, but they were a bit precious. Collecting was not yet a thing, so there was a lot of trading and admiring. One day, I saw some kids in a circle, standing up, tossing their hands downward, then one guy picking up something. Turns out they were “flipping cards”. Mano-a-mano, kind of like rock-paper-scissors: if your card showed the player’s face in color, and the other guy’s was the back, the stats in black and grey, well then, you got both cards. Both the same, they stayed on the ground as a pile or pot. I wanted to get good at it, especially when we switched the venue to the stairwell.
Our school was three floors, the first floor, where things like the cafeteria and gym were, being below grade. Outside entrances were via a descending staircase, surrounded by a railing. Over that railing we would lean, and flip our cards about ten feet down. This eliminated any outside influence like wind or stealthy big kids who tried to snatch the cards before the winner could grab them.
In order to gain some practice, I took one whole week’s allowance to Boatright’s, the corner store (it would be akin to a mini-mart now) across the street, where I bought a whole box of cards. The kind Mr. Boatright would open up, flipping the top, exposing the individual packets within. Which most kids bought one or two at a time. But I was buying 100: 500 cards at a time. This made the the king of the playground that day. Kids followed me around, wanting to know which cards I got. When they saw I had duplicates of someone they wanted, they’d quickly offer a trade. Other kids wanted the gum sheets, which I clearly had way too many of for any one person to use in a month.
But my main goal was to become the champion card flipper. With some house money, so to speak, I soon mastered the art so that 85% or so of my flips were face up. And I won massive numbers of cards that day. But – great life lesson here – it became so easy that I grew bored with the game, and looked for other attractions.
My eyes were drawn to the swing sets, and the bikes beneath them, directly opposite from the stairwell card flipping stadium. I hatched an idea: it would only take me eight more weeks, two months, to save enough to buy a real bicycle, which I’d have in time to ride every morning before the end of May.
I wanted a Raleigh, the ne-plus-ultra of wheels at the time, at least among the fifth-grade set. An English Bike. It had 27” wheels, chrome fenders, swept back handlebars with a matching white faux leather Brooks saddle. And, it had gears. Three of them. According to the late Sheldon Brown, renowned bicycle mechanic and historian, the Raleigh Three Speed All Steel Bicycle reached its zenith in the late 1950s, just about the time I bought mine.
One Saturday, my father drove me to the local bike shop, where I proudly handed over $50 and received the gleaming, serious looking machine to ride back home. It was a turning point in my life: I was never to be without a bike of my own, purchased with my own resources, for the rest of my life. I was free in a way only a ten-year old boy can understand when he gets his first Real Wheels.