Angell school 75th anniversary

In 1999, my grammar school, Angell School, celebrated its 75th anniversary by having a reunion of all classmates who were interested. In the letter of invitation, it was suggested that old-timers bring photographs taken in the early days of the school. We were also asked to write short accounts of our recollections of Angell School. I did submit some pictures and did write up some stories of school days. When I got to the reunion, I found that not many ex-students had submitted either stories or pictures. The pictures I submitted were duly displayed on the walls and the stories I had written were enormously enlarged and posted on a wall, extending from near the ceiling to the floor. What I had written was:

* * *

When I first went to Angell School in 1928 (kindergarten) the building struck me as being perfectly enormous! Now when I go there to vote it seems tiny.

When I was in kindergarten we were given milk and graham crackers every day. After we finished our refreshment, a pair of children, a boy and a girl, were assigned the job of going somewhere (I didn't know where) to rinse the bottles. One day I was chosen, my first time, but since no one had ever told me where the bottles were supposed to be rinsed, I simply followed the little girl who obviously did know. What I didn't know was that the place she went was the girl's bathroom. So I got scolded for my blunder.

Miss Buckley, our old ogre of a principal, once slapped me for no good reason (making me admire Peter Olmstead who once kicked her. Peter, who has since mellowed, was hell-bent for trouble back in those days). My crime that caused Miss Buckley to wallop me: We were rehearsing a play (I think it was a Christmas play) and I had been given the role of a crippled beggar with a wooden leg. The person who made this wooden leg - a leg that was strapped onto one of my shins - made it very badly. I was supposed to hobble around, a very tricky undertaking because the wooden leg and its strap were so flimsy and unstable. Once when I was passing a piece of scenery - painted paper covering the side of a table - the damned leg twisted around and I fell. It hurt but the real trouble was that the leg slipped under the table and tore the scenery. Miss B worried a lot more about the scenery than about me and came over and smacked me hard. Of course, I never forgave her.

On the west side of the ground floor there was a room with many caged snakes. I always found the snakes interesting to watch and usually took a quick look at them when I arrived at school. One day when I went in I found some rascal had opened the cages and most of the snakes were slithering all around the room. It struck me that the responsible thing to do would be to catch the snakes before they escaped into the rest of the school, and to return them to their cages. The snakes were harmless so I wasn't afraid of them. I did manage to catch all of them but it took awhile, so I was late to my room. The teacher was too impatient to listen to my excuse for being late so I got roundly scolded for my good deed.

I got scolded a lot. That wasn't all bad. It prepared me for marriage!

Of course, I did quite a few things for which I deserved to get scolded, and often escaped the scolding. For example, when walking to school I found that I could often catch bees sitting on flowers. I'd catch them between my thumb and forefinger, usually without getting stung, Once I'd caught a bee, I'd take it to school and put it into the desk of some unlucky girl. Happily, I don't recall a single time when the little girl got stung.

When I was 10 I won a model airplane contest for contestants under 12, sponsored by Fiegel's clothing store. My airplane was a scale model of the Supermarine S6B racer, the plane which permanently won the Schneider trophy for England. My prize was $3.00 (worth perhaps $50 in 2007 dollars). Mother "persuaded" me to invest my prize in a blue sweater- hardly my first choice for indulging my new won loot on. My teacher asked me to bring the model to school for all to see. When I walked with it down the ramp to the school door, some bigger boys taunted me and one threw a rock which smashed the model to pieces! Sad, how rotten some children can be.

Of course, I remember the kiddie choruses for the nearly week-long May festival. We would practice singing the scheduled songs for several weeks, and then perform. I believe on the Sunday afternoon program. Some of the songs were the Blue Danube and Voices of the Woods (Melody in F). We shared the stage at Hill Auditorium with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Rosa Ponsell who must have been less than thrilled by her competition. Many years later the kiddie chorus was cancelled, perhaps because the hundreds of kiddies would get bored and restless and distract the audience. Later the whole May Festival was canceled because it had become too expensive to pay a first-rate orchestra for so many performances,

Another thing I remember was that, however rowdy the children at Angell School were, they had mostly been trained to be civil. On the whole they were nice, well scrubbed kids. There were few bullies or serious fights. Then, when I graduated and went to Tappan Junior High School (now Burns Park School) I encountered my first rough-neck classmates from "the wrong side of the tracks." There were many bullies and I was beaten up regularly until I learned to take care of myself. It first I was totally shocked, unprepared, and intimidated because children at prissy Angell School just didn't behave that way. It took awhile to learn how to cope and to learn how to fight effectively. These were lessons that prepared me well for the real world later on.

* * *

When I got to the reunion, I was dismayed to find that those in charge of the displays had had the gall to censor my stories without even asking me! They...