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Health & Fitness

First Day in Public School – Boys and No Nuns!

Public School was an eye opener for this parochial school kid

After graduation from parochial school, my parents really could not afford the tuition for Catholic high school and that pleased me to no end.  You see, there are no boys in Catholic high school. Boys had their own high school.  AND there were no nuns.  I was done with hawk eye (Mother Superior) for good. 

Besides, they didn’t offer typing or shorthand in class and if you wanted typing you had to do it after hours.  I had obligations to help my Mom after school and I needed those skills for my future.  

Public school was something else.  I could not believe what the kids got away with and how they treated the teachers.  I loved the boys and loved when they fought over who would walk me home and carry my books.  I guess you could say I was a little boy-crazy. You know what they say about Catholic school girls!

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My homeroom teacher thought I was an angel compared to the heathens she had in her class.  She wrote my parents at the end of the year about what a pleasure it was to have such a well mannered respectful girl in her class.

My first day of public school was a nightmare though.  My dad had an argument with a neighbor the prior year which resulted in a lawsuit and her two daughters attended that same school.

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This was like an Italian-Mexican stand-off.  My oldest brother was roller skating on our block like we all did. The neighbor three doors down did not want my brother skating in front of her house. She was looking for a fight as she barged into our basement where Dad was doing some minor carpentry work with a hammer in his hand. 

I think the neighbor didn’t like my family because her husband sometimes stopped by after work to have a drink with my Nona and the neighbor was jealous because she thought her husband was having a drink with my beautiful mother present which she never was.   

The angry neighbor said some awful things about us little angels and my Dad stood up and pointed for her to leave and followed her out the basement door.  She left, but when she got almost to her house, three doors down, she turned back to my Dad and said, “And furthermore, your kids are nothing but a bunch of bastards.”  Well, the Italian stallion saw red. My Dad was furious.  He took that hammer and flung it.  It hit the cement pillar of her neighbor’s house and bounced back to the sidewalk.  She walked over to it, picked it up, and flung it back at me. It landed next to me in the street, under our car.  She went inside her house and apparently banged herself up, called a doctor, and then sued us for $3,000. 

I was twelve then.  I had to testify in court for my father.  When I said the hammer ricocheted, she said someone must have fed me that information because I could not possibly know what that word meant.  The judge asked me about it.  I said that I was an “A” student and I knew what the word meant and no one coached me.  The end result was an award to her of $300 which my dad paid at $5/month.  He wanted to make her wait for her money and it killed him to write those monthly checks to her at all.

So on my first day of school, one of the daughters encountered me on the staircase and proceeded to kick me many times.  I almost fell down the stairs. Here we go again, I thought, I endure the pain and no one gets in trouble because Mom did not want me kicked out of school.  I wanted her to go to school and demand that the younger daughter be suspended as punishment.  That didn’t happen.

But, I did end up winning eventually because her boyfriend had a crush on me and he dumped her. When she “called me out” after school, I had the meanest baddest girl at school who was my friend take care of business. I had no more trouble with her or her sister after that.   

Mr. Early, my social studies teacher, was an older gentleman, and the kids were brutal.  One day while he was walking back up the aisle to the chalkboard, back to the class, one of the boys threw a spit wad at the front of the classroom and it landed smack dab in the middle of the clock in the center of the wall.  You could not help laugh.  Everyone did. 

Mr. Early never asked who did it because, frankly, this group of kids would never confess.  Poor guy.  I felt sorry for him.  The culprit was a bad boy who loved to disrupt the class, along with his trouble-making classmates.  I was wide eyed.  . 

Mr. Early went to the clock very nonchalantly but by the time he positioned himself to retrieve the spit wad, it fell off by itself.  More laughter.  I felt guilty to laugh, but it was so funny that I could not resist. 

This would have never happened in parochial school.  The nuns would have beaten the truth out of the class. Mother Superior would have had a field day with this, I am sure. Wonder how the culprit would have coped with the five thousand lines I am sure she would have doled out. 

Every day was a shocker for me in public school.  I felt so sorry for the nice teachers that had to teach the classes I was in. Even more puzzling was the fact that the nuns had 48 to 50 kids in each class, and in public school there were certainly not that many, yet the teachers just did not have that type of command with the class.  I knew that being a teacher was not for me. You have to be real dedicated to try to teach kids that had no respect for their parents or their teachers whose mission in life was to fool around and cause disruption in class.  Thankfully, high school was a little more civilized.

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