It was his second day in first grade and his first time walking home from school. Maple Street was a half-mile long, one of several streets in Morrisville beautifully canopied with elms. There were twenty-three houses on the left side and nineteen on the right and, try as he might, he could not count both sides as he walked home from school. He would lose track as his eyes darted from left to right and the sums vanished.
Just below the hospital, Maple Street merged into Washington Highway which led east out of town towards the hill farms in the shadow of Elmore Mountain. The street’s lofty named belied its rutted gravel surface. His house lay just beyond the hospital yet still within the town limits, disqualifying him from riding on the school bus operated by his stepfather’s parents.
The three-story, wood-frame Copley Hospital, girded with a rocker-filled white verandah and surrounded by tall white pines, dominated his sparse neighborhood. Just beyond lived Dr. Guthmann, the town dentist, and Adrian Morris, the president of the bank. Across from his house was the Collettes’ house with its attached small-engine shop. Beyond lay Volney and Gladys Farr’s farm, the Ned and Lyle Stewart farm, Mrs. Fisher’s sharecrop tenant house attached to the Stewart farm, the Morrisville dump, and, further up, Greaves’ Dairy.
In 1947, his stepfather had hired Oscar Churchill to build a home for his new family in the middle of Volney Farr’s hayfield and then signed on as a carpenter to lower costs. Mr. Churchill’s wife, Madge, taught seventh grade. Bill could not imagine being in seventh grade, and like other first graders, lived in fear of kids in the higher grades.
His first grade teacher, Mrs Fancher, was an avuncular person, if one can say that about a woman. The purplish wen growing on her lower left cheek was often the focus of her student’s attention as she spoke to them. She was strict, but exuded a warm sympathy for her student’s trials with their first efforts at learning. A generous bosom framed in a discreet décolletage and spindly legs with high heels made it often seem as if she might tip over. She was too heavy to genuflect next to the small desks in her classroom so she would lean over in order to assist a first grader. Her generous décolletage would then dominate the first grader’s entire view. His stepfather had had her as a teacher and confided in him that when they were little, it was referred to as a balcon in the French they spoke among themselves, “like the balcony in the Bijou downtown,” he confided with a smile.
The tall, small-paned windows in the corner classroom flooded the square room with light. Silver-painted cast-iron radiators, noisy in winter, clung to the dark maple wainscot walls below the windows. The many applications of shellac on the worn maple floors were evident only in untraveled nooks and crannies and where the black cast-iron desk mounts were screwed to the floor, the aisles between desks subject to the endless scuff of small leather shoes and playground grit.
Five times daily the class marched single file to morning basement, morning recess, lunch recess, afternoon basement and final recess. Going to the bathroom was called “going to the basement” and was highly regimented. The school had no kitchen facilities so the basement was dedicated to boy’s and girl’s toilet facilities, janitorial services, and a massive asbestos-clad coal furnace visible only when the janitor’s door was ajar. The entire basement was painted pale yellow. Students were admonished to hold the stair railings as they descended the flight of stairs and, on reaching the lowest level, girls diverted to the right and boys to the left.
