It's Just One Blog After Another: The Life of a Story in Progress 003: Texas, School and Nuclear Holocaust

Bellaire Elementary School. Built in the year in which I was born: 1955.

When I was 6 years old, my family moved from S. Grafton, MA to San Angelo, Texas. We rented a small house on Linda Lee Drive. It was the last of three houses on the street. After our house, there was nothing but a desolate dry dusty landscape for as far as you could see. We literally had tumbleweeds blow across our yard all the time.

Soon after moving in, my father caught a scorpion and put it in a small clear plastic box. He wanted to show me and my brother and sister the scorpion so we’d know what it was and to avoid it. I remember thinking that no one would have to tell me not to touch something with a big stinger on its tail! At some point he also pointed out a black widow spider and a big black tarantula. For some reason, after pointing out the tarantula, my father smacked it with a baseball bat and its legs seemed to fly out in all directions.

Not all the native wildlife was dangerous, there were scary looking Horny Toads, which were very docile. The myth was that if you spooked them, they would spit blood at you from their eyes. I could look this up, but I doubt this is a true fact. Also, there were a great many types of lizards which provided many hours of fun trying to catch one of these fast reptiles. Oh yes, I forgot, there was another myth about Horny Toads; if you captured a big trash can full of them, someone would pay you for them. This was a really silly idea because Horny Toads were more common there than frogs and toads put together are here in New England.

Of course, there were a few more villains of the environment I can mention: the rattlesnake, the copperhead, the cotton mouth and the water moccasin. Actually, I think a cottonmouth IS a water moccasin. I’ve seen them all. I once stepped on a cottonmouth but it didn’t bite me, which is a good thing. Jumping ahead to a time when I was 13, it was common practice for the first Boy Scout troop to go to summer camp to thrash through the bushes with sticks to scare off rattlesnakes. I don’t know if this actually reduced the number of rattlesnakes that would be present in the campgrounds throughout the summer, but the activity scaring off rattlesnakes was routine.

Back to being 6: the elementary school that I attended was in my back yard. I don’t mean close to my back yard, it was IN my back yard. The school was named Bellaire Elementary School and it was the first elementary school in the U.S. to have central air-conditioning. The building was “round” with many flat sides; picture a big pie. (see figure A, but imagine many more pie-shaped classrooms)

The entire building was encircled by a very deep cement-floored overhang. This was a very inviting place to ride your bicycle. However, the edge of each classroom extended out into the overhang area more than it did on along the long side (see figure B). Each time you came to one of these edges, you ran the risk of having a head-on collision with another bicyclist going in the opposite direction. Fun! Also, the cement was very polished, it was quite slick and if you took a corner too fast, you’d skid out to the side.

The inside walls between classrooms were flexible and any number of them could be “folded back” to create a room or area as big as was needed. In the middle of the building was the office. My classroom wasn’t in the main building. It was in a long barrack-style temporary building that was up on cinderblocks. There were a few of these buildings and mine was the part of the school that was in my back yard.

Part of the curriculum of the second grade was reading books about Dick and Jane (and Spot, of course). I don’t know if such books are still used, but they were a staple in the teaching of reading in the early sixties. Curiously, I remember that I thought reading lines such as “See Dick. See Dick Run. Run, Dick. Run.” to be inane. Nobody actually spoke that way.

In another one of these temporary buildings was the music room. I liked music. We sang songs (Git Along Home Cindy, Cindy, The Yellow Rose of Texas and The Battle Hymn of the Republic). We listened to Peter and the Wolf written by the Russian Sergei Prokofiev. I also learned to play the flutophone. I can still play You’re a Grand Old Flag to this day.

In what would seem today as a ridiculous and futile emergency procedure, we had routine fallout drills. There was a different alarm sound for a fire drill and a fallout drill. A fallout drill was sort of the opposite of a fire drill. Fire drill meant get out... fallout drill meant get inside. There were two kinds of fallout drills.