What’s past is prologue. The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1, by William Shakespeare

There’s something captivating about a school choir, beyond the simple appeal of children together, singing. In a town the size of Texas City, a choir delivers a kind of prologue. The prologue of a play sets the scene and introduces the time, place, characters, and so on. In this picture of the Danforth choir, I see the future in the past. The little singers were a group, a graduating class, and part of a whole generation who still know the same lyrics, sing the same songs.

The bows are green satin, though memory is as fickle as spring. If Alice told me the bows were red or Dennis insisted they were blue, I’d believe them both. After all, they’re in the picture. The photo can’t tell the truth; it’s black and white, something memory never is.

In a small town the past as prologue is more than a metaphor. It’s the literal truth. I still know many people in the photo, and in some cases, better than 58 years ago. Now we are as we were then, but wiser. Our responsibilities have lessened. Our children are grown, and our summers are free again. Instead of just beginning, the urgency of the mating game has tempered to a comfortable glow.  There’s a lot of life ahead, but the crazy getting, spending, planning, middle of life is over. For the Danforth Elementary School choir, it was all ahead.

And who was I then? I loved Danforth. It looked enough like a prison to gain my respect, yet the playground beckoned with monkey bars and merry-go-rounds. At last free from domestic turmoil, I was relieved. I was home. I opened my eyes every morning to a new world, with no thoughts nor plans, just a day to unfold as it might, existentialist before I knew the term. I was warped by my parents, as most kids are, one way or another.

My parents’ attitude toward children? They thought I was a pet or an idiot, but I was precocious, and I thought they were weird. As an example, my father brought home a mutt I named Seven (I couldn’t decide which of the seven dwarfs to name him after). Poor Seven sealed his fate by refusing to be house broken. My mother dressed me for a matinée as my father prepared to go out and “meet some people.” By the time we got home, my father was back, and Seven was gone.

“Where’s my puppy?” I said.

“Ask your mother,” said my father.

“What puppy?” My mother’s answer left me silenced by my lack of vocabulary, but dear Mom in Heaven: “Do you imagine I didn’t know I had a dog in morning and by afternoon I didn’t? ARE YOU CRAZY, LADY?!”

So in sixth grade I trusted no one but Danise, not adults, not boys, not even teachers, and I had regrets already. I wasn’t kind to my sister, but I didn’t know how to be different. She was too often my responsibility, and I didn’t want to be her mother. I didn’t know how, and I wondered who was supposed to be my mother? Tish became confused, too, and later she rebelled. Our cross-purposes would take deep root. Before my mother remarried, I kept house, did the grocery shopping, and minded my sister. My mother did the best she could, and parenting wasn’t a verb yet. When I was expecting my second child, my mother told me I was lucky. She tried hard not to have ANY kids, and she took what she got. Wow. Good one, Mom. I feel better about myself now. As with so many things, what hurt to hear then makes me laugh now. Charlie Chaplin had it right.

As for my sense of values at 11 and 12 years old, I was led to believe the prevailing, bigoted bull ca-ca at large, even though TC was probably better than most Texas towns in the 50s. On my first day at Roosevelt, my mother told me to be myself, which was merely useless advice. The first day she sent me off to Danforth, she said, “Don’t play with the Mexican kids.” This was bad advice, and ignorant.

When we had PE, and I did play with them, I thought they were nice, Francesca and Ruthie and Lydia and the others. Pleasing my mother was paramount, though, so I did as I was told. I regret it to this day, but I understand at least that the loss wasn’t theirs. It was entirely mine.

There were a lot of Mexicans at Danforth, and people develop an irrational fear of things as the numbers increase, but there were other groups in the “don’t play with” category. I heard whispers about Communists, queers, and colored folks, but that was under control. The coloreds had their own school and their own town. Queers? I thought this meant peculiar, and the whole population of TC could be called peculiar in some way, so I was confused. When I finally understood what this meant, I felt sure we didn’t have anybody like that in our town. Commies? Please. The unions wouldn’t have stood for that! I noticed I was having an appalling number of ideas that went against the wind, but I forced myself to remain mute, to purge any renegade thoughts.

Texas City was my hometown, and I loved it, even though these attitudes were ugly in thought and in practice. You don’t love anyone or anything because they’re perfect. You take them as they are, and when they change for the better, you’re glad about it. The virulent prejudice of the 50s has passed away over time, or at least been diluted.

I soaked up too many lessons from fairy tales, too. Rapunzel: good hair is key. Cinderella: the right shoes can change your life. Snow White: keep house for little men until your prince comes. Sleeping Beauty: just stay asleep until he gets here. At least there was counterbalance in movies like Bambi and Old Yeller.

Consider Bambi. His mother is killed by a hunter pretty quick, and eventually his forest home goes up in flames.  As for Old Yeller, he saves the family over and over, and Travis loves him, but has to shoot him. Is there a 50s kid alive who ever forgot Travis drawing a bead on the beloved but rabid Old Yeller?  I feel weepy even now. I doubt either of these movies, iconic as they are, would get passed the drawing board in this age of sucking the truth out of anything for kids. Too bad. These films were about life, about coping, about doing what you had to do.

And one last thing regarding who I was in sixth grade. I thought birds flew overhead and bees made honey. By the seventh grade, childhood would be gone, but we were lucky in the 50s. These days childhood is brief, replaced with computers, organized sports, and a proliferation of sexual images and foul language we once wouldn’t have tolerated. Computers and sports are good (in addition to freedom and outdoor time, not instead of). I can’t fathom how children benefit from being saturated with sexual images. I knew nothing about sex until my mother told me when I was 11 years old, and I doubt if I was any more innocent than most girls that age.

But I stood on the launching pad of sixth grade. I was an existentialist, ruined, regretful, guilty, innocent, mute mass of self-doubt, like everyone else on the verge of puberty.

Danise and I had a novelty in sixth grade, a male teacher, and although I have a high regard for the profession, I suspect Mr. Milton was on the low-end of the scale. He liked to say “look it up,” but he didn’t offer to help, and I went away not knowing the answer and suspecting he didn’t either (another thought I didn’t express). A strange memory of Mr. Milton: he was so upset when the Soviets launched Sputnik, he cried.

The best part of the whole school day was the milk delivery. Milk was available for two cents a carton, in plain or chocolate, ice-cold, and by now I’ve eaten everything from snails to Snickers, but I remember that icy mid-morning milk better than the cassoulet I had at the Stein Erickson Lodge in Beaver Creek, Utah. Perhaps because the milk came with a savory side order of memory, and all I got with the cassoulet was beans.

One day Mr. Milton interrupted the bliss of milk consumption by introducing a new student named John. “Can you guess how he spells it?”

“J-O-N,” I gave in for once to the impulse to speak.

“Why, that’s right,” said Mr. Milton. “How did you know that?”

Then another unexpressed thought: If it isn’t J-O-H-N, what else could it be? H-A-R-R-Y?

So Jon arrived, and I thought he was cool. He was more sensible than cool, but he kept this to himself. I love high school reunions. People tell you things. Jon told me he felt as inadequate as the rest of us. Jon was and is a friend, past as prologue.

Mrs. Williams also taught at Danforth (high-end of the teacher scale), and one day she caught me lingering outside a classroom. I had a pencil in my hand, and she asked if I was writing on the wall. I wasn’t, but her stern presence scared me, and I gulped. She thought I was lying, which wouldn’t have mattered, except she would become my next door neighbor when we moved to 17^th Avenue, and mother of my new friend Carolyn. For the next five years, I remained convinced she thought of me as the lying little sixth grader she caught writing on the wall. In truth, she probably didn’t even remember the incident.

My life finally had an element of permanence, but my mother considered a lot of it temporary. She had no intention of being single or working outside the home for very long. And here’s a bit of prologue: Her future husband was a seaman, and when he was in port, he lived in a hotel on Fifth Avenue called the Fifth Avenue Hotel. My mother walked by the hotel every day at the same time he left for breakfast. They discovered this when they started dating, and there’s little doubt their paths crossed. He said he remembered seeing her. Charming, but I doubt it.

About this time we moved from the garage apartment to the Third Avenue Villas (villas on Third Avenue – what else would you call them?). I loved our first apartment, but all the moving when I was a child turned me into a gypsy. I was restless, and as long as we didn’t leave town, I welcomed the motion. Also, shortly before we moved to the villas, Danise moved to the villas. For a while our back doors were not 10 feet apart.

We left the garage apartment because on a blind date my mother met the man who would become my stepfather. Cody was handsome and tall, but she had to overcome her fear of bad omens. Cody’s birthday, including the year, was the same as my father’s.

My mother couldn’t offend the Widow Wagoner by having Cody spend the night in full view of her back windows. The villas were more private. Cody was at sea for long periods of time, and because they planned to marry, they wanted to save the money he spent on the hotel. I never even wondered about it. Ours was a one-bedroom apartment, and he slept on the couch. My mind never wandered beyond what I saw in this regard.

This lack of awareness was fading, changing, but slowly. There were hints of unknown and forbidden tinglings. Danise and I sipped Cherry Cokes at Agee’s down on Sixth Street, and we made a point to sit at the end of the counter, where there was a rack of paperback books with lurid covers. We wondered what those girls with huge bosoms running over low-cut blouses had on their minds when they looked at the bare-chested heroes with big birds on their shoulders and whips in their hands.

We didn’t see the Fourth Avenue bunch after we moved to the villas, but there was David the cute paperboy, and Lonnie who seemed nice but wasn’t. There was Mike, who followed me around the playground at Danforth, but I didn’t get it, and I didn’t like it. Still, the past is prologue. I fell in love with Mike in junior high, the minute he fell in love with someone else, pretty Virleen. When they broke up, he came my way again, but dumped me in a week. That’s romance when you’re 14.

Mike wasn’t my first crush, though. I got my first crush the summer following sixth grade (if memory serves). I fell for Gene, son of the proprietor of King’s Shoe Shop down on Sixth Street. I took shoes there from time to time, and it was amazing how slow Gene did minor repairs. The moccasin didn’t get re-laced until he had my number, for instance. We talked on the phone, and his parents drove us to the movies once or twice. We went to different schools, which made it more fun somehow. He even gave me a ring as a token, and my first kiss, walking across an open field behind the Third Avenue Villas. I reminded him of this at a reunion, and he pretended to remember. Again, charming, but I doubt it. Our romance was short-lived, but I couldn’t return his ring. My sister flushed it down the toilet, so it was gone forever, like our love.

Gene fell for Jean in junior high, and there was never anyone for either of them after that, but I would spend a lot of time with Gene and Jean in high school, because my high school sweetheart, Charlie, was Gene’s best friend (still is). Gene took me to a dance, maybe seventh grade, and I met Charlie. I asked him once, did he notice me at all at that dance? I was fishing for something like, “Yes, I thought you were dazzling.” His answer was simple and Charlie-like. “Nope. You were Gene’s girl.”

In Shakespeare’s famous lines, there’s a suggestion of inevitability, but I don’t believe the future is cast in stone. The materials are put in place long before you’re ready to use them, and you can choose what you build. I see the trajectory of life as a series of rising concentric circles, all connected, rather than a straight line. Certain actions have consequences that break your heart. My sister and I were estranged and never spiraled back together before she died. I see my mother passing by Cody before they met and the omen of his birth date, and my crush on Gene turning into something real with his best friend. People, if they meet at all, so often meet again.

And here’s a happy result of writing this blog. I’ve become better friends with many people, and made friends in unexpected ways. For a long time I’ve owned and enjoyed a book called Images of America, Texas City, by Albert L. Mitchell (available on Amazon). I didn’t know Mr. Mitchell, and when I received a message from him about my blog, I was pleased, and pleased at his offer to share some of his photos in a more usable size and format, such as the choir pictures. I told him where I was standing, and he did the same. And there we are, one kid apart, young and green, singing our song forever.

 

NEXT: Ruby Ella Long. Charley Benskin.

Author’s Note: Below is a wonderful essay Al Mitchell wrote in March 1999, about Danforth. We have many memories in common, even the chocolate milk, which I wrote about before I read his essay.

REMEMBERING DANFORTH ELEMENTARY

Whenever I am in Texas City visiting my mother, I usually take a nostalgic ride before I return home.  I always go down Texas Avenue to see my dad’s old business, the source of a lifetime of memories.  I usually drive by Danforth Elementary and recall some good times that I  had.  The building and playground in which so many activities took place for so many years now stands silent!  All that remains are our memories, but what good memories they are.

I can not help but recall some friends in my class who were my neighbors, in my Sunday School class and also in my Cub Scout troop.  They were James Barger, Pat Griffin, Gordon Dewalt and Bobby Burgin.  There are others I can mention, but these four lived within one block of my house, and like most of the kids in my first grade class, we finished high school together twelve years later.

A picture of my first day of school shows my cousin, Billy Pierce, and me standing in  the playground.  We both have our satchels around our necks.  Billy was staying with us that year because his father was fighting in Korea.  We were put in the same class for one day.  On the second day of the first grade one of was moved to another class.  We must have talked together too much.  Sometime that year Billy’s dad came back home, and his family moved to California.

I remember the view from the east windows looking towards Monsanto.  The explosion had occurred just six years before, and one could still see the damage.  The most apparent was the old grain elevator.  It looked as if it were ready to fall over anytime, but it was years before it was torn down.  I remember days when the sky was full of black smoke.  This was years before the EPA, and chemical plants would occasionally release ‘things’ in the air.  As a kid at Danforth I thought that a polluted sky was the norm.

I recall lining up at the cafeteria and receiving shots on more than one occasion.  It was never a fun time, because if I was at the back of the line,  I  had too much time to think about it.  I’ll never forget waiting in line for a shot and receiving a sugar cube!

Who can forget the two-cent milk?  In the late morning the teacher would collect the pennies from each kid and send two kids to the cafeteria.  When they returned, we would have a milk break.  The chocolate milk always tasted so good.

My two favorite teachers were Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Wages.  Mrs. Williams liked us so much that she followed us to Blocker.  In Mrs. Wages class we had an unusual field trip.  Her husband owned Wages’ airport.  On a beautiful day we packed lunches, motored to the airport, and, via Piper Cubs, flew over Texas City.

Such memories remind me that I was raised in a great time and in a great place.