The sun's rising, it's all peace, but get it going to be morning without dawn frozen.
WRGN
Up in the morning and out to school, the teacher is teaching the Golden Root.
A American history and practical man, he's nutting him hard, hoping to pay.
WRGN, your fingers right down on the bone, but the guy behind you won't leave you alone.
Ring, ring, goes the bell.
For cooking the lunch, you're ready to sell.
You're lucky if you can find a seat.
You're marching and if you have time to eat.
Back in the classroom, open your books.
Keep it the teacher, don't know I mean you look.
Sooner, three o'clock rolls around.
You finally lay your burden down.
Rolls up your books.
All right, school days, Chuck Berry.
That's it, our topic is this morning.
Jim Maseer, Carol G. and Forte here.
Today we're going to talk about the 1950s school days here in Racine.
These two lived it.
And survived it.
I'm not going to ask you, I'm going to ask you.
What grade were you in in the 19 early 1950s?
Late, not late 50s, we'll put it that way.
What grade were you in?
Oh, fifth grade.
Fifth grade.
Yeah, I went to Washington, junior high in 60.
So yeah, 59.
Are you old?
We're older.
We're survivors.
They're done.
I didn't know the service sponsored by AARP plus.
No, I just made it.
1959 kindergarten.
I graduated kindergarten in 1960.
Congratulations.
I made it.
Well, we offer you congratulations.
It was a close one.
The most diploma.
Your parents must have been so proud of you.
So would you go to grammar school here?
Well, we're going to get into that.
Oh, okay.
It's coming up right now.
It's a top secret.
Let's start right now.
Okay.
Well, thanks, Don.
We all have pleasant memories, of course, of going to our grade school.
And for the most part, we had a lot of fun.
But Jim, we have to say we want to be honest.
Now, you just did a posting on Facebook sites.
And you said there were over a thousand replies to these sites.
On eight different sites, likes.
Yes.
Everybody remembers.
So, by and large, I think we turned back.
And 99% are fun, happy, smiling memories.
But, yeah, we thought we had to be a little honest here.
That's right.
We all have survived the multiplication tests,
long division, notes home to parents.
But by and large, we're so happy to look back.
But we are astonished as we thought about this topic.
You know, to think that we were, let's say, six years old.
And in our first grade or whatever.
And now, decades later, we can picture that first grade room.
We can see that first grade teacher.
We can, the memories are quite astonishing.
So, I guess, talk about molding our lives.
Oh, yeah.
Well, back in 1954, according to the Racine City directory,
Racine had 28 grade schools, public and pro-kill, mostly public, of course.
Usually, the pro-kill schools went from grade one to eight.
And with no kindergarten, public schools had kindergarten up to grade six.
And then, of course, you moved on to what junior high.
I personally went to a Holy Trinity grade school on Franklin.
That was just south of 21st near Roosevelt Park.
We had eight grades.
That building was constructed in 1949.
But then in 1954, it was added on to because of the baby boomers.
That school, actually, is still standing.
It's a special needs kid school right now.
And Carol, you went to Lincoln, didn't you?
Yeah, because now we kind of say, throughout our memories, you were a South citer.
Yes.
I was an Earth citer.
So Lincoln is pretty near, hardly a athletic field, but on the corner of Carlisle and state.
And it was one of those buildings.
It was built in 1891.
And it looked like James and Howell, that same kind of castle-like look.
And it, too, is currently standing.
I'm glad of that.
In the 90s, it was, or 80s, it was made into a home for apartments.
It's called Lincoln apartment snow.
And I had a chance to go in there.
They've had tours.
You can go into Lincoln school and see the apartments.
The Jane school is no longer in use anymore.
No, that is beautiful.
It's the landmark.
Yeah, I don't know what they're going to do with it.
They've got to do something.
They just were parroted recently.
A couple of years ago, we get the roof and everything.
Yeah.
But no more kids.
They still have kids playing out there.
Yeah.
I'm all gone.
Yeah.
There's a lot of schools that are in there.
So what they do with all those kids?
Move them to other schools.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, and maybe our enrollments are down, too.
Not sure about that.
Not sure.
Anyway, we were, yes, part of the baby boomers.
And we all know that the story about parents reuniting after the war.
And I looked up, 76 million of us were born in 1946 and on for 18 years.
So our schools, our city had to respond.
And we know that they were built and large, remodeled, Lincoln stayed old,
but added like many of them of that design a multipurpose room.
It really now looks kind of, or did look kind of odd.
Here you've got this castle.
And then our multipurpose rooms on those schools were like the big box,
blonde brick and square, but that was how is our gym and stage and things.
But Johnson was built.
Waterless was built.
Starbucks.
Sacred Heart was newly built.
And Holy Trinity was that enlarged?
Oh, yeah.
Back in 54.
As a matter of fact, in our third grade class and Holy Trinity, we had 55 kids, 55 kids.
That's, you know, because of the baby boomers.
And I'll tell you, that none had complete control.
And I really mean complete control.
I hear stories about nuns being really strict.
Is that true?
Well, ours, I think.
Let me see your knuckles.
Yeah.
They still swollen.
Yeah.
That old saying speaks softly, but carry a big stick.
I think that applied to throughout a lot of these nuns.
But, um, and of course, we had our gym.
I have to interrupt.
Yeah, go ahead.
Did you even know your name with 55 kids in the classroom?
Did you go all year long without knowing who you were?
You know, they knew everything about us, everything about us.
And it's funny because we had a lot of common names back then.
There were so many bobbies, a lot of joys.
There were four jimmies in our class.
And I was one of them.
We had, of course, Johnny's, a lot of Tommy's, Danny's, Billy's, even a couple donnies in there.
But we had, actually, we had two Thomas Miller's.
Same name, first and last name.
So the nun had to differentiate them by calling one Tommy J and Tommy G.
We had three Robert Russo's in my school.
Wow.
Wow.
It was tough to differentiate between them.
Yeah, they were two middle names, middle initials.
Yeah.
Three Robert Russo's in the same school.
Yeah.
The thing that's kind of funny about this is like with relatives.
Now here we are in our 70s.
And if you have a cousin that was Jim, you may be still called that cousin, Jimmy.
So do you meet any of your old classmates and they still got the, the why you have to really deal with Tommy?
Yeah.
Are they still the Tommy's?
Oh, absolutely.
Yes.
When I was working at rude lighting, one of my old cousins was hired.
And in front of my boss and everybody else, she said, hi, Jimmy.
Oh, no.
It was a comedian who said, if you have the name Robert, it's pretty good.
Because when you're a kid, you're Bobby.
When you get a little older, you're Bob.
Yeah.
And if you become, you know, night, you know, have a good job.
You're Robert.
And later on, you get older, you're Bert.
And you don't switch things up.
You're Roberta.
Oh, there you go.
Oh, that is hysterical.
The name can be used throughout your entire life.
Yeah.
No, were you called Donnie or Don?
I was Donald because we had a kid across the street from us.
He was Donnie and I was Donald.
Oh, OK.
Wow.
All right.
How about some of the girls' names?
Well, they were the Y names, too.
Taffy, Sherry, Susie, Jackie, Debbie.
But then there were also, you know, things, names like Janet and Sharon.
Carol, now that four of us were in Lincoln School in our grade.
So I was Carol B.
We could use our last name initials.
But I think some of these people were named for Carol.
Some of my friends Carol Lombard.
I looked her up.
You went to school of Carol Lombard.
Hold on.
Are you?
Hold on.
There was a little Jamie Marseille and a little dainty Carol,
Jean Fortay today.
We're talking about growing up in receipt of the 1950s in grammar school.
I think everybody remembers their grammar school.
I can name all my teachers in grammar school really quickly.
I mean, I could do it really fast.
And I have some of my school pictures still on my phone from...
I don't know what happened to second grade and third grade.
I have...
I don't know.
I have fifth, sixth, and first in kindergarten on my phone.
Do you look at them often?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because every day someone else in my class is dying.
Oh, yeah.
Because on the high school memorial page, they keep listing them.
And I'm like putting X's through my little medley through everybody's face.
Yeah.
It's hard to believe we're all little kids now.
No.
Somebody in them are donating.
Oh, yeah, to be at this stage.
Yeah, somebody died.
Very sobering.
Caractid in, some died of disease, some, you know, just died.
Yeah.
Did you ever go back for a grade school reunion?
Sometimes there's an eighth grade reunion.
No, no.
It's a big slut for me to go back because I got to get a hotel in New York.
Yeah.
You have had reunions of eighth grade, haven't you?
No.
Not eighth grade, no.
Well, high school reunion, we had said, you know, high school reunion about two years ago.
And the girl in charge of it, the woman in charge, Evelyn Capodonna, she just, she lives with
this stuff.
And she sent me, since I couldn't go, she sent me all the little table decorations they had.
Oh, really?
She sent me everything.
She's really into this stuff.
And she loves taking care of our high school memorial page, our high school reunion page.
Who knows, to her, because I wouldn't have the patience to deal with her.
You're kind of lucky.
You've got a person like that.
You want to plug in?
She's, she's there.
Yeah.
Let's talk about that.
Yeah.
Well, now, the public schools had kindergarten.
And Jim, you mentioned that the approach of schools, you had to go to public school.
That's right.
Everybody go to kindergarten that later on was in first grade, parochial gym.
I think so.
Yeah.
I wonder if it was mandatory.
I would think so.
Yes.
I, like Carol said, parochial schools didn't have kindergarten.
So I went to Mitchell.
And I can still recall my teacher's name, very pleasant memories of her Mrs. Van Velza.
And wonderful.
It just rolls off the tongue.
Yeah.
That's right.
But see how we remembered.
But well, well, I was thinking that was a major event in my neighborhood, kindergarten,
and coming up to kindergarten because we had a lot of kids in my neighborhood, baby boomers.
And now they were, we were all going to go to kindergarten.
But who was going to be assigned mourning?
And who was going to be assigned the afternoon?
That's right.
Yeah.
We right get split shifts in kindergarten.
And that was the parting of the neighborhood ways.
Yeah.
We did that too in our school.
It was very traumatic.
And then they flipped them halfway through the year.
Well, they didn't for us.
No.
No.
And we walked the kindergarten as a five-year-old.
I remember walking a couple blocks.
A lot of kids did that by ourselves.
Oh, yeah.
Why sure?
Why sure?
Rain, snow.
Yeah.
Snow banks.
And we're not going to hear about you walk through 30 inches of snow when you were five years old
through blizzard winds.
Well, one of the big memories of kindergarten, of course, in Racine anyway.
Then we'll find out if you did this.
Even though we had half days, we had to have a nap.
And so you required to have a blanket or a rug.
Yeah.
They didn't have some.
Yeah.
We had a snack.
And then we had a snack.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The other teacher had a break from us, maybe.
So you could take a snooze.
I still, you know, my mother being pretty frugal.
We kept that napping rug for years.
It used it for here and there.
A light blue.
And now you're using it as an older person.
Yeah.
We had to learn the nursing home with my kindergarten.
During our news and farm report, she's got the finger and nap on the floor for five minutes.
That was such a big deal.
Also, when you think, now, geez, how unlimber I am, we did in kindergarten a lot of being on the floor.
The nap was on the floor.
But, you know, we'd sit in circles on the floor.
Sure.
I teach her we'd be reading to us.
We would sit on the floor.
On the floor.
Right.
Yeah.
And we got up with no trouble, Jim.
We could jump right up.
Yes.
Yes.
Unlike now, right?
We could jump right up from sitting on the floor.
What we learned.
We learned something.
Nursery rhymes, of course, in fairy tales.
I can still sing Itsy Bitsy Spider.
Remember that one.
We won't request that right now.
But we don't.
Yeah.
What was your favorite one, Carol?
I guess Hickory Dickory Jack was one that's a little unusual.
We have that by the Jackson Five.
Let me check.
Of course, we had music.
We learned what Jack and Jill, you know, that's one.
Everybody remembers.
I'm sure we can sing it if we want it to, right, Carol?
Jack and Jill went up the hill.
And of course, we used scissors and glue and paint for finger painting and coloring.
Did you eat the paste?
I probably did.
Yeah.
I think so.
We used to call that up for a reason.
We used to call those the paste eaters.
Yeah.
It was a real thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We learned how to count.
We learned our ABCs, of course, back in kindergarten.
Geez.
We learned a lot of things, you know, really.
We were getting a foundation.
I think so too.
Yeah.
We were getting a foundation.
Yeah.
And a favorite time was when the teacher would read to us.
Oh, yeah.
And we would probably be sitting on the floor, most likely.
Mm-hmm.
And, you know, she read the classic fairy tales, three bears, Cinderella.
I guess you liked?
I liked the three pigs.
The best part was the wolf coming down the chimney in a pot of boiling water.
Is that funny?
Oh, my goodness.
That's nightmare stuff.
They were quite violent.
And I'm also thinking of singing.
You touched on that, Jim.
But I thought it was very fascinating how we learned to sing in rounds.
Mm-hmm.
Remember, part of the room would start row, row, row, row.
Row, row, row, your boat.
Yeah.
Rest the room had to be quiet.
Mm-hmm.
And then the second part, second group would come in.
And maybe even the third part.
Yeah.
And wouldn't we end up at the same time?
Oh, yeah.
Sure.
It was just amazing how the rounds worked out.
Yeah.
And then, of course, the school buildings themselves.
There were certain things about each school, which was quite unique.
Halls for one thing.
They were always decorated with our art, especially for open houses when our parents would come and see what we did.
Then we had, at the Holy Trinity, we had a large lunch room in the basement with a kitchen.
And that was used for hot lunches every day.
We had our Christmas pageants there.
Our eighth grade dance was held there.
And school meetings were held there, too.
And, of course, we had the old wooden tables and chairs.
White milk came in little cartons from Progressive Dairy.
Ours were three cents.
Three cents for a carton of milk.
Three cents.
Yeah.
And some kids, oh, it'll have any money today.
Well, sorry.
No, they gave it to you.
And they just, you know, rode down with you, owed them.
Yeah.
Wow.
And, of course, you forget, how do you forget three pennies?
I didn't know it, but back in the 50s, three pennies was, you know.
What did they do now?
They didn't make pennies anymore.
No.
No milk for you.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, that's right.
So, little Carol, a little Jimmy today.
Carol, TN 4K, Jim to see.
We're talking about growing up in grade school in the 1950s in Racine.
I was just during the break showing them all my pictures from kindergarten.
I used to get fifth grade.
I can't find the other side.
I showed you junior high, too.
Kind of goofy looking character.
But, yeah.
My kindergarten teacher's name was Miss Groose.
Now, being a little five to six year old kid, you don't know what that even means.
But, today, if she was like, hey, you're gross.
Miss Healy was my first great teacher.
And I didn't appreciate it then, but she was a locker.
I mean, you're six, seven years old.
You don't know which teacher looks like.
But I look back and say, wow.
That's, look at her.
Well, I wish this listening audience could be seeing this because I have the privilege of sitting with these two guys.
And so, Don whips out his phone.
And we're looking at his great school pictures.
Third grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, where he's standing in the back row because he was tall.
Always in the back row.
And always that thick black hair.
All the shrimpy people right up front.
Yeah.
So, we had the privilege of seeing from Massa Pico.
Massa Pico in New York.
Yeah.
Now, also, you know, you've been calling me dainty little careful.
Well, I've got to say, starting probably in about fourth grade.
I sure was not dainty little Carol because I shot up to like five foot three.
And I had size probably seven size shoes at that time.
So, I was always in the back row.
And I thought I was a giant.
Well, it stopped.
I'm five three yet today.
That's it.
But I, but I experienced being a giant among others for quite a few years.
Well, anyway, back to what our school buildings were like.
Now, Lincoln being a hundred years old, wood and floors, wood, wood, wood everywhere.
And I think it gave us personality, the creaking floors.
When they were wet, there was, I don't think we minded it, but a certain smell in the air.
But we had the news section, I mentioned before, like many of the schools in Racine,
the multi-purpose room was built in 1951.
Now, we didn't call it the addition or the gym or anything.
We very seriously called it the multi-purpose room.
And so we did.
It was the gym.
It had tables that came down from the walls for lunch.
But we had dancing classes there.
It had the stage.
It had a very nice kitchen.
But we were very true to the description.
It was the multi-purpose room.
And another thing that Lincoln School had, so I can't speak for other public schools, but we had a library.
And it was part of the public library.
So that was always a routine to walk down this long haul.
And then we would go down three or four steps and we were in the public library of Lincoln School.
So we were learning right there of what a librarian does,
and how you stand and check out books, and you get the date stamp, and you return your books.
It was a real learning and fun thing.
And then the library, and of course, picked out all these great picture books.
So we had blueberries for sale, and also many, make room for ducklings, Henry Huggins.
So Jim, we had our own classrooms with basics there to remember how our classrooms looked.
Well, getting back to the library.
We never really had a public library.
We just had a very informal room where you just went in and grabbed the books.
It was like a de-honor system.
Yeah.
You took one and brought it back when you're done.
There was nothing, you know, to fill out or whatever.
But everybody remembers the principal's office, too.
Oh, that's right.
Yes, right.
See, we didn't have a principal's office.
Our eighth grade teacher was the principal.
So the only good thing out of that was you could never be sent to the principal's office because we didn't have one.
Oh, you're reminding me.
I think in school had a principal that we loved who then had a stroke when we were maybe in fifth grade.
Very sad.
But Mr. Temmie, so you could go by the principal's office and see him standing in there, and then we knew the secretary,
Miss Nelson, and we had a supply room, too, right across the way.
You could smell like those pencils and erasers and just for nickel or something, you could buy your supplies.
Right.
I was friends with my grade school principal up until a few years ago when he passed away.
Oh, no.
I met up with him again online or down online.
I got his phone number from the school and we spoke for a long time then, traded letters back and forth for a couple of years.
Oh.
And he remembered everything.
He remembered me sliding down the banishters when I shared the ban.
Remember my brother, my parents.
He remembered everything.
Now that is a real professional.
He was very good.
He was one of my favorite people.
Oh.
Mr. Dodd.
And he was for, you know, seven years to kindergarten through sixth grade.
He was a great principal.
Yeah.
And I'm glad I got to speak to him in the last few years.
Well, when you think of the power that a principal or a teacher has for good, you know, to want to talk to this person 40, 50 years later.
I mean, that really says a lot about the impact that they make on us.
Mm-hmm.
He remembered everything.
Huh.
Listen to that.
Good and bad done.
Good and bad.
One bad.
He was sliding down the banishter or the new school when I shouldn't have been.
Oh.
And I saw him at the bottom.
I couldn't stop because I was late for my monitor's post.
The crossing guard post.
Oh.
Yeah.
He was like six foot six, too.
So he's an hour over.
Really tough.
Yeah.
He caught me.
Well, let's remember some of our old classrooms.
Remember the old wooden desks.
They had the wooden seats.
Unlike now.
Some of the older desks, Don, maybe you remember, they had the ink wells in them.
They had a hole, you know, inside the.
What do you use them as?
You didn't use them.
But the hole was there, you know, from the old days.
Some of those old desks, by the way, were made in Racine by the Racine hardware manufacturing company.
So I don't know if we had any of those or not, but I remember ours were really old.
The teacher's desk was also wooden.
I remember ours was on an angle and in front of class.
And the teacher just sat there and, you know, kept an eye on us at all the times.
I'd say the teacher's desk was placed very prominent.
Oh, yes, yes.
We could all see it.
Yeah.
And of course, we had the blackboard, right?
Well, also now we've gravitated to the newer desks that were movable with chairs.
Okay.
And, you know, you and I were saying we could even remember the interior of our desks.
There was that little tray where you put your pencils.
It was a mess.
That's what I remember.
And then while we had the desk, when we get talking about our routines,
we'll say desk cleaning desk.
Yes.
Right.
But, oh, I know in third grade, he's class, do we know?
But I don't know how he made us laugh.
So one of our classmates, his first name was Mickey.
He got away with tilting back on his chair and then falling backwards.
And probably dangerous for your neck or your head.
But tilting chairs and Mickey, making us all laugh, it was just a wonderful routine.
But yes, now another thing looking ahead, sitting at our desks,
blackboards all across the front.
White chalk, tray at the bottom, and erasers.
But what we remember, too, is what was above the blackboard.
Yes.
Right.
Usually with a green background, cursive writing examples, all for the whole alphabet.
Small and capital.
Small and capital.
Yes.
Big part of the room.
Oh, yes.
Remember the old pull-down maps?
For geography, somebody would always pull it down and the teacher would point with her pointer there.
And this is, you know, where Africa is or whatever.
That's when we were daydreaming.
That's right.
Yes, exactly.
Oh, and then bulletin boards?
Yep.
Now, that was a very big thing at Lincoln School.
Perhaps the principal said that the teachers needed to have them all up to date.
But I can still see, I really believe, like for fall, leaves, fall colors, thanksgiving, Christmas, of course.
But food groups.
Oh, do we study food groups?
An astronomy.
The dark blue with the planets on it.
What else was always in the room?
Oh, my gosh.
We had the clock, which was usually above the door.
At least ours was.
That's the object that most people watch constantly.
Yes.
We're watching it.
Yeah.
Our clock didn't, it wasn't the constant.
But every minute it would advance.
Did it check if it was required?
I don't think so.
It's just after a minute it would have had a clicking sound and then it would advance.
So every minute it did that.
We also had a dictionary in front of class, usually on a stand.
So sometimes a teacher would call on you to look up a word.
And when the boys would go up there, they would probably think,
why did the teacher pick on me for this?
Because that was really embarrassing.
They'd go in front of class and look up a word and read it.
We're talking to you.
Little Carol Jean Forte and little Jimmy Messier.
That little and more.
Hardly.
You're still little.
You're not.
You're not.
All right.
We're talking about school.
I was always told.
I shrunk.
We're talking about school days from the 1950s in Racine.
Well, it's really strange when you think about what we had in our classrooms
and how important these items were.
Now, we just talked about things like the bullets and boards in the clock.
But we'll continue on with chalk and erasers.
I mean, we had to live by chalk and erasers.
White chalk.
Jim, what else would you say we had to have in that class?
Oh, we had a globe, of course, for geography.
We had to find out what countries were.
Of course, we had a flag.
We always did the Pledge of Allegiance.
You'll get into that a little bit later.
What else did we have?
Now, you didn't think this was a big deal.
But it seems, in my mind, the pencil sharpener.
Oh, yeah.
Because I seem to remember a lot of shenanigans going on with the pencil sharpener.
You know, boys, especially if there's a test,
take a minute out and sharpen your pencil on the quiet room,
you know, for attention or distraction.
Yeah.
Jim, what else?
Oh, upright projector.
Remember that?
That projected an image on a large screen.
Usually, like, for math problems and things where the teacher had a show great detail.
And what's another material?
Well, it was always kind of on the exciting side
if we had a role in heart with the movie projector or a film strip projector.
Oh, well, of course.
That was fun, of course, when you saw the teacher rolling in the projector
because anything to avoid class time.
Right, right, right.
And I think those film strips, didn't they?
I'd be often cracked or broke off.
Sometimes.
Yeah.
And everything would stop and she'd have to tape it and then, you know,
back to running it again.
Yeah, for teachers, you know?
Oh.
And then we had extra books to read and even magazines.
We had magazines such as National Geographic, I remember.
Well, we won't get into that.
Well, Jim and I are going to confess.
We've been having some jokes about the National Geographic because we were learning about Africa
and those of us who were in those great school rooms for the National Geographic,
I think you know what we're saying.
Let's just say the boys are very interested in the African culture.
This is a family show, so we won't get into that right here.
I am so disappointed in you.
We wondered if we should refer to this for not, but now we have Jim.
Yeah, we did.
We think best.
We think best.
We also had supplies, of course.
I remember my school bag or book bag you called them.
To carry your books in when you walked to and from school.
Now, this has been very funny because I had to talk.
You didn't have that.
I said I didn't have a book bag, so I wrote a couple of my friends.
They didn't have any book bags.
Yeah, that's what we had.
One wrote back, so we never had any homework.
Oh, my God.
I don't know, but is it something we didn't.
Now it's all backpacks.
Yeah.
Now things have changed.
Smart.
Yeah.
Now, in the lower grades, we were into our Creole of crayons and surprising.
Some of my friends, too, went right along with remembering when we were learning how to print that paper we were given.
The lined paper.
They were separate sheets.
And there would be a section of heavy lines with a dotted line in the middle of them.
So you had your capital space and the small letters space.
We can still see that paper.
But another thing in the room, we did so much with lower grade school scissors, glue, construction paper, paints, even those pink erasers.
Did you remember any erasers?
Sure.
Yeah.
And of course, we had what we called workbooks for spelling and arithmetic.
And we had flash cards.
Yep.
Yep.
And the upper grades, remember those pens with a cartridge you could take out and put it.
It was like an ink pen, but you had to use a cartridge.
I guess that replaced the old ink wells.
But one thing, both of us remember very well, was a paper that was printed on that ditto machine.
It had that sweet smell, that very unique aroma.
The Mimi graph.
Well, actually, it's a ditto.
Mimi graph wasn't like a black color, I think, the ink.
That was like a purple color.
Well, that was purple.
Yeah.
Well, the reason that we're talking about this is Jim and I and his posting had this about the program coming up.
I never heard a ditto.
And Mimi graph.
And one of our listeners, John Nicholson, wrote to us.
Correct it us.
He corrected us this weekend about Jim's posting and said it was the ditto machine.
He was a teacher.
I didn't either.
I looked it up and he was right.
Next to John Nicholson, we have been, we have stood corrected.
But we remember the smell.
The smell.
The smell.
Yeah.
It wasn't ink.
It was like, I don't like it.
It was kind of alcohol.
Yeah, the alcohol effects.
It's kind of equivalent to rubber cement or something.
Yeah, right.
Well, finally, we get to some of the routines that we all remember.
The morning, starting with the pledge of allegiance.
And then Mr. Temi would give the announcements every day.
And he would, he would start his announcements by three bells on the xylophone.
Da, da, da.
That was the beginning.
It's like NBC.
Yeah.
That's right.
We had morning prayers, of course, being at a prokyl school.
That started our day.
I think what we love to hear was the recess bell too.
Oh, yeah.
We had bells for school starting and ending, of course.
But like I said, everybody look forward to that recess bell.
We just love that.
Fire drills.
Remember, fire drills, Carol?
Another way to get out of class.
So we enjoyed that too, except in days like today in a winter time,
we hated to go outside in this kind of weather.
But anything to get out of school.
We had the atomic bomb attack.
Oh, yeah.
We had to go into the hallways and you dumped that.
Dr. Trevor.
Yeah.
You had to go into the hall with your hands over your head.
Yeah.
Like when a nuclear bomb comes.
Yeah.
That's going to save you.
Put your hands on top of your head, dunking in the hallways.
Yeah.
Is that covered in drugs?
You were younger.
Yeah.
You were really into the cold war.
Well, fire drills, you mentioned, Jim.
Now that we've got a few more minutes, I didn't even tell you this story.
But I'm going to put it in now.
One of my most embarrassing moments ever.
We were having nap time in kindergarten.
And it was spring.
And so I had forgotten all about what you did in a fire drill.
So all of a sudden, here was that huge alarm for the fire drill.
And you know what I did?
I got up off my rug.
And I ran for the door.
And I ran outside of the school.
And I ran down the street.
And I went to Lincoln Supermarket.
Oh, my God.
I kept on running.
Wow.
And then Louis Schneider, the owner of Lincoln Supermarket,
he had to call back to the school.
And Mr. Tammy came in as big Buick to pick up at Lincoln Super.
He's.
Oh.
Yeah.
Remember cleaning out our desks?
Yes.
Cleaning out our desks.
That was a big routine.
Yeah.
And we had to do that.
We know them.
Ours were always inspected by the nuns.
So they had to be clean.
Mm-hmm.
And what else did we do?
Well, silence.
Oh, yes.
It was actually a big part of our school life.
Yep.
Silent.
Right.
Silently raising your hand.
Yes.
Silently lining up.
Yep.
You know, silently doing a-
Yeah, when you had a form of line.
No talking in line.
That's right.
No talking.
It was like the Marine Corps.
No talking in line.
Right.
Silence.
Silence.
So anyway, we're going to continue this next time,
because we have just, just tapped the names of this.
Yes.
We have not even talked about our teachers.
Okay.
All their names.
Yeah.
How they looked.
What they wore.
Ms. Gross.
Ms. Gross.
How we dressed?
What kind of clothes we wore?
Girls dresses.
How they dressed.
All the nuns dressed the same for me.
So that was, that's easy to talk about.
Well, thank you guys.
Well, sure.
I appreciate it.
So we'll be in next month.
Yes.
Okay.
For part two.
Little Jimmy Messier.
And little Carol G.
And for two.
I want to thank you guys for coming in.
You got through a lot of work with this, son.
It's pretty good.
It's very highly researched on.
Yeah.
Highly.
Are we ever going to see another Golden Rendell presentation?
No, we're going to move to the church again on, uh, okay.
Living faith.
Yeah, living faith.
It's 300 people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Next August will be there.
This August, I should say.
My mom used to enjoy the year.
Oh, we love seeing you two there.
Three years.
Yeah.
My mom loved it.
Even though she knew nothing about recene,
it didn't matter, you know.
Okay.
Well, those were big extravagances.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah.
