7th Grade: On the banks of the White River in Cotter, Arkansas

The summer that we headed back to the Ozarks, after the end of my 6th Grade in Cloverdale, we were still in the Cookie Wagon. Except this time, all five of us were riding together because we didn't have the car to drive back. A nice, cozy journey.

My Dad found more construction work before school started. In Arkansas. Cotter, Arkansas, to be precise, which, if you believed the signs on the edges of the little town, they were the "Trout Capital of the World." Apparently still are, according to this website. The White River running through Cotter is renowned for trout fishing. I'm glad it was good for the trout, because it was much too cold for me!

Now, if you've ever been to Cotter, and think it is small, consider this: Some of my classmates lived in neighboring communities of Cotter, some of which were much smaller. Communities such as Monkey Run, Gassville, Flippin, Calico Rock, and Yellville. I think their names are pretty cool. So, the question is, had I just gone from being an Okie, to being an Arkie? It was so hard to keep up my growing list of identities.

We rented a house in the middle of "town" (such as it was), less than a block from the school, which hosued all twelve grades in the big, square, two-story brick building. Since I was starting 7th Grade, I would be on the TOP floor where grades 7-12 shuffled back and forth between the handfull of rooms. My little brother? Well, he would be relegated to the lower parts of the structure, as it should be. I guessed that's why they were referred to as "under" classmen. Being a top-floor, "upper" classman was a thing of beauty.

Now, as you may have guessed, when we headed back east from California, I had to leave my rented piano behind. So my love for music had to find a different path. Cotter School had a band, and from the 7th grade on up, you could join. Oh, joy! So now to decide what instrument I wanted to play. By the time I had decided I wanted to play saxophone, all the saxophones were taken, so I was told the closest relative to that was a clarinet. Sold! I was now a student of the clarinet...the "licorice stick." Except the one I was assigned didn't look much like licorice because it was all silver. In fact, most of the band's "student instruments" were silver. But I didn't care, I had a new object for my love of music. Besides, this kind of instrument would be much more portable since we were such a portable family. I loved being in the band. I think we learned other stuff like English and math and history, but it was Band 101 that I looked forward to every day.

We stayed in Cotter the whole year of my 7th Grade. By the time the year ended, I was playing the clarinet like I had played the piano, by "adding stuff" to the music. But only at home, because it was frowned upon while playing with everybody else in the band. I had to keep my embellishments to myself.

Band, and that clarinet, were two of the things I remember most about 7th grade at Cotter.

But there is something else I remember. Not a happy or fun memory in any way.

We were each assigned to one of the old wooden double-wide desks that were in the "study hall" which took up the huge main room of the school's top floor. A mix of 7th through 12th grade students were each assigned to a desk, with a deskmate, that would be theirs throughout the whole year. I liked my deskmate. She was very nice to me, very tiny for a 7th grader, and very, very smart. We got along famously.

One Monday morning when I came to school, my seatmate was not there. And there was a lot of whispering going on. When I asked where she was, they pointed towards the empty half of my desk and said "She was shot in a hunting accident over the weekend. They don't know if she will make it. And if she does, she may never walk again." I was devastated!

She was gone the rest of that school year. I didn't get a new seatmate. The empty half of my desk haunted me, and reminded me to pray for her every day. I remember her name. But I won't mention it here, because I have no right to do so. I did manage to track her down online because I really did want to know what became of her. Well, I did find her, and and was so happy to learn that she is doing quite well, and is very active in helping other people all around the globe. She might not remember me, but I remember her very well. And I remember the tearful, heartfelt prayers I would pray for her every night before going to sleep.

You know, that year I was at Cotter was 1963. And as you may remember, there was another tragedy that occured in 1963. November 22, to be exact. President Kennedy was assassinated. And yes, I remember exactly where I was. I was in the band room, getting in some extra practice on my silver clarinet when a classmate came charging down the stairs (the band room was in the basement) and told us we were all being sent home because the President had just been shot.

As traumatic as that day was to me, my sweet deskmate being shot was every bit as traumatic. To this 7th grader, anyway.

So here's to you, Cotter, Arkansas, my alma mater for just one year. You with your shiny, silver band instruments and that humpity-hump bridge over the freezing-cold White River.

And to my sweet deskmate. I'm ever so glad you "made it."

.

1/2 of 6th Grade: Cloverdale CA

6th Grade, Part 2: Cloverdale. As in California. The state.

This is where the "thing" happened that I had told London about awhile back. And after I told her, and Harold said I should write about it, I started on my grade-by-grade School Daze narrative. Before I get to the interesting "thing," though, a little background about the school I attended the last half of my 6th Grade.

We arrived in Cloverdale just before Christmas, and I got to spend my first, and only, Christmas in the balmy California climes. It seemed weird to me that we could rollerskate in our short-sleeved shirts down the sidewalks while our Moms were cooking Christmas dinner.

When we first moved there, we lived right inside Cloverdale, and my Daddy got a job in a nearby auto mechanic shop. We were close enough to ride our bikes to school every day, and since it was warm year-round, that was our mode of transportation the whole time we were there. Even in the winter rainy season.

My Mom went and got us both registered for the school we would attend: Jefferson Elementary School. There were two elementary school in Cloverdale at that time: Washington and Jefferson. And believe you me, there was some hot rivalry between the two. You almost had to spit on the ground if you mentioned the name of the other school.

My first day of school, I heard a word I had never heard before, and it was used on me: Okie. Well, actually, DUMB Okie. I had to ask my parents what it meant, and they laughed and explained it was a word that Californians gave to anybody from the midwest, or, in reality, not from California...and was originally supposed to mean someone from Oklahoma. Oooohhh-kaaaay...I was from Missouri. Well, I may have been a dumb Okie, but I was smart enough to know that I was being made fun of because, since I wasn't from California, I was apparently supposed to be dumb. Whatever. I had moved enough already to know one thing: you can't let what other people think of you define what you think of yourself. So it rolled off my back.

I also found out that when I started the classwork that what they were studying was what we "Okies" had learned back in "the stick" at least one to two years before. So I just kept mum and did the work. Again. Besides, I really liked my new teacher, Mr. Creel.

I did learn one new thing: Foursquare. No, not a church, or some kind of software. It was a schoolyard game played with a big, rubber, bouncy ball and man, those kids were serious about it! So I did get to learn something new after all. They had ZERO playground equipment. Zip. Zilch. Nothing. Nada. Their "playground" was paved with black asphalt, so running was verboten. If you got whistled down by a teacher for running, you spent the rest of your recess sitting in the classroom with all the other running rebels. Well, the black asphalt playground pad had those foursquare grids painted all over the place. And that, boys and girls, is what we played. Every single day.

Another thing that was a real change for me was that they didn't have hot school lunches! Man, what kind of deal was that!? No hot rolls, or fried chicken, or school pizza? Instead, they had a school "cafeteria" set up with long picnic-style tables where we all went in one big group to eat the lunches we brought from home. Or that somebody else brought from their home that we swapped with. But they sold ice cream, and that's where I met and fell in love with orange juice bars. My eyes still water thinking about those! And my Mom bought bags of Wampum chips to put in our lunch every day because my brother and I insisted that we had to have those in our lunches. I always loved the name of those. Wampum chips.


ZEKE

Now, time for the "thing" that happened that I shared with London, and inspired me to start this whole school writing mission.

I had probably only been at the school a couple of days at the most when one day, during class, I heard the loudest voice I have ever heard in my life, coming from outside our CLOSED classroom windows. It was saying "Awwwwk! You're a bear, I'm a crow! You're a bear, I'm a crow." All of a sudden, all the heads in my classroom swiveled around and everybody looked right at me, and everybody had a big grin on their face. They had been waiting for this!

I looked at Mr. Creel. He wiggled his finger and said "Come here" and walked over to the window. When I got over there, he said, "Look up there on the flagpole." There sat a big, black crow. When he noticed us walk up to the window, he flapped his wings and I saw it then, with my own eyes: he TALKED! "Awwwwk! You're a bear, I'm a crow". He was looking at the California state flag, which has a big bear right in the middle of it. The kids just started laughing! And so did I! Mr. Creel then told me that the crow's name was Zeke, and he lived nearby, and he comes to school all the time to talk to, and play with, the kids.

I got accustomed to seeing Zeke flying low, zooming the kids on the playground. Especially when we were playing softball during P.E. class on the grassy field beside the school. I saw him one day swoop down and grab a cap off a boy's head and fly off with it. After he dropped it, he laughed. Really laughed! Like a person. And the hatless kid would chase after Zeke, and Zeke would say things like "Don't kill Zeke....hahaha." It was something I would never, ever forget.

I tried a few years ago to Google Zeke the crow of Cloverdale, California, and came up dry. So when I started getting close to this chapter in my School Daze log, I googled again, and bingo! There it was! I wasn't imagining or dreaming. It really did happen. And I also learned something else: Zeke.....was a girl! This article which appeared in a January, 1969 newspaper article confirmed I wasn't dreaming. That's all I have ever found about Zeke. But it's enough, for now. Maybe someone else who has some more information, or even pictures, of Zeke will find this and contact me. I would love to find out more than this little article provides.

Oh, and when our grade cards came out, word was out on the asphalt playground. Only two people in the whole school got all A's (ten A's, to be exact). In whispers, it spread like wildfire: "The OKIE got straight A's!" Now I was just "The Okie" instead of the dumb Okie. Which wasn't so bad. When someone would call me Okie, Mr. Creel would always just look at me and grin. Wonder if he was an Okie, too?

Well, when school ended, we moved just outside of town. My Daddy had got a new job. He was the driver for a local wrecker. And when we moved outside of town, a little area called Asti, the house we lived in was right across the highway from what was then called the Italian Swiss Colony Winery, now called Cellar No. 8 at Asti Winery. Back then, and still today, tourists can "taste" all the free samples they want during tours and tasting events. So Daddy's job was pretty secure, some of the tasters didn't get very far down the road without needing his services. Or even past the ditch at the end of the long driveway to the winery. Job security. For awhile anyway. Then Daddy was offered a job at the same logging company as his brothers and he took it, driving a logging truck. That's the job he had been waiting to get since we moved to California.

We enjoyed a fun summer playing with the kids who lived on either side of us, one family was French, the other was Italian, and since they were related to each other by marriage, we were privy to some very vocal, sometimes very heated, family "discussions" (I believe the Brits call them rows) in their mother tongues. It was quite fascinating to watch. And hear. But the two French boys, Pierre and Emilio, both took piano lessons from a teacher that made house calls, and I hatched a plan: I could take lessons from her when she came to give their lessons! She would only have to come next door!

So my Mom and Daddy rented a piano from a music store because they knew how much I missed my old friend, the upright, Howard piano, with all the missing teeth (ivories) that I had memorized. I don't remember my teacher's name, but she would put little stars and stickers on all the pages of my music books that I would play for her. And she actually got a kick out how I would embellish those little songs with "extras" I added by ear. I still have those books. I later learned that she was not your run-of-the-mill piano teacher. Embellishing the written music was apparently a no-no to most other piano teachers. So they got the straight music during my lessons with them. But I embellished to my heart's content in the privacy of my own home.

Living in California was magical. I remember it vividly fifty years later. Especially Zeke the crow. But staying longer was not to be. My Mom got a phone call one day and she was told that Daddy had gotten hurt on the job. Pretty badly. We waited for him to come home, and when we did, he was on crutches. He had broken a foot pretty badly, and that was that as far as the logging business for him. Besides, as nice, and as fun, and as pretty as California was, we missed Missouri.

And all our dumb Okie friends and relatives.

And another school year was just around the corner...

FIRST 1/2 of 6th Grade: Couch, MO.

6th grade. Couch. The place, not the furniture.

It would be interesting to know how many people even know there is such a place called Couch, Missouri, much less that there was a school there. Apparently still is a school there. And apparently I got to attend not long after a new elementary school was built.

Couch wasn't very far down the road from Alton, but far enough to be in a different school. We lived right inside Couch proper, such as it is. In the house right in front of "the" church (there was only one church), and across a tiny little gravel road from the little grocery store with the wide wooden-plank squeaky, uneven floors. No supermarket, that. But they had candy. And pop. And that's all I got to say about that. LOL. And sorry, but no class photo this year. For some reason, my Mom decided that I, who had naturally curly-frizzy hair already, needed to have a PERM before school started, so I literally sported a poodle-with-a-pompadour hairstyle for my 6th grade class picture. Nope. Not gonna' share that one!

My teacher was Mr. Copeland. I don't remember his first name, but I remember he was also a minister. I didn't know where his church was, but it wasn't the one in my back yard. I also remember that Mr. Copeland was a very nice man.

And guess what? Yup, we moved away before the end of my 6th grade ended at the Couch elementary school. On the last day I was supposed to go to school there, Mr. Copeland threw a surprise going-away party for me. I got presents and everything, which I kept and carried around with me for, oh, at least the next 2 or 3 schools. It was amazing, and apparently made a lasting impression on me.

Anyway, my parents said the reason we needed to move was that there wasn't any construction work left around there. And since my Daddy's family all lived in a place "out west" where they told him there were lots of jobs, we had an auction and sold everything, including my piano. They said it was just too heavy to take with us.

We didn't use a moving truck. Heck, by now, we had moved more than the moving guys who did it for a living. Daddy just bought a used, windowless oversized panel van that we kids dubbed the Cookie Wagon, and we only took what would fit in the Cookie Wagon with us, and headed west. We also still had a car, so my Daddy drove the Cookie Wagon, and Mom drove behind in the car. And between my brother and me, they took turns switching out which one rode with them. I rode with whichever one of them said "I've got to have some peace and quiet for awhile." We made lots of switching stops.

There was no air conditioning in the Cookie Wagon, so when we reached Needles, California, whose slogan sign bragged: "Needles, CA: Hot spot known for absolutely nothing, 20 miles from water, 2 feet from hell." Pretty much how I remember it, all right. We stopped the Cookie Wagon at some sort of reservoir to take a swim and try to cool off a little bit, let the Cookie Wagon cool down before it blew the radiator, and had to literally RUN across the scorching sand to the water to keep the bottoms of our feet from blistering. TIP: Never go barefoot anywhere near Needles, CA.

It was hard to believe this was right before Christmas time. Just didn't seem right for it to be so warm in December. But our California adventure was just beginning...

School #6, Couch, MO, was now in my rearview mirror.