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Galen Green
8606 Chestnut Circle, Apt. 3
Kansas City, MO 64131
816-807-4957

Sunday
October 14, 2007
(941st Anniversary of the
Battle of Hastings)


Dear Shannon (& Co.),

It was great to hear from you, to hear that you and Gene seem to be doing well -- have produced a family and are doing a considerable amount of good in the world -- and that you sounded, in your note of a month or so ago, genuinely interested in exchanging a few memories, reflections, lessons, analyses, etc. concerning our semi-overlapping childhoods at Fairmount Elementary, Brooks Junior High and East High School in Wichita in the 1950's & 60's. I apologize for taking so long to get back to you, but it's been an unusual past couple of months at my end of things. I still work for the Kansas City Missouri School District, but have recently had to move from what I had been doing to what I'm doing nowadays, as a result of a torn left rotator cuff.

More about that later perhaps. Right now, I'm eager to start trying to put into words a few of the impressions from Miss Roberton's 1st grade classroom that have recently begun swimming back to me from when we were 5 & 6 & 7 years old together there in Wichita. Just before Steve Trombold moved back to Wichita (in 2004?), I had a couple of conversations with him, the mere fact of which feels to have opened a floodgate of images, moments and sundry sensory flashbacks that I'm finding both pleasurable and helpful in constructing a gestalt out of such pieces for my memoir-in-progress tentatively titled The Toolmaker’s Other Son. (My late adoptive father, Harry [1908-1982], whom I believe you may have met once or twice back then, was a toolmaker at Boeing from 1941 until they threw him away -- like Arthur Miller's Salesman-- in 1968, just before he was set to retire.) If I'm not mistaken, you & Steve (Dr. Trombold) & Ellis West are the only 3 students who ended up attending all the same schools as me from Kindergarten through our graduation from East in '67. Am I remembering that correctly? And in actuality, of the 4 of us, I was out of the picture in the 6th grade (1960/61), when Harry & Margaret sent Kevin and me to the Wichita Christian Academy. (That'll be a whole chapter in itself.)

I think that the main reason Miss Robertson's 1st grade classroom sticks with me so vividly stubbornly is that so much of my time and energy as an adult has been spent pondering things political, and a little secular homily Miss Robertson delivered to our class one quiet afternoon, probably in the spring of 1956, has itself stuck with me so vividly stubbornly. To condense the substance of this 5-minute homily into an even tinier nutshell, I'll just say that I seem to recall that she started out by responding in her grandmotherly way to a student's question about why our country had recently been involved in Korea and why it had, not very long before we were all born, been involved in fighting Germany & Japan. In a nutshell, her grandmotherly answer began with why and how these United States of America had thrown off the British yoke, and

concluded by explaining that, being the good people we are, we want nothing more than to help oppressed peoples throughout the world to throw off the yoke of their particular oppressors and to achieve (though I'm sure she didn't use this term) self-determination -- i.e. freedom, equality, democracy.

As that was more that half a century ago, I cannot attest to the exact wording our kindly 1st grade teacher used that placid spring afternoon, but it was the first truly stirring testament to democratic principles that I can recall ever having heard. And while it was obviously a huge oversimplification, it got my attention -- and has kept it.

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Let's see: I was born in April of 1949 and ended up as an English major. So please don't hesitate correct my arithmetic. So it would seem to me that I entered kindergarten at Fairmount Elementary in September of 1954 and then Miss Robertson's 1st grade with you in September of 1955, having turned 6 years old that April. Does that sound right?

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I should probably mention at this early juncture that, as a result of untoward fires and floods over the years, I now find myself bereft of most of the photographs, boyhood treasures and paper documentation from my early life. I do, however, seem to recall having run across our 1st grade and 2nd grade class pictures somewhere amongst my little life's shards, not too awfully long ago. I mention this because I seem to recall reading on the back, where my diligent mother had written it in pencil back in the spring of 1956, that our 1st grade teacher's name was Miss Robertson -- and not Miss Robinson, as I believe I misremembered it when writing that shameful little prose piece in the summer of 1977 entitled "Mash Note to an Arizona Housewife," about the crush I'd had on Linda Hull back in high school. (I’ve apologized to her numerous times for that. I'm not the man I used to be – which is just as well.)

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We'll return to Miss Robertson's 1st grade classroom in just a moment, but I do want to insert one more footnote here before we do. I'm wondering if perhaps you ran across the book I'm about to recommend to you while working on your Ph.D. The book is entitled Dissent in Wichita: The Civil Rights Movement in the Midwest, 1954-72 by Gretchen Cassel Eick (University of Illinois Press, 2001; 312 pages). According to the book jacket, Dr. Eick is an assoc. prof. at Friends U. in Wichita. Her Ph.D. is in American studies at KU. (Go Jayhawks!), and she appears to have an impressive resume.

I discovered her book's existence about a year ago while googling key words for this memoir I'm drafting, and I had to buy it off of amazon.com since that's the only place I could find it. (I believe I paid around $15 for it in hardcover, new, plus S&H.) I particularly enjoyed Chpt. 8 which includes considerable reportage on that notorious Sandy's parking lot riot across the street from East in early May of 1967 -- and on the "cheerleader controversy" which allegedly triggered it (though we all know that it was triggered by a multitude of social force, not all of them local by any means). As Head Cheerleader at East at the time, do you have any special insights you'd be willing to share on the matter? Eick's book tends to view it as a rather typical manifestation of late-60’s local politics in which we students were mere pawns. I'm not trying to put you on the spot or to make you feel uncomfortable. That's the last thing I want to do. I'm simply
saying that I found Eick's account edifying.

Heading back now in the general direction of our theme, allow me to recommend equally highly Chpt. 4 of Dissent in Wichita. It's entitled Black and White Together and predictably moves the reader's attention backward in time, from 1967 to the 1950's. On page 60 within this 4th chapter, a section begins entitled Black and White Collaboration in the Fairmount School Project. You can well imagine my astonishment and delight at stumbling upon this informational gem. Before we move on, here's just one illuminating quote from this section:


Fairmount already had a long-standing reputation for academic excellence as
well as a popular principal, Gerald Cron, who was enthusiastic about the
opportunity to make Fairmount a model integrated school. (p. 62)


Throughout my adult life, I've frequently been asked how it is that I get along so well with Black folks of all classes, both inside and outside of the workplace. And as tempted as I am to respond that it's because I have Jesus in my heart, I give them the answer they need to hear, which is: "I was lucky enough to attend racially integrated schools when I as growing up in Wichita." Now, however, I've come to find out that Fairmount, at least, was a kind of "laboratory" to confirm the main premises of the Warren court in their Brown v. Board decision -- which came down the very year you and I started school, so that we were perhaps among the very first Baby-boomer to take racial integration almost totally for granted. Only since going to work for KCMSD in January of last year, and thus being given the privilege of getting to know "up close & personal" the realities of KCMO's less fortunate history of race relations, have I begun to appreciate the full measure of our good fortune in having had the school system we had as a launching pad.

I'd love to hear about your own observations and experiences regarding this issue of school systems around the country which might (or might not) have benefited from the blend of circumstances with which we were blessed in our youth. Meanwhile, shall we journey once again backward in time to the 1955 & '56 and elegant, dedicated, grandmotherly Miss Robertson's 1st grade classroom?

On the 2nd floor of the Nelson Museum here in KCMO, there is a dimly-lit, climate-controlled gallery hung with ancient Chinese scrolls, some of them more than a thousand years old. The first time I entered this particular gallery, I was transported immediately to Fairmount Elementary and specifically to Miss Robertson classroom. It was the scent, the fragrance, something exuded from those ancient Chinese scrolls which had not invaded my olfactory memory since before the Russians launched Sputnik. If I were Marcel Proust, I could fill a dozen pages with florid purple prose as to the mysterious spell which the mere inhalation of the rarified air within that gallery continues to cast over me each time I re-enter it every few years. Being, instead, Galen Green, however, I’ll just say that T.S. Eliot probably said it best when he had J. Alfred Prufrock ask himself: “Is it perfume from a dress/ That makes me so digress?”


In the case of the aroma from these Chinese scrolls, a single whiff conjures up images of Miss Robertson standing gracefully in front of us at our little four-pupil tables with her carefully coiffed pale pink tinted hair, her tidy Edwardian high-collared blouse with slender calf-length skirt and her tasteful 1930’s glasses. In fact, much about our 1st grade teacher tended to strike one, even at the age of 6, as vestigial from the 1930’s or 40’s, if not downright antique. I’m sure you know what I’m getting at here – and that I mean it only in the ameliorative. To me, she presented a mixture of my adoptive mother, Margaret McCall Green (1912-1990), and her own mother, Phoebe Evans McCall (1880-1981), the latter of whom had been a schoolmarm on the Kansas prairie during the Presidencies of Wm. McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt and the former of whom, though in 1956 on a proto-version of the so-called “mommy track,” had herself schoolmarmed in the 1930’s and 40’s, both in one-room country schoolhouses in Franklin County, Kansas, and in the Wichita Public School System (today known as USD #259). So one need not be Sigmund Freud to figure out why it was that Miss Robertson held a special place in my heart and mind – nor why it is that her ghost seems to have taken up permanent residence there.

In point of fact, Miss Robertson and my mother had evidently known one another, had taught together in the years before my parents adopted me, and were somewhat friends, despite Margaret’s being a generation younger than our dear old 1st grade teacher. Sometime during the autumn of 1955, Margaret read a note to me, which she then had me hand-deliver to Miss Robertson, in which she stated in unambiguous terms that (as would end up being the dynamic with all of my grade-school teachers), Miss Robertson had parental consent to employ corporal punishment with me if she deemed it necessary, with specific reference to my little posterior. Needless to say, the mere knowledge of this arrangement had its desired effect.

So, Shannon, if you ever labored under the illusion back then that my being, in general, a perfect little gentleman was pure manifestation of my inborn good character, you’d have been only half right; the other half of my generally polite behavior was motivated by stark terror of kindly, patient Miss Robertson’s dainty hand bringing humiliation to sitting-place. And as with our high school peers Max Moses and Carl Mar, my darkest dread was that of bringing shame upon my parents. When I asked Steve Trombold in a 2003 conversation how it was that he was always such a well-behaved little boy back then, he reminded me of one particular exception to that pattern (in perhaps the 4th grade) when Ann Jones (Remember her? Don’s mother, our phys-ed instructor?) “punished” him one day by making him stand out in the hall, there on the 2nd floor, near the door to Mr. Cron’s office. Dr. Trombold confessed that he was so embarrassed that he tried to hide behind the students’ coats that were hanging along the hallway wall. And I then confessed to him that I’d coincidentally passed through the hallway, had seen him standing there with his little athletic legs sticking out from beneath the coats, and had wondered silently to myself for the next 45 years what he was doing there. Well, now I know.

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I think I’m going to need to take a break here for a few days, though I feel that I have plenty more to share with you on this theme. Anyway, I do have every intention of coming right back within the next week or two and conjuring up more memories of our time together in Miss Roberson’s 1st grade classroom at Fairmount Elementary. In retrospect, I believe that to have been one of the most important, memorable and pleasant years of my entire life. I’ll be eagerly awaiting your take on it. I suspect that, as career educators, we share similar motives in wanting to explore the process of early childhood development through a wide variety of perspectives, including the subjective. Sometimes, when my “significant other” of 15 years, Marie, and I are discussing a film we’ve just sat through together, it’s as though we “didn’t see the same movie,” as the expression goes. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that feeling. Anyway, Shannon, I’ll be eager to hear from you at your earliest convenience, with regard to what I’ve shared here thus far, as well as to any particular pedagogic, sociological, or existential topics you’d care to raise for our future discussion. OK? We’ll see to what extent you and I did or did not “see the same movie.” Whatever the checkered answer, I’m confident that I for one will be enriched by the process.

I can’t go, however, until I’ve said a word or two about Miss Robertson’s ancient bandaid-colored Hudson. Do you remember it? Being male, I can see why it might have made a deeper impression on me. That, and the fact that our family car at that time was also a Hudson, a 1951 gray & tan Hudson Hornet. You may have ridden in it once or twice. No? You may recall that she usually parked her ancient Hudson on Lorraine, just across 14th Street from the school itself. It was my father who told me that Miss Robertson’s car was a Hudson, and then tried to explain to my 6-year-old brain why, if it was a Hudson, it didn’t look anything like our 1951 Hudson Hornet – which, in turn, got me thinking thoughts of Darwinian evolution among various automotive species.

One day, Margaret invited Miss Robertson to lunch with her and me and my adoptive brother, Kevin (who’s 4 years younger than me), at our home. It was a unique experience for me. As I recall, Miss Robertson left her ancient bandaid-colored Hudson parked in its usual spot and rode in our car with my mother and brother and me to lunch at 1737 North Lorraine, 2 blocks away. If I could recall any of the details, I’d relate them. Since I cannot, I’ll simply pause my self-indulgent reminiscence here for now.

But I’ll be back just as soon as is feasible. Meanwhile, please RSVP as much as is feasible for you and let me know whether or not I’m on the track here that you would like for me to be on. OK? Thanks? I’m finding this exercise to be wonderfully therapeutic. Also, if you happen to have any specific questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. OK?


Until Next Time, Stay Well,

Galen

October 17, 2007

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P.S.

If you’d care to know a bit more about me and my work, here’s how to get to a couple of my current blogs:

galengreen.blogspot.com

thetoolmakersotherson.blogspot.com


-- G