Our wonderful school days
It’s that time of the year.
Schools all over the country are reopening.
It’s been 60 years since I first walked through the doors at Park Elementary School, up there on Connellsville Street, to begin my educational journey.
I still miss those days.
To me, aside from Christmases and my birthdays, the first days of every school year (from kindergarten through my senior year) were some of my favorite days of the year.
I’ll admit, though, that I had another set of happier days.
The final days of every school year.
That’s ’cause I was a mediocre student, who had plans for every summer (usually to sleep in late).
But on Day No. 1 of those school years, I had hopes that I’d overcome my educational inadequacies.
I can remember going to school wearing my brand-new shirts, new pants, new shoes, new socks, and (ladies, turn your heads for a moment) new underwear.
As they say, “I was as clean as the board of health” – for a week or two.
Afternoon recesses usually dimmed the prospects of permanent cleanliness, though.
We’d always find eager teachers, with their (sometimes) futile hopes that they could transform us hellions into honest-to-goodness thinkers.
Those teachers would greet us in newly decorated schoolrooms, with their freshly opened packets of pencils, crayons, and paste, and we’d get those big, old Clearfield tablets.
I may have doodled incessantly on mine until most of the pages were so covered with squiggly, graphite deposits, that there’d be no room to put anything readable on them.
The folks up there in Clearfield, Pa. – where they’d been making and distributing school supplies since 1894 – must’ve been happy to know that just about every school kid in Uniontown, and possibly everywhere else, was using their tablets with airplanes on them.
In my earlier school years, Dick, Jane, and Spot would always appear and have such wonderful adventures that made reading a pure joy. (No, it didn’t.)
I didn’t care much for Dick or Jane. To me, they were both a little too perfect. Spot was pretty cool, though.
I was 15 before I realized they weren’t real people.
By then, it was too late.
However, in the 1950s and ’60s, there was no shortage of real human drama that made my school days interesting.
On Oct. 13, 1960, those of us staying after school to watch it were lucky enough to see Pittsburgh Pirate Bill Mazeroski hit the most famous home run in baseball history, in the seventh game of the World Series against the New York Yankees.
They rolled a TV onto the floor at Lafayette Junior High School, so the students could see what turned out to be a historic event. (Unlike today, the World Series games were played mainly in the daytime.)
In 1961, also at Lafayette, we saw the first space flight, by the second person in space, Alan Shepard.
Less than a year later, in February 1962, school students witnessed the flight of the first American to circumnavigate the earth, John Glenn.
Once again, there was an assembly, with a television in the auditorium at Lafayette.
All around, there were school days that were interlaced with real-life events.
Early on, I learned the importance of “ducking and covering,” to avoid the effects of possible atomic bombs that were supposedly aimed by the Russians at, well, maybe Lafayette Junior High.
Quite frequently, we found ourselves under our desks, hoping not to get blown to smithereens.
That possibility seemed real in October 1962, with what was called the Cuban Missile Crisis.
At the same time, John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev stood toe-to-toe on the world stage. In Uniontown, there was quite a different focus.
“Uniontown – Sports Capital of Pennsylvania,” said the headline on the sports page of the Uniontown Morning Herald on Nov. 12.
Sometimes, world events just have to take a back seat to the fact that the Uniontown Red Raiders had just won its first (of two) WPIAL football championships.
There would be more championships to come.
Edward A. Owens is a multi-Emmy Award winner, former reporter, and anchor for Entertainment Tonight, and 50-year TV news and newspaper veteran. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net.