6 Elementary and Early Schooling Through Grade 6

Elementary and Early Schooling through grade 6

I attended kindergarten with my boy cousin at Brainerd Methodist Church; I remember being told to put our heads down for naps.

For my six elementary years I attended Sunnyside school (it was about a mile away) usually walking past the Vine Street Orphanage; often I cut through the woods in back of our house, or walked another road up a steep hill.

There was a Bible class with a lady who visited weekly for that purpose; she taught flannelgraph stories; the Jewish children were excused from these times. We all were given (by Gideons) red New Testaments with Psalms and Proverbs; I was very pleased with mine. We played softball some afternoons after school.

There were seasonal programs in which the student body sang hymns and patriotic songs, led by a teacher. We often sang in class; I remember several: “Funiculi, Funicula”, “Mocking Bird Hill”, “Bicycle Built For Two”, “Tennessee Waltz” and “Waltzing Matilda”. We had a class picture taken every year.

In a second grade spelling bee I won a brown Schaeffer pen and pencil set; the next spring I had the privilege of demonstrating a “robot” I made with my Erector set from a roller skate; the robot moved through the skate wheels and the Erector motor. I was invited to skip third grade but declined.

When I was in fifth grade my grandfather died suddenly from a stroke. I remember arriving at our home, having walked there after school, and finding my grandmother outside on the front steps surrounded by sympathetic friends and neighbors (several cars lined the street); my grandfather’s body was sitting peacefully in his big chair in the living room. His funeral was at St Andrew’s, and he was buried on a hillside at Chattanooga Memorial Cemetery, where his wife (my grandmother) and his son (my uncle) are also buried in the same fenced plot. My grandfather’s sudden death was desolating to me, and I’m sure to his whole family, especially my mother, who talked of going to his grave and pouring out her lonely heart to her daddy.

For a sixth grade outing we had a trip to the Incline Railway and Ruby Falls on Lookout Mountain.