First Grade

The first day of school—I have no recollection of it.

It was the same building as the one my mother and step-father had attended in the 1940s, four classrooms for grades 1-8, but had the addition of a hallway, with indoor bathrooms and a kitchen, and cafeteria/gymnasium/theater appended sometime in the 1950s. Most of the students were from working class families who had settled in the township a couple generations earlier (my father’s mother had attended a different incarnation of the school in the 1920s). In 1963 there were about 85 students. By the end of the decade all of this would change, with about 120 students, as the area became suburbanized and the people moving in around Island Lake started building what to the rest of us were mansions. Until then, most of the families living around the lakes had houses that began as single or two-room cabins, with bedrooms and bathrooms added on as the families grew (or as indoor plumbing became more common).

Gnesen School, on the Howard Gnesen Road about 15 miles north of Duluth. View from the west.

In general I have few memories of school, and those that I do have are unpleasant. I was so excited to be able to learn things and to be around other kids, to have playmates, yet both quickly proved to be disappointing.

But that’s not what’s always on my mind from that year.

At no point in my life have I paid attention to what’s going on around me, neither watching television news nor reading papers or magazines. History? Yes. When it’s all done and analyzed I find it fascinating. I think I want a complete story rather than an unfolding and usually dwindling one (which is why I read graphic novels rather than comic books?). The future? Can’t stop imagining it. And it isn’t just current events on the public scale: I know very little about the people around me. I wouldn’t say I’m introverted. Or can one be introverted and still oblivious of one’s own feelings and motives? I tend to find myself as uninteresting as everyone else.

So what was so interesting about first grade?

As mentioned above, I started school in 1963.

That is the beginning of what we later came to think of as the era of dead Kennedys. It meant nothing to me at the time except that we probably had a day off school for the funeral, probably had a TV in the classroom as the news unfolded, and I took interest in my father (one of the school janitors) flying the flag at half-mast. The meaning of the event unfolded for me as I grew older and tainted the rest of the decade and the whole of my childhood.

1964 brought us Beatlemania and the beginning of the British Invasion. That, too, meant nothing to me. It’s probable I saw The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. I think it was broadcast on Sundays and I often went to Kelsey, MN with my grandparents to visit the folks, as my maternal grandmother called her parents, on Sundays (Wild Kingdom, Disney, and Ed Sullivan, I think, all aired Sundays). I have a vague recollection of the adults laughing at their haircuts and the screaming girls (the girls were already screaming then, right?).

Sometime before Easter my paternal grandfather’s mother died (her family had settled in Gnesen circa 1860, though I don’t think my grandfather grew up there…he was born in western Canada and later had a house on 9th Street, just below Skyline, on Duluth’s central hillside, which is where my father grew up). My great grandmother had a house a mile or two west of the school.…I remember relatives coming down from Canada for the funeral. I remember going to Shopper’s City and getting yellow chick Peeps.

I also remember this being the last time I prayed. I’d seen a bag of toy soldiers on a hook at Woolworth’s, blue and gray for the Civil War, which I so badly wanted. I had a moment alone in my maternal grandparent’s basement, looking up along a rough-sawn column to the beam, joists, and subflooring above me (a rather bleak view of Heaven, I recall thinking about it, wanting a view of clear sky) as I fervently prayed for the soldiers. I got what I wanted.…I don’t remember having any profound thoughts but there was obviously something wrong with this, as though God was petty and trivial. I could never again bring myself to pray.

The most devastating event of that year, though I wasn’t consciously aware of it for decades to come because no one around me was conscious of it, I suppose, was the cancellation of Rocky and Bullwinkle. After that I had to watch Underdog. That hit me where it hurt.