I paid a visit to my old alma mater this weekend, and I mean really old: Edgewood Elementary School, founded during the Coolidge Administration. Folks like to wax nostalgic about high schools and colleges, but only rarely do they pay proper obeisance to those single-digit grades where began their formative educational experiences.
The occasion was the Edgewood Elementary School Spring Festival, a low-key fundraising bacchanal made necessary by the baleful economics of running a school system in Alabama. The Homewood system, of which Edgewood is a part, is a lucky one, because its residents raised their own property taxes to support education, and houses in Homewood ain’t cheap to begin with. Too, there is a Homewood City Schools Foundation that uses private donations to provide “curriculum enhancements.” In my day, those might have been chalk and pencils; nowadays, that means ChromeBooks and iPads. It’s all aimed at achieving what Principal Patricia Simpson and her crew call Edgewood Excellence.
Fundraising has changed dramatically from the bygone era in which Edgewood School empowered me to practice capitalism. I seem to remember that one year we were asked to sell packets of seeds to raise money for the school. Even though this was in a time in which door-to-door sales flourished, I lacked something in my DNA that would have made me the slightest bit convincing to whichever wary housewife in the neighborhood responded to my tentative knocks. Edgewood School couldn’t have bought a Nifty notebook with my paltry sales revenue.
It could be interesting to research the kind of expenditures Edgewood made to educate us all those years ago, but there’s no guarantee it would be, so I shan’t. Suffice to say that there were aspects of elementary education then that puzzle me yet. For example, erasers had to be dusted. Much of the information we were expected to retain was painstakingly scrawled in chalk by our teachers upon blackboards. At intervals, a pair of students was selected to go out to the playground and pound the dust out of the board erasers on an outside wall. I don’t remember whether this was intended as punishment for dunces or a sop for achievers (the reward being a chance to spend a few blissful minutes outdoors, away from the educational process).
Either way, the dutiful eraser pounders were guaranteed a lungful of sedimentary carbonate dust, which I hope never entitled them to participate in a class action suit involving mesothelioma.
As I strolled through the Edgewood School gym Sunday afternoon, odd recollections effervesced. In that room, I think, came my first opportunity to be an emcee, when I was entrusted with introducing the Christmas musical program. I had meticulously written out the order of performance in my decidedly un-Palmer Method handwriting, then committed it to memory, the better to bedazzle the dozens of people who might be in the audience.
On the day of the show, I was dressed in a dapper suit from some downtown emporium bargain basement. I carried off the first two introductions with a suave stage manner that no doubt reminded the spectators of Art Linkletter, or maybe even Bishop Sheen.
Then I froze. I couldn’t remember the name of the next number’s composer. My mind was completely empty, and in panic I could feel my most recent meal rising to fill the void.
There was nothing to do but run. I sprinted as best I could in my Buster Brown shoes down the highly polished hallways to my homeroom, where I searched frenetically and in vain through my desk for my written program. I felt seconds ticking faster than my heartbeat, which was by now at the velocity of a hummingbird’s. Then, the sweet relief of dumb luck: I found my program notes crumpled up in the waste basket next to my teacher’s desk, where I’d so cavalierly tossed it after my memory feat.
I hightailed it back to the stage in the gym, where the second musical number was just concluding. Only the prominent cracking of my voice and the visible tremor of my hands as I read aloud from the wrinkled paper I was clutching might have suggested any variance from absolute cool.
The composer was Mendelssohn, by the way. The whole incident was a wonderful life lesson. I’ve been winging it ever since.
Things got a little Prousty last Sunday afternoon. Thinking about upchuck reminded me of our school custodian, a burly African-American named Shack, who always had access to a mysterious supply of sawdust to take care of digestive accidents anywhere in the school building. Walking across the gym floor invoked the shade of Miss Ambrose, our Phys Ed teacher, who was also the commandant of the Edgewood School Safety Patrol, in which I served one tour of duty and never once wounded myself with my aluminum Triple A flag pole.
As I walked the grounds at Edgewood, I thought about all the women who’d done their best to instruct me in grades one through six, and I realized learning was never more fun than at that school. Judging from the visages of the kids who go there now, that, at least, has not changed from my days there.
Heading home, I spotted one of the primo attractions of the festival. In front of the school, on College Avenue, there was a dunking booth. All manner of Homewood citizens, prominent or otherwise, had spent a few minutes out of their day sitting there, letting kids take a shot at plunging them into the murk of the tank below.
I watched young lawyer extraordinaire Todd Miner in the booth for a few minutes. He’s got two kids in Edgewood already and a third upcoming, but his wife Stacy told me he volunteered to get dunked. He got dropped half a dozen times while I was watching, and he emerged smiling every time. Edgewood Excellence apparently extends to the parents, not just the students and teachers.