Starting School

     It’s a landmark day for my grandson Vake—he starts preschool! He will learn standing in line, sharing, and basic socializing with other kids, his father Eric explains. He should do fine—he’s very social already. “Yes, M’am” he answered my question on the phone.  And he busted me for “snatching.”  When he wouldn’t release the bag of graham cookies Eric had handed him, when asked to, I took them.  I don’t argue with two-and-a-half year olds. “We’ve had a discussion about snatching,” mother Alison explained.

         We didn’t have preschool when we were his age.  In Florence, only town kids had kindergarten, at Mrs. Lorenz’s house.

        Like most Florence kids, I started school at age 6, in 1953. My classmates and I overwhelmed the school system with our sheer numbers—we were the first flush of “war babies.”  WW II had ended in ’45, all the returning GIs got married in ’46, and everybody had their first babies in ’47.  Somebody saw us coming and built a whole new primary school to accommodate the crush. As we progressed to elementary school, a couple of Quonset huts were erected on the school grounds to help house us all.

      Starting school meant getting a new metal lunch bucket, probably with a cowboy on it, like Roy Rogers. It meant new dresses. Girls had to wear dresses or skirts, so Mom bundled me in a corduroy jumper to protect me from the cold wind that blew off the ocean, up the river, and across the school yard.  And I got new shoes! I chose saddle oxfords, with a tan toes, a rust-colored saddle, and soles the pinkish color of a rubber eraser. Mom and Dad coached me. I had always been called “Susie.”  “Your real name is Susan Rae, and they might call you that in school” they explained.

     My first grade teacher was Mrs. Miles, and she was good. Soon she had every one of us reading, phonetically, about Alice and Jerry and their dog Jip. We learned to date our papers, September 12, 1953, and we learned to print in neat round letters on a straight line. 

     Mrs. Miles gave me special treatment. She saw me scratching and took me into the restroom to investigate.  I was covered with flea bites around my waist, so she doused them with rubbing alcohol and sent me back to class. After that, Mom and Dad doused our house with DDT, and that cured the flea problem.  But Mrs. Miles must have remembered me, because when I graduated from law school 21 years later, she sent me a note of congratulations.    

Susie Sampson Starts School

Ruby Miles'  1st graders 1953. Susie Sampson is front right.

Brook's first day of school, September 1976