Rant #1,833: School Is Out/School Is In

The wonder of being around almost 60 years on this earth is that you not only have a wealth of memories about your life, you also have an abundance of mementos to signify just how far you have gone during this journey.

And is there anything better to signify such a journey than a class picture?

I have most of my class pictures in digital form, a few of them I have as the actual photos that our parents purchased way back when to show proudly to whoever would look, and then to stuff away somewhere to take out for another day.

Most of my photos, unfortunately, are lost to me, as a combination of ex-wife taking, and mom losing, have left me without most of the actual copies, but through other people, I have been able to obtain most of the ones that I am missing from my formative years of schooling.

They are just so much fun to look at, and to remember who we were way back when.

The photo above is my second grade photo, one of my favorite of all my class photos, because I think it really showed who I was at the time, and who my classmates were too.

The place I had just moved to some months before--Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens--was a brand new development way back when, and the first class that I ever spent there was in second grade.

Our school, P.S. 30, wasn't even built yet, nor was much of the development at the time.

We had our classes in mock schoolrooms set up in the actual buildings, and in portable classrooms outside the buildings, too, as our P.S. 30 rose on the grounds of the development.

Everything was new, we were pretty new, too, and the world was going to be ours one day, but this is where it all started.

Miss Marlowe--I never knew her first name--was our teacher, and she was young and eager to teach us.

We were getting new classmates each and every day, and it must have been difficult for her to teach an ever changing brood of seven and eight year olds, but I guess she did as well as could be expected.

I don't know what happened to Miss Marlowe--if she is still around, she has got to be in her late 70s or even in her early 80s--but I do know what happened to some of the kids in this photo, including me, of course.

I was a bit much to handle back then. In first grade, in P.S. 165 in Flushing, I was put into an experimental program where we were taught first, second and third grade work in one year, taught by and older teacher who had never taught kids our age. Mrs. Gold was a college professor, and it was a noble experiment.

So when I got to P.S. 30, all the work they were teaching in second grade I had done already in P.S. 165, and I know I was bored, and when I was bored as a kid, I was a bit rambunctious. Just let's say that notes went home to my parents just about each and every week, and I wasn't a bad kid, just a bit disruptive.

But whatever the case, I was a kid, just like the others in the photo. Baby Boomers seemed to be the last generation where kids were treated as kids, and my childhood was just that, a childhood. Succeeding generations seemed to be brought up as sort of "little" adults, and well, as far as I am concerned, they did not experience the full childhood experience like Baby Boomers did.

Anyway, back to the photo ...

I remember that when it came out, the only question we had was why the girl in first row seated, Vicki P., was sort of half sitting on her chair, leaning closer to Stephen B.

Why was she half off the chair?

Of course, way back when, we made it into sort of a "love fest" between Vicki P. and Stephen B., but according to Vicki P.--who turned into a pretty, really nice lady who now resides in Florida, with children of her own--she must have been trying to get closer to our class lothario, the Beatle-haircutted Eric S., the one seated three kids away from her.

Well, Stephen B. became a lawyer, Eric S. a dentist, so she really couldn't go wrong with either one.

Me, the writer, I am seated on the bottom on the left, nest to Yale S., who passed away a number of years ago.

This photo brings back so many memories to me, and yes, it proves that a picture really is worth a 1,000 words--this one might be worth a million to me.

But whatever the case, try to find your own class photos, and when you do, really take a good luck at them.

They really are the greatest keepsakes of our childhoods, and thank goodness I have most of mine.

They really and truly are the greatest reflection of who we were back when we were kids, and I cherish each and every one of these that I have been able to find.