Dear Garrett..

In the midst of the chaos and danger intensifying in our family with this new negro man moving into our home, I was able to graduate successfully from the Elm Creek School eighth grade class.  I enjoyed attending Elm Creek School.  It was a four room school house in the country located between our farm and the town of Seguin. One of the rooms was an auditorium. Another room was the kitchen. There were two classrooms. One classroom contained grades one through four. The other classroom grades five through eight. My sister, Laura was in the first classroom in the fourth grade. Paul, Harvey and I were in the other classroom. Paul sat in the sixth grade row. Harvey was in the seventh grade row. I sat in the eighth grade row.

The teacher in our classroom was Mrs. McKinney. She looked like Donna Reed to me, pretty, neat and very proper. I thought she did a great job teaching us. Mrs. McKinney moved from row to row teaching the different classes. She would stand in front of the row of students that she was teaching while those students gave her their attention as much as an elementary student could at the time. While she was teaching the students in one row their lesson, the students in the other rows ignored the lesson being taught to the adjoining classmates while working on their own study assignments.

My row had six students altogether, four girls and two boys. I thought all the girls were pretty in my class. They dressed very nice for school each day. I was in love with each of them at different times throughout the school year. For a month or so, I would meditate on Gloria, then move on to Dorothy for another month, then Brenda, then Irene. I didn’t love them all at the same time, just one at a time. I never made my feelings known to them. I just thought about them a lot depending on who I was in love with at the time.

My 8th grade graduation class, Elm Creek School, Seguin, Texas (1961). L to R: Paul, Dorothy, Brenda, Gloria, Irene, Mark

Mrs. McKinney motivated us to complete our lessons in a timely manner by announcing to us that we could play baseball when we all finished our lessons. That was all we needed to hear. We all got busy completing our work. When completed, we’d close our books waiting for the slower students to finish their lessons too. When Mrs. McKinney saw everyone sitting at their desks with books closed, she would release us to play baseball as promised.

Our baseball diamond was in a pasture like field behind the school house, the boys and girls outhouses, the school bus barn and the first through fourth grade teachers house. We always played softball. The only equipment we had was a softball and a bat. We had no gloves. Everyone caught bare handed and did so really well. The girls caught bare handed well too which always amazed and intrigued me. I grew up playing baseball in Michigan with a hard ball. We always caught with a glove. Catching without a glove seemed primitive and handicapping. I played according to the rules of the southern ways of playing baseball in my new and foreign feeling environment though I never appreciated playing baseball without a glove to catch with. As much as I liked catching with a glove, I wasn’t going to be the only player using one especially when the girls could catch bare handed well, not to mention the boys. I coached myself to basically tough it out and hoped I didn’t look too bad in my opportunities to catch balls bare handed like everyone else.

We played volleyball and “Kick the Can” at Elm Creek School also. We had a killer merry-go-round in front of the school house. What made it dangerous was a missing board in a section of the seat. We (the boys) would get on the inside area of the merry-go-round and get it spinning as fast as we could in an attempt to sling anyone off that was brave enough to ride it.  We were able to get it going really fast. The riders had to hold on for dear life.  If anyone got slung off, they could get hit by the missing seat board section or get thrown out onto the playground.  Though I was keenly aware of our impaired merry-go-round hazards, I still spent a lot of time either spinning or riding it. As I look back on this merry-go-round experience, I can see that at age 13 I had already developed a keen sense of danger when dangerous situations were present.  I can see now that the years between 9 and 13 had provided many opportunities for me to develop a strong sense of what psychology would characterize as “extreme vigilance”. I would face and have to learn to deal with this extreme vigilance characteristic of PTSD later in my life as an effect of serving as an Army Aviator in Vietnam.

Towards the end of my eighth grade year at Elm Creek, Mrs. McKinney stopped me during a recess break one day in front of the school house near the flag pole. I had just gotten in a fight with one of the Herbold boys during the recess break. Several of the male students from the higher grades had been giving my brother Harvey a hard time back by the bus barn. The male students were obviously well-trained to dislike (actually hate) Yankees and negroes. My siblings and I were guilty on both counts making us targets for resulting expressions and consequences of said hatred.

On this day, the recess period began with one of the boys throwing horse manure on my brother Harvey. After attempting to deal with that situation in a diplomatic rather than physical manner, things eventually elevated to continued harassment and a physical assault on Harvey by a Herbold boy. True to my duty as the eldest brother, I intervened into the situation physically and deterred the Herbold boy from prevailing with his physical assault on my brother.

The scuffle occurred between the merry-go-round and the flag pole. Mrs. McKinney caught notice of the scuffle and came over and began speaking to me privately. “Don’t you know it’s wrong for your mother to allow a negro man to live with your family?” she said angrily. The pretty Donna Reed look on her face that I was accustomed to seeing and admiring had transformed into an angry and distorted scowl. I could tell that she had been infected with the same virus of hatred as the boys.

After Mrs. McKinney’s pronouncement of condemnation on my family for a violation of the local social code, I just stood there not knowing what to say or do. After seemingly several long seconds of silence following the verbal release by Mrs. McKinney while I stood there stunned and not knowing what to reply, we parted ways. It appeared to me that Mrs. McKinney’s task then became to regain her composure so as to reposture herself to re-assume her teaching role and duties. My duty became to regain my footing while trying to figure out how to process the malignant pronouncement of condemnation on the things going on in my family which I had no control over. Mrs. McKinney’s position in life towered far above mine at the time. I simply did not have the tools to know how to handle that experience with her other than to let it settle into my subconscious mind for handling at a later time.

School seemed to let out earlier in Texas than what I was accustomed to in Michigan. The school year at Elm Creek completed around May 20. When I asked why so much earlier than in Michigan, I was informed that the school house would become too hot inside to attend any later in May since the school didn’t have any air-conditioning. During the winter we had only a wood stove for heat — and nothing for cooling as summer approached — not even a water cooler.

Following eighth graduation at Elm Creek School, I spent the hot Texas summer working the farm with my siblings. Mom was busy attending to the hazards of having a negro living in our home in the early 1960s in Texas. Mom was gone a lot. We heard reports that there were dangerous things going on. Mom told me a year or so before she passed that the Sheriff there had her in the back seat of a car with his hands around her neck. When I asked her what he did, she said, “I just prayed and acted like I wasn’t scared although I really was – and he didn’t do anything”, The family of the negro man apparently knew what was going on. The man’s sisters and their children would come out to the farm and stay with us when Mom was gone to see that we were okay.  When they did come out, we enjoyed playing baseball and “Kick the Can” with the negro man’s four nieces that came to our farm with their Mom and aunts.

Following summer vacation, I entered the ninth grade at Seguin High School. After attending school there for two months, Mom told us we were moving to California again without asking us kids what we thought about the idea. We drove away from our farm in what felt like in the nick of time. The sense of danger had continued to escalate to higher and higher levels the longer we stayed at our farm in Seguin.

I remember feeling scared as we drove out of the driveway. I was worried we would get caught trying to leave. It felt like we were escaping from the danger of the people who were angry with us for having this negro man living with us…

As it turned out, leaving Texas for California was a good thing. I missed our farm in Seguin a lot but the move to California resulted in my acquisition of a wonderful aviation family once I made it through High School and out of the hell of living in East Palo Alto.