An Old Coot remembers his lessons.
By Merlin Lessler
It
was an innocent enough wise crack, “God made me do it!” The problem was, I’d
said it in a religious instruction class at Saint Johns School, and then turned
around to grin at my friends in the back row. I never her coming, but I sure
felt it when she latched onto the flab of flesh on the under side of my upper
arm in a vice-like grip and escorted me to a stool next to her desk at the
front of the room. I paid the price, but the rest of the class got the message;
don’t mess with a nun! I was seven at the time, a student at Public School #13,
Longfellow Elementary, on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Every
Wednesday afternoon at two o’clock, a few dozen Catholic students blotted the
ink on their school paper, wiped their pen point with an old rag, closed their
inkwell, put their worksheets in the drawer under their seat and assembled in
the hallway by the side door for an unsupervised, mile long trek to Saint
Johns. We lined up in pairs: sixth graders led the entourage; fifth graders
held up the rear: the younger kids were cradled in the middle. Separation of
Church and State was maintained, yet the objectives of both institutions were
accommodated by the one-hour early school dismissal.
Sending
a troop of kids on a 30 minute trek in rain, sleet or snow would not be allowed
today, but neither the school administration, nor our parents, had the least
concern for our safety on the walk to Saint Johns, nor did they fret over the
possibility that we would overly misbehave along the way. Bad behavior was
controlled by a well-oiled social pecking order, supported by the application
of immediate consequences to unacceptable behavior. (It also was a time when
parents didn't sue for every misfortune suffered by their "darlings").
If we acted up in front of adults, strangers or not, we expected a reprimand, a
slap on the bottom, a cuff to the side of the head, or worse, a report of our
obnoxious behavior to our parents. Older kids just creamed us if we got smart
with them.
Our
journey to religious instructions was in reality, well supervised. A legion of
stay-at-home moms along the route kept an eye on us. The only disruption to our
march occurred when we came to a sidewalk square that was imprinted with the
logo of the mason who’d poured that section. Most of us, the boys anyhow, felt
compelled to leap over those squares. Sometimes, two such squares would abut
each other. We had to back up and get a running start. That’s when our parade
got a little out of whack. Otherwise, our pilgrimage was an orderly adventure
through neighborhoods unfamiliar to us. I never did make it over a double
section, though I had skinned knees and torn pants to prove I’d tried.
The
instruction we received in the classroom on those Wednesday afternoons was not
as informative as the things we learned getting there. The human nature stuff.
And, though the nuns were kind and gentle during our first few years there, the
gloves came off once we turned seven; we’d reached the so-called, age of reason.
We were then thought to be capable of distinguishing right from wrong and
responsible for our misdeeds. The lessons got harder and the nuns got stricter,
as I’d discovered the day I spent an hour on a stool in the front of the room
with a throbbing skin flab.
Don’t
get me wrong; the Longfellow teachers were masters at discipline too. They
skillfully employed many techniques. I experienced the full range: solitary
confinement in the cloakroom, public humiliation in the front corner of the
room, at attention long after the dismissal bell had rung with my hands folded
on my lap, or laboriously writing, "I'll never again do bla, bla,” dozens,
and sometimes, hundreds of times on the board or in a notebook. But, my
criminal record wasn’t all that unusual. There were ALWAYS consequences for
misbehaving, and most kids, most boys anyhow, had a similar rap sheet. Our fear
of public school discipline, though profound, did not hold a candle to our fear
of nuns.
As
I look back on it, some sixty odd years later, I can’t tell you the capital of
South Dakota, even though it was drilled into my head at public school, but I
can recite the answer to the catechism questions, such as, “What is man?”
(Answer - a creature composed of body and soul and made in the image and likeness
of God). It must be because I can still feel a twinge on the underside of my
upper arm. My Uncle Jack and me, heading to my Confirmation in 1953
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