The idea to write about neighborhood schools came to me in the middle of summer, while most of us aren’t thinking about reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. During a talk with my sister Chris we got reminiscing about our elementary school teachers. She and I (as well as my other siblings) went to Phillips Street School on Fulton’s west side.
Chris started listing her teachers from kindergarten to sixth grade: Miss Stoddard, Miss Sullivan, Mrs. Robarge, Mrs. Mearder, Mrs. Thompson, Miss White and Mrs. Carpenter.
With the exception of fifth grade, when I had Mrs. Schneider, my sister and I had the exact same teachers during elementary school. This got me wondering if more families had the same experience back when neighborhood schools were the norm, so I put that question out to my friends and on social media. The response was overwhelming, so much so that I ended up with enough stories to fill three columns!
Why devote three columns to one topic? Well, as my good friend Paul McKinney, who had a long career teaching school and, like all of us, a long journey as a student, said about school: “It was more than learning subjects in our classroom. It was a social experience. We were learning about our neighborhoods, our friends, ourselves.”
Paul’s right. For a lot of us, when we think back on our schools years, much of what we remember takes place outside the classroom: on the walk to school (Remember when we all walked?), in the lunchroom, on the playground. That’s a lot of territory for churning up memories about neighborhood schools, so let’s jump right in. I’ll start with my family.
I asked my sister Chris if she had specific memories about those teachers we shared. Some of her answers were obvious—“We used to have graham crackers and milk in kindergarten and Mrs. Robarge was very kind to her students.”—but when she shared the fact that our sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Carpenter, read to us every day, a wonderful memory came back to me.
How I loved those after lunch stories. Mrs. Carpenter always chose a book that had main characters right around our age. I couldn’t wait to hear the adventures that they had, and a few of those books—My Side of the Mountain comes to mind—remain among my favorites. I think my love of reading started with Mrs. Carpenter.
It turns out not everyone in Fulton had stories of sharing the same teachers with their siblings. My cousin Ginger Leotta grew up on the east side of Fulton and she and her brother John attended State Street School for some of their elementary years, but they only shared a few teachers.
“I think John and I may have had the same first and second grade teachers: Mrs. O'Meara for first and Miss Quirk for second. But the rest of the years were different and I had the same teacher for third, fourth, fifth and sixth grade.”
I had to make sure I understood Ginger correctly: the same teacher four years in a row? “That’s right,” she assured me. “I had Mrs. Hartnett for four years and about five of my friends had her all four years, too.” I wondered what having a four-year run with the same teacher was like and when I asked, Ginger said it’s muddied some of her memories.
“Four years in the same room with the same teacher and mostly the same kids and all my memories run together. If someone asks me what I did in fourth grade or how was fifth grade I can't say because everything is a blur.”
But some of Ginger’s memories recently had a chance to be revived at a reunion of some small neighborhood schools in Fulton. “We took a picture of those of us who went to State Street,” Ginger explained. “One of the other people in the photo, Linda Vanucci, was also in Mrs. Hartnett’s class for four years.”
Other Fultonians shared their unique neighborhood school experiences. I heard from Fred Fanning. Fred and I graduated high school together in 1973, but I had no idea what his elementary school years were like. As he described it, Fred was “a migrant elementary child within the Fulton system.”
“I went to Erie Street for kindergarten through third grade,” Fred explained. “Mrs. Close for kindergarten, Mrs. Wilson [for first grade], Miss Mangot for second and Mrs. Tyler for third. I then moved on to State Street for fourth grade with Mrs. Hartnett. It was Fairgrieve for fifth grade with Mr. Coons and then over to the Junior High on Academy and Fourth Street for sixth grade.”
As Fred explained, “by the time seventh grade rolled around, I knew a lot of east side people who were going to a new school, the Junior High, and I already had a year's experience with that school and changing classes.”
Not far from the Junior High, but a world of difference in terms of elementary schools, was the St. Mary’s School for Catholic children. Memories of those students who were primarily instructed by nuns could fill a book, I’m sure, but Tom Frawley shared one story that will surely evoke memories in anyone of school age in 1963.
“My first and third grade teacher was Sister Marion Eugene. In third grade I was entrusted with the last seat, in the row next to the door to the classroom. Back in 1963, everyone had to knock before entering the classroom and my job was to open the door and let my teacher know who was there. The reason I remember this stems from that fateful day when I opened the door, late in the school day, to find our principal (and several of the other nuns) crying in the common area between the classrooms. News that President Kennedy had been assassinated had just reached the school.”
If you’re of a certain age, I’m betting you have memories of that November day. For me, a third grader, I remember our principal announcing the news over the PA. I remember our teacher crying and being dismissed early. I walked to my aunt’s house on the east side of Fulton. Crossing the bridge, looking down at the river flowing, it was the first time I felt my world shifting.
Next month: More on neighborhood schools and more on how we made memories, not on a laptop or cell, but in real time.
A reunion of students who attended State Street School in Fulton. Front row, third and fourth from the left, Ginger Leotta and Linda Vanucci, who had the same teacher four years in a row!