I don’t mean to brag (Yes, I do!), but I was the champion speller of the eighth grade in Bancroft. The year, 1938.
Yes, I’ll admit the competition wasn’t great, since there were only 12 in that grade, including me. What irks me to this day is when it came time to select the Bancroft student to compete in the district spelling bee, the principal picked a girl.
If he did that because a girl would look better on stage, he was wrong. I was a good-looking, curly haired boy. I’ve got the class picture to prove it.
The girls were plain, still-on-the-farm types, with Depression era dresses and hairdos to match.
Well, this upset me so much I hitched a ride to Durand for the spell-off at the high school and took a seat in the balcony, closest to the stage as I could get.
I’m not a poor loser!
I spelled, to myself, every word given to these principal-chosen contestants, but held myself in from jeering the losers because that wouldn’t have looked good for this good-looking, curly haired boy.
But, that isn’t the only time I was picked on, as a student, when it could have been a girl’s fault.
I’m sitting in the front row of a senior history class in Vernon High School when someone behind me (Heck, everyone was behind me.) created a disturbance.
The teacher flew into a rage and kicked all the boys in the class out of school for three days. Being boys, we, of course, went to Durand and shot pool the rest of the day.
When I described to my mother what had happened that day in class, she confronted the principal and I was readmitted the next day.
My point is that since the teacher’s back was turned to the class, she assumed a boy caused the disturbance. It certainly could have been a girl. Some of them were outspoken, tough and vengeful.
These two instances I’ve mentioned prove, at least to me, that never have I known a boy who was a teacher’s pet. I attended seven schools and always girls were favored.
They could sit anywhere in the room, but I was always put in the front row. Perhaps that was an advantage to me, giving me first access to teacher’s wisdom of the day. But, I didn’t think so at the time.
Girls were excused more quickly for nature’s calls from those one-room schools, with outside one-hole features, though I never actually followed a girl into one to be sure.
Boys were assumed to be crude, misfits, slow learners, and anti-learners, school haters.
Girls were always the smartest, best mannered, most willing helpers, who never threw spitballs, always turned in their work on time and blamed boys every chance they got.
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Of course, those were my stereotypes,
And this brings me back to my great spelling ability. A few weeks ago my friend Dick was found to have trouble in a vein in his neck. He told us it was a carotid artery.
I kept referring to it as clogged and one day he really emphasized the carotid artery as being the name, not a condition. Which sent me to Merck’s medical book and Webster. With Dick’s pronunciation I went to the Cs.
Cou, Cru, Cur, Cir, Cer. Nothing, of course. I went to a bigger dictionary at the office, in front of our proofreader. I said what I was looking for and immediately she, and an overhearing typesetter, spelled ‘carotid.?
Back to Merck’s and there are even pictures of the carotid artery in neck sides.
I’m glad that word wasn’t in the 8th grade contest. This good-looking, curly haired boy would have missed it.