I attended Montlake Elementary School in Seattle from 1957 -
1961. It is a classic mid-1920’s Floyd Narramore
design that, back then, served the children from the middle-class neighborhood.
Third and fourth grade at Montlake were years marked by good classroom behavior on my part. Being new to the neighborhood and the school I was focused on fitting in and my classmates helped me with that. My third grade teacher, Mrs. Parsons, doted on me so I was very comfortable and really well behaved in class. My report cards testified to that fact with notes such as: “Jon is a good citizen in class”.
Fourth grade introduced me to Miss Wolcott who was former WAC
or some other branch of the military and she didn’t suffer fools gladly. “Fear” would best describe my memories of her.
She was severe and when someone acted up in class the whole classroom would
have to go out on the playground and march military-style. Girls learned to “dress-right-dress” along
with the boys and nobody wanted to be the one whose horsing around caused the
whole class to march in the rain. I behaved and while I never fit in to
Scouting, I could sure look sharp standing at attention and marching on orders.
In fifth grade something changed. Hormones, maybe? Whatever it was, Mrs. Showalter and I didn’t click and it was during that period that comments like “Jon is a disturbance in class” started showing up on my report cards. Hate to say it but that was a fair assessment. While some teachers would sentence a kid caught chewing gum or acting up to spend time out in the hall with the wad of gum stuck to their nose or a cardboard sign hung around their neck detailing their transgressions Mrs. Showalter sent us to the adjoining Janitor’s Closet where we had to copy pages, by hand, from a giant dictionary.
The closet was about 6 feet wide and 27 feet long. It was lit by a single light fixture at the
far end and an overhead skylight near the entry. There was a partition wall that divided the
closet into two rooms and blocked the light from that solitary lumenaire. The room where punishment was meted out was 36
feet square and featured piles of books, a wall-mounted ceramic sink and a
heavy wooden book stand. On the oak
bookstand rested the Dictionary from Hell which seemed an impossibly large, heavy,
thick book with tiny lettering and a bazillion arcane symbols. The skylight was the sole source of
illumination making visibility on sunny days great but on dark and rainy days rendered
the source material murky and hard to read.
Seating wasn’t provided so if you sat at all during your sentence it was
on the edge of the sink.
A first offender would get a sentence of a single page which meant that he/she was closed into the room and had to reproduce every word, symbol and mark on that page. Depending on the crime, repeat offenders could receive sentences of multiple pages and had to work through recess. Oh, the humanity! Mrs. Showalter would choose the pages that contained words that she hoped would convey a subliminal message. If you were a repeat offender she viewed you as irredeemable and simply wanted you out of the classroom. Though your sentence was more severe you had the freedom of picking your additional pages so you could choose those with words that conveyed your own subliminal message. Pages containing words with specific anatomical body parts or their attendant functions were good for that and somewhat educational to boot.
Five years ago I had the opportunity to visit Montlake
School with my older sister’s class. So
many memories with familiar sights and scents.
Like Papillion revisiting Devil’s Island I returned to my 5th
grade classroom and the site of so many of my early incarcerations. I noted some changes to my former cell that
included updated lighting and the removal of the partition wall. The original sink had also been replaced by a
freestanding unit, probably due to being used as a chair by one-to-many recalcitrant
students.
I looked around and there wasn’t a single dictionary to be found.
Thank you, Mrs. Showalter.
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