It wasn’t really a tank it was a 1940 Chevy, V8, 4 door sedan. This thing might as well have been a tank it was amazing. First of all, it was huge. The hood opened from each side, that was cool. The doors opened from the middle of the car…also very cool. It was huge inside and didn’t have a ridge in the middle, the floor was flat. It had a floor starter and a floor shift. When it was running and you came to a stop, you literally couldn’t hear the car running. When you opened the hood all you saw was this huge V8 engine. I used to talk my parents into letting me take it to football and basketball games with all my friends because when we needed to get out of the parking lot other cars would move out of our way. No one wanted to challenge this beast of a car. It was the one vehicle that we had that always started on the first try. I know it was almost 20 years old at that time but what a car. They just don’t make them like that anymore. Me and my friends always referred to the car as a Tank. It had huge tires which also made for a very comfortable ride. The other thing it had was a knob on the steering wheel that was kind of free-wheeling. This made it possible to steer by just holding on to the knob. No 10 and 2 for me. Just the knob. I don’t even know if that is legal today, but it sure made it fun to drive. The front seats were separate so you could move from the front to the back with no problem. I don’t want to call the front seats “bucket”, but they were separated. I remember that car fondly. It was a big part of my high school years. There were no seat belts so it was possible to get a lot of people in that car. We would all pile in going and coming from football and basketball games. Great times!!! Anything was possible with “The Tank”.
Miss Green
I want to take you back to my sixth grade class. I was, for the most part, a model student. Always paid attention in class, participated in class activities, did my homework and turned it in on time…always. I had this teacher called Miss Green. She was different than most of my other teachers up to that time. She was young and pretty. She was a good teacher. One day she was ready to get the class started. We were coming in from recess and I was the last one at the drinking fountain. She was standing there and getting kind of upset at how long I was taking to get a drink. I guess her waiting and me drinking was taking way too long. Once I finished she ask why I had taken so long. My response was…”I was thirsty…” I guess it must have been the way I said it…my tone…whatever, her response was to slap me across the face. It came out of nowhere, without warning. I was shocked. No one, not even my parents had ever done that. I didn’t know what to do. So I did nothing. Gathered myself and went into class. She and I never spoke of it again. Probably just as well. Today she would be brought up on charges. Then it was a frustrated teacher reminding a student of who was in charge and to show a little respect. I remember it because it was so far out of the norm. Miss Green was normally easy going, stern, in control and kept all the kids in line without slapping them around. I guess what I said or how I said it just didn’t sit right with her…result a slap in the face.
Miss Payne
She was the Latin Teacher at North High School. I think she was alive before Latin became a “dead” language. She was ancient , but she really knew her Latin. I do not remember liking Latin at all. My dad insisted that Latin was extremely important because it was kind of the basis of a lot of our words and our language. I don’t know if conjugating verbs had any impact on my identifying parts of existing words. It was interesting for about 10 minutes. I didn’t take Latin for one year but two full years. Both with Miss Payne. She was a Pain. She couldn’t talk without spraying you with her saliva. So gross. Just thinking about it makes me cringe. I was ok with conjugating verbs, you know amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant. Whatever, who cares. There is little, if any, real world application. It sounded good to be taking Latin if you wanted to impress your friends or girlfriends, but that was it and the one thing I could not do was translate anything from Latin to English. Forget about it. I don’t know how I got through two-yeas of that. You had to study, there were tests practically every day and homework every night. I guess if I want to take out my frustration on anyone, it would be my dad. He’s the one who got me into Latin in the first place.
Mr. Martinson
I don’t think that I ever saw Mr. Martinson without a piece of chalk in his hand or a wooden protractor with chalk on one end. All of his shirts were stained with chalk. I wonder if he was ever able to have a conversation without a blackboard being involved. He spent most of every class with his back to the class. He was always writing on the blackboard. Putting up equations for algebra, and advanced algebra and then the following year all of the drawings for geometry. His wife must have hated to clean the chalk out of all of his shirts. He was a very smart guy, his tests were crazy hard and I don’t think that he had any favorite students. Probably because he had little or no interaction with any of them. The only time he turned around was to dismiss class or tell us to line up for a fire drill or to dismiss us for lunch. Other than that the questions were given to his back and he would erase something on the blackboard and make room for a place to write down the answer or the process to solve the problem in question. I don’t remember him passing out test results. I think he just put the pile on his desk and we had to find our own. He didn’t seem to care that we might see what our friends scores were. He was a very strange little man. Very focused. A math geek to the nth degree. I did learn a lot from Mr. Martinson. There was no time for goofing around…it was all business with him. The homework was…you guessed it…written on the blackboard, like everything else. I am thinking that he probably used the most chalk and that his blackboards didn’t last as long as other teacher’s blackboards. Maybe they ordered him better chalk and tougher blackboards. I sometimes thought that he should wear guards for his rolled up sleeves so that they weren’t yellow with chalk. This is getting a bit redundant. The main point is that Mr. Martinson was a chalk and blackboard junky, with little or no relationships with his students, who knew a lot about math and made you not want to have anything to do with math once you left his class.
