Daggett

Last week E. M. Daggett Elementary School in Fort Worth, Texas, celebrated its 100th anniversary. My brother Don and his wife, Mary, took me to Fort Worth for the party. My friend Barbara, whom I have known from second grade through college, met us there.

I began kindergarten at Daggett in 1934. My three brothers also went to school there, as is did Mary and her sisters. We all had the same teachers, even though Mary’s sister Becky was 20 years younger than I am.

The kindergarten room was at the west end of the first floor of a two-story cream brick building with a tile roof, very handsome and modern in 1934. In kindergarten the boys built houses out of enormous, light-weight blocks – there was no foam rubber in those days, they must have been balsa wood. The girls played at cooking with pots and pans on a miniature stove. The boys also constructed “shopping” stalls where the girls pretended to buy things from the boys. Yes, there was gender discrimination in those days.

Don remembered the kindergarten room as having a small piano, which he took apart. On the second day of school, he was expelled from kindergarten. When he grew up, he became an engineer.

The kindergarten teacher was a big, fat, motherly woman, whose name I can’t remember. My first grade teacher was Miss Spencer, a prim old maid with rust-colored hair. I was afraid of her. At the end of the year, despite Miss Spencer’s efforts, I could not read.

An old lady, a friend of the family, moved in with us and spent the summer teaching me. I remember holding the soft, tan pages of stories about Little Henry and trying to solve the puzzle of the words on a page with pictures of Little Henry and some ducklings. How frustrated I felt when the letters made no sense to me.

By the end of summer I was reading well enough to enter second grade with the rest of my classmates. But, for the rest of my school years, I felt inadequate. Arithmetic remained a puzzle. I never learned my multiplication tables, and even today I cannot balance my check book without using the calculator. It was only at commencement from high school and college that I looked at the programs and saw how few others graduated with honors. I realized I was not so dumb, after all.

Junior high was in two square buildings, joined at ground level with offices, creating odd stairways where we seemed to be constantly going up and down between classes. I thought they were ancient and should be torn down. In a second-floor classroom, on the day after Pearl Harbor, the science teacher brought her radio from home, and I listened as President Roosevelt gave his “Day of Infamy” speech.

At the 100th anniversary party I felt as if I was suddenly on the set of “Back to the Future.” We walked into the kindergarten room, and it is still a kindergarten. Don stood among the tiny chairs and said, “This is where I took apart that little piano.” I peeked across the hall. The first grade classroom was exactly the same, “easy” words printed in big letters on charts, just as when I sat at those tiny desks 75 years ago!

The physical layout of the school changed in the 980's with the addition of gymnasium and new cafeteria, joining the buildings where I attended elementary and junior high. The buildings which I considered old and out-dated in the 1940's are still there. All are in excellent condition and students still study in those 100-year-old classrooms. I wonder if they have the same old blackboards, or have they been replaced by whiteboards?

Little Hispanic girls offered Barbara and me programs as we went into the familiar auditorium, which looked exactly as we remembered. Barbara said, “Do you think this oak floor is original? At least the auditorium is now air-conditioned.” Also, the upholstered chairs were more comfortable than the old wooden ones.

When Barbara and I were pupils in that school, all the other children were Anglos. As the chorus of current students lined up in front of us, most were Hispanic with a few blacks and only a couple of Anglos. The new children sang and danced enthusiastically, although their music was (to me) incomprehensible. The principal, a young, vibrant woman with long blonde hair, gave a short speech telling us about the excellent scores the Daggett kids made on the Texas standardized tests.

I hear a lot about how bad the public schools are today. My old school with 100-year-old buildings and “disadvantaged” students is doing okay.