Its Raining Its Pouring

Today I woke up to the sound of a gentle rain outside.

When I was in first grade and waiting for a bus to pick us up for school we engaged in the rhyme.

Its Raining its Pouring
The old man is Snoring
Bumped his head and fell out of bed
and Couldn't get up in the Morning

I highly dispute the premise that everything I needed to learn in life I learned in kindergarten.

My memories:

Kindergarten was at Martin School. We lived in an apartment that was always cold. It was in an a very busy street in South San Francisco that faced the huge hill that separated the suburb from the Brisbane and the city. We were the class of 1968. We had little understanding of that then, We were major baby boomers and there were not enough classrooms for us. We were in split sessions (morning or afternoon sessions) for several years until classrooms could be built.

Martin school had a great view of the industrial base that provided for its support. South San Francisco was truly the industrial city that it still proclaims on the hill today. A couple of steel mills spewed out smoke. There were slaughter houses that were serviced by the railroad. Industry was good then. It was one of the main reasons we came to California. The tax bases before prop 13 allowed teachers to make a salary that was not available in other parts of the country. In 1955 in Colorado, teaching was a secondary job for many. They paid for it in the same manner. Dad came to South San Francisco in a "show me the money!" phase. He was tired of scrapping by and falling in debt because a custodian was worth more than a teacher.

Three things happened at this school.

Incident One:

One day my ornery friend talked me into my first piece of defiance. As the students lined up to go outside to recess we stood on top the the table and shouted Fuck at them. Frankly, I did not know what Fuck meant. But it landed me in the principals office. He showed me a big stick and said that I would be struck with it if I ever did something like that again.

Mom asked me what happened at school today when I got home. I blew it off and said oh nothing. "Thats not what I heard she said." She told me that what ever I got at school I could expect twice as much when I got home.

Incident two:

Some kid threw up all over the floor in Kindergarten. What a mess. Suddenly it drew a crowd. Everyone had to go take a look. Spectacle draws crowds. Sometimes for no good reason.


Incident Three:

I petted a cat on the way home from school. The cat had ring worm. I got ring worm. Modern medicine had not advanced to the point where they had discovered that ring worm can me treated with antibiotics. Antibiotics in this era came from big needles in stainless steel tubes. Penicillin was a daily shot sequence for about 8 days.

The treatment for ringworm was the shave the area (my head) and treat it with topicals. I was slathered with a cream that smelled like desinex and wrapped with a nylon cap made from womens socks. Every other week I went into Kaiser and got a sunlamp treatment on it. I wore a baseball hat continuously. Even for the photos where they wanted me to remove the hat.. nope it stayed on. This is probably why I am not a big hat wearer today. It seemed like this happed over the period of 2 years. I am sure it was less than that. When my hair grew back, my mom always cut my hair in to what they called a crew cut. I had a patch on the back of my head that even up into high school did not grow hair in sufficient density so that it didn't call attention to itself. Kids would ask what happened there. I told them that was where Quick Draw McGraw shot me.

But life moved on. So have I. Its a lot better life now than that time.

:) Pat