Ashland Elementary School

Ashland Elementary School

I was cruising through my Facebook page the other day and noticed that one of my friends belongs to a group who went to Ashland Elementary School. Scrolling through the Ashland Facebook page I was reminded of my time there. I went to Ashland only one year for Kindergarten.

When I started Kindergarten my mother, father, brother and I lived with our grandparents. This was way back in the day, before preschool and my grandmother walked me to school everyday. It was a straight shot from her house to the school on Margaretta. Everyone thought she was my mother. I thought that was very cool.

One day when we arrived at the school there was a crowd of people and firemen at the corner of Margaretta and Newstead. Of course I wanted to see what was going on. When I got up to where I could see, there was a girl my age stuck in a crack in the cement at the edge of the round sewer cover. Her right leg was in the whole all the way up to her hip and her left leg was straight out in front of her as if she were sitting on the ground. Yikes!

Right now I am alarmingly close to 60 years old and this image is still fresh in my mind. It scared the bejezus out of me. I thought that it could very possibly happen to me. I still get nervous walking or riding my bike past a sewer. I have to give myself a good talking to, to remind myself that I am too big now to even fit into a sewer. I probably won't get sucked into a sewer like I thought that long ago little girl had been.

Another memory from Kindergarten was drawing pictures on giant rolls of brown paper, rolled out on the floor. Our teacher chastised one of my classmates because he had drawn a nearly life sized man whose pants had one leg one color and the other leg another color. I thought the pants were just the greatest thing. The teacher was about to lose her mind as she attempted to stamp out this little boy's creativity.

Hope things are better there these days. That was in 1960 and there were still white kids attending school there. Still in the neighborhood. That creative little boy was a white kid. By the time I was a teenager all of the neighborhood was black and I barely remembered it being any other way, until now.