St. Mary's

St. Mary's was a primary school I attended up to 1960. The school had 4 classrooms; 2 on the first floor and 2 on the second floor. Now my memory is getting hazy - I know that on the first floor, entering from the main door, the room on the right was first and second grade; the door on the left was 3rd and 4th grades. Yep, one grade was on each side of the room and the nun would teach alternating classes. I do not remember how the time was split, but I do remember that we had recess. The school grounds were paved with 'big kid' playground equipment. Across the street was an overgrown field with not equipment; that is where the 'little kids' played. About this time weird cards came out with a compliment on one side turned into an insult on the other side (eg. Your teeth are like stars they come out at night - I tried this on one of the nuns and she asked me how I knew she had false teeth, I was stunned as I don't think I really understood until that moment what the joke was).

I remember Jody was a tomboy who always wanted to be a horse in whatever game we played and I remember one of the girls was brave enough to jump on one of the nuns - I was stunned that nuns were people who could be touched and interacted with. I just remembered the name of another of my classmates Pugliano - I remember his name because we teased him by calling him ugly piano (and he did not care because he played the piano; I thought that was unfair because we were trying to insult him, oh well) I lived at 711 W. Clark street at this time (yes, I have used google maps to check the house out). On the way home one day, I met a kid and went to his house to play - I forgot my catechism at his house and so got in trouble when I got home because my parents had to buy another one. I have no idea why I did not remember the kids house. His name, as I learned later, was Danny Gibson and he and his parents thought I might have been trying to convert him by leaving the catechism there - they laughed when they heard how much trouble I got in for losing it.

As you may noticed, a lot of things stunned me during this time.

When I got to play on the big kids playground, there was a merry-go-round - the standard round wooden platform with metal (round pipe-style) rails that radiated out from the center that was useful for spinning it and for hanging onto while riding it. We could get that thing going so fast that kids would fly off of it; often because we would try to stand in the exact middle or just stand up and not hold on. (Did I mention that this playground was paved?). There was a monkey-bar set - oddly, my memory tells me it was both the cubic boxy kind and the rounded kind, odd that. But the real killer (and I use the word on purpose - I believe this device was on every Catholic grade school playground) was a maypole-like swing set that involved chains hanging from the top of the pole on a pivot/bearing. Since the children playing on this were of differing heights the length of different chains were varied. The ends of the chains had solid steel ladder-like hand holds; the short ones that had only one cross bar to hold on to looked kind of like a stirrup. I think the longest had 3 crossbars. So the point of this 'toy' was to run in a circle fast enough to eventually start flying while hanging on. Most people would consider this just a large mace or morning star - think about a playground toy that involved solid steel metal bars swinging freely from a chain - part of the fun of toy was to try to grab one of the bars while it is already moving, essentially running at a tangent to the circle scribed by the swings, grab on and fly. Miss a grab or try for one of the shorter swings and you will be brained.

But if you were caught playing on the emergency fire escape slide (a round metal tube from the second floor to about 14 inches off the ground - I seem to remember it as about 45' angle that flattened to parallel for about the last 5 feet), you would be punished severely like spanked by priest or knuckle-rapped by the nuns. That thing got really hot in the Montana sun.