The worst timed newspaper strike in history began in Toledo, Ohio, on November 16th, 1963. The following Thursday afternoon my classmates and I dutifully laid our heads on our desks, pretending to be asleep, while Mrs. Markowitz graded papers. I had my eyes open, watching the undulating heat rise above the steam radiator. The heat waves warped the scene outside the classroom window. This was my usual naptime activity, imagining another world on the other side of this steam curtain.
Jennifer Drake was a classmate of mine. She loved horses even more than I did. We were both horse addicts, collecting sets of stallion, mare and foal families of Appaloosa, Pinto, Morgan, and whatever horse families the Breyer company produced. I used to go to her house to play. Her father was an architect. There was a baby grand piano in a totally black-and-white decorated room with bubblegum pink carpeting. We weren't allowed in that room, but I always sneaked a peek. I loved the idea of a room decorated in such a frivolous manner, so unlike my house.
Jennifer was a little odd, like me, and didn't fit in well with the other children. Unlike me, she could make her eyes pop out of her head and then put them back in. She also knew how to roll her eyes so only the whites showed. I attributed this to her having an older brother. She also knew how to take orange slices and make huge orange smiley faces by slipping them in front of her teeth, just behind her lips. I thought this was the epitome of originality at the time.
Back then, we all knew everyone else's parents, or at least their mothers. People tended to stay in one house all their lives and you were stuck with whatever role you found yourself falling into at a young age. I was doomed to be the weird, smart girl with the odd parents.
Anyway, it was during naptime and Jennifer's mom burst into our classroom holding a red transistor radio. A transistor radio was about the size of the palm of your hand and a marvelous thing to have back then. You could listen to radio broadcasts without a cord tethering you to the electrical outlet. She rushed in, and I noticed her hair wasn't neatly combed like it normally was. Her eyes were wilder than I'd ever seen, and I thought offhandedly that maybe that's where Jennifer learned her cool eye tricks.
Mrs. Markowitz stood up as Mrs. Drake rushed towards her. I knew immediately something bad was wrong. "Jack's been shot," was all Mrs. Drake said. "Jack's been shot." I remember Mrs. Markowitz cried. So did Mrs. Drake and Jennifer. Two of my classmates' fathers had died already that schoolyear -- unusual, I know, but it was normal for my experience. I wondered why someone had shot Mr. Drake.
We were all sent home early. School was cancelled the next day. Nothing good was on television, only newscasters and solemn men with shaky, gravelly voices and the same picture of some people in a car over and over again. Mom wouldn't talk about it, and I wondered how important Jennifer's daddy must have been for us to get out of school because he was shot. I also wondered who shot him, and why. I wondered if somebody was going to shoot my daddy.
Coincidentally, President Kennedy was also shot that day. He died. He had a daughter my age and a little son Fritz’s age. I felt sorry for them, and for Jennifer and her brother, and for my other classmates who had lost their fathers.
It wasn't until we went back to school the following week that I learned who "Jack" was and found out Mr. Drake was just fine. I still felt sorry for the President's children and my classmates who had lost their daddies. It turned out to be only the beginning of many children's daddies dying -- Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, all those Vietnam soldiers, those black men who were burned and tortured down south, and many more.
In December, Mrs. Markowitz decided we would make and decorate Christmas trees for the bulletin board. Each student had a large sheet of green construction paper. We were instructed to fold it in half lengthwise. Then we were to cut out the shape of half of a pine tree and take our newly formed pine tree to Mrs. Markowitz and get her approval before irretrievably gluing on our ornaments. I was handy with scissors, and quite adept at cutting out half of something from my earlier experience with paper dolls. I sashayed up to her desk, pine tree in hand, before anyone else.
"That’s a good shape; you'll want to trim it now." I was puzzled, but not one to argue with my teacher, I returned to my desk. There I refolded my tree in half and cut around the shape once more. When I had shaved a bit more off the tree, I joined a couple of students lined up at her desk for the official Mrs. Markowitz stamp of approval.
"That's fine, but you need to trim it, Virginia." Feeling a little frustrated, I returned to my desk and once more reduced the size of my tree. I opened it up and examined it carefully. Surely, this was perfection itself. Back to the desk for judgment I went, this time in a throng of other students. While waiting for permission to decorate my art, I looked around and saw the quicker children – my usual peer group – with at least half of their trees decorated by now.
"Virginia, your tree needs to be trimmed!" Mrs. Markowitz said with a hint of impatience uncharacteristic for her. I trudged back to my seat, sighed, sat down and began to cut yet again. I held my now-thin pine tree up and looked critically at it once more. Other than being much smaller now in all dimensions, my tree still had a good shape. It would definitely be smaller than the other children's trees but the shape was good.
I took a deep breath and shakily returned to the teacher's desk. This time, I stood alone. All the others had finished their trees. Mrs. Markowitz wore her no-nonsense expression this time.
"Virginia, I want you to sit down and trim that tree right now!"
"But Mrs. Markowitz, I have trimmed it, and trimmed it, and trimmed it again! If I trim it any more, it’ll disappear."
Mrs. Markowitz threw her head back, laughed, and hugged me tightly. "Oh, Virginia," she said, tears coursing down her face, "I meant for you to decorate your tree, not cut it more!"
I still remember that bulletin board – 24 tall green construction paper Christmas trees with hand-glued ornaments, and one anorexic tree a third the size of the rest. Though skimpy on ornaments, my Christmas tree was trimmed more than all the rest.
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