In November 1963 I was 10 years old,in the 4th grade at Our Lady of Victory School in Columbus, Ohio. Actually, the school was located in Grandview Heights;then a solid middle class working suburb of small-town Columbus. I could get to the cornfields on my bike. This was the same school my mother attended in the 1930’s as it was then an all girls school. The leaves were almost all off the trees and the yards had a beautiful thick colored carpet of golds, reds, and brown.
I had an afternoon paper route then. It was only 35 or so papers I delivered. My dad had my brothers give me a small part of their routes. I earned 1.5 cents per paper for the daily and a whopping 5 cents for the big Sunday paper. The Sunday paper was a morning edition and it had to be “stuffed” which meant they were delivered by truck bound in wire like small miniature bales of hay and thrown from the truck into our front yard by the curb. I had my own “dikes” (wire cutter tool) to get at those papers. It came in 2 sections, so one section had to be “stuffed” into the other. I then placed the papers into my red wagon which I attached to my Schwinn bicycle in the rear with a clothsline and off I would go to deliver them. On several occasions, the wagon tipped over. On one cold, wet and blustery November Sunday morning the wagon went over on Club Road which was on hill by the Golf Course. I lost about 8 papers which meant after I finished my route and crying, I went down to the Pharmacy on the corner of Guilford and Arlington Avenue and rifled the retail paper box that was on the sidewalk outside. I would put a quarter in the box (the cost of 1 paper) and take all of them. Then back on my bike to finish. By this time it would be around 7:30AM on Sunday morning. I was now home,dry and hungry. Now before I left on my route, I ate 2 pieces of toast with Peanut Butter which is still my favorite comfort food to this day. However, I would not be eating now… I was going to attend Mass with my parents and in 1963 we were obligated to fast 3 hours before receiving the Holy Communion. This Canon Law was abolished in 1964. Obviously, this rule wasn’t working in the Church’s favor. Anyway, after attending Mass, my Mom would make a glorious breakfast with fresh donuts from the Tremont Bakery, eggs, bacon, more toast with peanut butter
on fresh baked bread from the bakery. I can remember my mother calling the bakery to order the bread. “Betty, I’ll take 4 loaves of butter bread sliced.” One loaf would go in the bread box; the other 3 in the freezer.
So, back to Our Lady of Victory School pictured below.
It looks like a building out of a Dickens novel, doesn’t it? The nuns convent was right next to it here.
My teacher in the 4th grade was Sister Mary Dorothy. She was probably 65-70 yrs old and our classroom consisted of over 50 kids. Now , as you no doubt can see, this building could pass for a state mental institution, but instead, our classroom was a zoo. Kids collected together with various learning disabilities and an old nun that had a heatlamp on her desk warming her face and an electric single burner that she would use to cook soft boiled eggs.
Freddy D. was still wetting his pants in the 4th grade. He’d been doing that for the last four years. I was one of the wilder animals. The classroom was in the front left corner 2nd floor. The social structure of the class was basically divided into the kids from North of 5th Avenue (which was me) called Arlington and the so-called students from the South side of the road; Grandview and Marble Cliff. Marble Cliff was an Italian community formed outside of the city limits because these Waps were scorned upon in Columbus society. Marble Cliff was so named because of the granite and limestone quarries that provided Columbus with the stone to build the city. These are the kids the Stratman brothers shared their schooling with. The Monteneros, Sconos, Moroni, Balagoni, Maselli, Oti. I had a posse that I protected from this crowd. Mark Rough, Frank Ross, Camille Cenci, Bobby Lombardi. I remember defending them from the bullying Jerry Balagone, the leader of the Italian bully pack.
I was fighting every month, sometimes between the parked school buses, more often in the dirt field behind and below the school.
I guess I was craving the attention. I was also going home with my clothes torn and catching hell for that. I was a very poor student and often looking for attention. I used to have a pea shooter made out of a plastic straw that was only about 2.5 inches long so that it was hidden in my fist in class. I would take great pleasure in “beaning” one of the italian kids or shooting the peas off the blackboards. And then I would spend the rest of the day in the cloakroom in the dark. It was November, so I just piled up the coats and made a nice bed for myself.
At home Mom And Dad now had 5 children, Jeannie was now 4 and Tim was 2.They were busy and I was the child in the middle.
Now to Peter, Paul & Mary. In 1963, mostly young afro-american men were being taken out of the inner cities of America and
shipped to fight in the jungles of Vietnam. I was only 10, but I was reading the newspaper every day. I mean you have to know the product you’re selling. Then came Friday, November 22, 1963 and JFK, our beloved Catholic president was dead. I still remember the day…The nuns were red faced from sobbing and we were told to go home. I didn,t go straight home. I went to Miller Park and followed the creek to the Scioto river. It was a place where I would spend many an afternoon in a few years playing hookey.
When I arrived home, the newspapers were there and people would stop and ask me to sell them one. I told them I couldn’t. Even though it would have been extremely profitable, I knew there would be no extras in the Vendor boxes that I could rifle.
Like the one in front of the pharmacy..
So there was always music in my house. Dad belonged to the Columbia Record Club and albums came like clockwork every month. Mostly classical, but also some popular and Broadway Musicals. Peter, Paul & Mary entered my life through this channel. The Album “In the Wind” is still one of my favorites.
We had an old turntable attached to a big mono floor speaker that stood about 3 feet high in the basement. There were a few of Dylan’s poems on the album “Blowing in the Wind”, “Quit your low down ways”, and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s alright”. ” I learned every song on that Album and learned one of the harmony parts. At 10 yrs old, I could sing Mary’s part. Here are the lyrics. And of course, I was in love with her.
The folk music scene was being transformed
Dylan and PPM had cut their teeth in the Greenwich Village Coffehouses of Manhattan. It really was the beginning and Center of the Anti-war movement. A few years later, it would move to San Francisco and the Flower Children. “If your going to San Francisco, be sure to wear a flower in you hair.”
November 22