I mentioned I've designated this "photo archive week." Here is the 6th grade (graduating) class at Daniel Webster Elementary School in Seattle...a long time ago.Months ago I got a Facebook friend request from someone who also graduated from Ballard High School in 1968. I didn't recognize her name but clicked "Accept" nonetheless. Seems we went to school together all the way back to elementary school. Yesterday I got an email from her about a reunion she's hosting at her house for the graduates of Webster Elementary, Class of '62. The email contained a link to a web site she's set up, and the home page includes this photo. I've got one just like it buried in a file someplace but I haven't looked at it in years.
Looking at that photo brought back interesting memories. I can only remember the names of a half dozen of those people but I can recall most of them - the kid who could draw amazing pictures, the girl who was always the teacher's pet, the boy who was very athletic....
If you must, you can click to enlarge the photo. I'm the weenie-looking kid squinting in the middle row, sixth from the right. Scared of his own shadow. Might have weighed 30 pounds, couldn't throw even like a girl, and had to attend summer school to catch up on arithmetic (do they even call it that anymore?).
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this one tells a story I'd just as soon forget. The rest of my life I'll remember Knute Olsen, fourth row up, fourth in from the right. He and his friend Paul Kenner regularly ambushed me on the way to and from school. I was the class runt, something that continued into James Monroe Junior High, and if boys will be boys they will find a way to pick on the kid at the bottom of food chain.
I won't be able to attend the gathering, and I have mixed emotions about that. It would be interesting to see some of the people in that picture and find out where life has taken them. But everyone says that when you go to a reunion you step back into who you were; the old dynamics take over. And I really hated the dynamics of my life at Daniel Webster Elementary.
Besides, it's real possible that I'd be the only one who showed up. Wouldn't that be awkward!
2 comments:
I looked at the photo first thing and picked you out, before I continued reading the blog. I did not enjoy my public school years at all. I was very much a wallflower and extremely shy. Some kids were not nice to me either.
I hated Jr high for the same reasons. I was tall and gawky and awkward, and I was picked on. You couldn't pay me to go to a reunion with those people.
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