In 1957, the grade school in Hailey, Idaho was an aging brick building on a hill above my grandmother’s house, its architecture the apparent inspiration for the Norman Bates home in the movie Psycho. An added fire escape, a three-foot metal tube, extended at an angle from the top floor to the ground. In case of fire, schoolchildren on the top two floors were expected to climb through a small classroom alcove into the tube and slide one by one to safety. First-floor students were instructed to jump out the windows. There were no classrooms in the basement, which was mostly taken up by an ancient coal furnace, the reason that the building, even with the fire escape, was known as a firetrap.
I never saw the inside of it. My parents lived in Hailey but worked in Sun Valley, and my mother enrolled me in the first grade at Ketchum Elementary in the fall of 1957, when we moved back from Sawtooth Valley. My grandmother had told her the building was unsafe, probably because she didn’t want me hanging around her house after school. But it really was a firetrap, in essence a large square chimney filled with kiln-dried wooden floors, walls, and furniture.
It hadn’t helped that the previous year, a giant section of plaster had fallen off the ceiling onto an empty first-grade desk. “John would have been in that desk if he’d been in that school,” my mother told friends who asked her why I was going to school in Ketchum.
Ketchum Elementary was relatively new. It had been built in the late Thirties, and its brutalist architecture reflected utilitarian notions about education. Newer schools looked like factories because that’s what they were. Students were hard-to-shape raw materials that would end up—rolled, stamped, and pressed—as product.
Corporal punishment was common. Every teacher used it, more or less judiciously, except for Mrs. Mac, the third-grade teacher, who shouldn’t have been allowed around children. Students were spanked or verbally humiliated in front of classes. Bullying of younger students by older ones was an every-recess occurrence.
Nobody got sent to the principal’s office, because teachers took care of discipline problems themselves. It was a strategic maneuver, because Mr. Jefferson, our principal, had a soft heart. A trip to his office, and the gentle talk that ensued, could undo weeks of aversive conditioning.
The worst punishment, which qualified as broad-spectrum terrorism, was Ketchum Hot Lunch. It exists in my memory as cases and cases of #10 cans filled with slimy lima beans, whole plums in radioactive purple syrup, and bits of pork in a sauce that matched library paste in texture and color but didn’t taste as good.
Students ate off thick steel military surplus trays. We had to eat everything on them before being let out for midday recess. About once a week, on pork-and-white-sauce days, I would sit staring at my food until the bell rang for classes. Usually, though, I could find other students who would eat the food I couldn’t stomach, and I could get out on the playground for a few minutes of hiding from bullying older students before heading back to the classroom.
There were other tricks, ones that involved sticking slices of processed cheese onto the undersides of soup bowls (if the teacher picked the bowl up to see if you were smuggling food to the garbage cans, the cheese went with it), or cramming empty milk cartons full of wilted lettuce and wrinkled grapes and mushy bananas. These tricks worked best, we knew, when the teachers on lunchroom duty brought their own lunch. The ones that ate the lunch we did took a grim joy in catching picky eaters.
To this day, I cannot eat food that reminds me of what we were forced to eat at Ketchum Hot Lunch. The good news is that food like that is mostly not made anymore, and the supplies of it that were World War Two surplus were eventually removed from school lunch programs and taken to hazardous waste dumps. But even the cornbread, generally considered benign nourishment, would suck every bit of moisture out of your mouth before starting on the rest of your bodily fluids.
Cornbread remains a point of contention in my life. Julie likes it and would bake it if I would eat it. I won’t. She doesn’t.
She does cook beets for her own consumption. She loves beets, but they, too, came in #10 cans at Ketchum Elementary. They give me flashbacks.
Adulthood brings an adult perspective. Having spent thirty years teaching, I can look at the teachers of Ketchum Elementary as people struggling to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic to near-feral children, all the while dealing with poverty-level paychecks and difficult personal situations. Even Mrs. Mac, who would periodically lose her shit and beat the crap out of one of her third graders, now looks to me like a deeply suffering human being, one who could have used antidepressants in conjunction with, say, primal-scream therapy.
Mr. Otto, famous for chasing a student around his sixth-grade classroom and tearing the kid’s shirt off before the kid jumped out of the second-floor window, was married, with children, gay, closeted, and tormented, at least until he divorced and, with a new partner, opened an antique store on the Oregon coast. Mr. Bell, the seventh-grade teacher, used a paddle made from an oar on students at the slightest excuse, and sometimes with no excuse at all, and put way too much emotional energy into making his classroom the cosmos and himself its supreme leader. Mrs. Pyrah, the fourth-grade teacher, hung herself in her woodshed one winter evening and the fourth graders got a whole week off. Mr. Pender, who taught physical education, drank beer with his lunch, and now and then went to sleep at his desk. Mr. Ruiz, who was more intelligent than anyone else in the school, taught math for a couple of years but then quit to become an electrician and, rumor had it, died in an electrical accident. Miss Mizer, the school district’s guidance counselor, gave IQ tests to problem students (that was most of us) and used the results to advise twelve-year-olds to go to college or not, to major in psychology or not, to marry or not. She was a eugenicist when eugenics was no longer cool, and the Stanford-Binet was her tool.
Trauma studies are a hot topic in academic circles these days, and people have written PhD theses on the concept of education as systemic violence. PTSD is what a diploma certifies, and students graduate into eternal educational recurrence, condemned to constantly relive a series of shocking violations of the self.
Well, duh. Even before lunch.
Education at Ketchum Elementary was violent. Mr. Jefferson had a soft heart, but he had been a radio officer flying in Air Force bombers during World War II and had traumas—his own and other people’s—in his past.
I remember him reading our eighth-grade English class a story by John Galsworthy, “Quality,” about an old London artisan bootmaker who starves to death because he can’t make a living in a world of machine-made footwear. The last line of the story has the narrator saying, “He made good boots,” and when Mr. Jefferson read it, he burst into tears.
Mr. Jefferson had PTSD himself, and not from being principal at Ketchum Elementary. Galsworthy’s story had instead broken through Mr. Jefferson’s willed forgetting of what machines had done to human art, human touch, and humans themselves—not to mention what Hiroshima had done, and the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the recent assassination of John Kennedy.
Galsworthy’s story had briefly made Mr. Jefferson remember a kinder world, one where old bootmakers and kind principals could survive.
Mr. Jefferson must have known that children at Ketchum Elementary were being traumatized, but he also must have been certain we would face far greater violations of ourselves, once we were adults.
I left Ketchum Elementary knowing the rudiments of reading and writing, and Mr. Ruiz had taught me enough math that I got through high-school algebra and geometry without much trouble, or much studying for that matter. My fellow students were educated too, even the ones whose IQ scores had Miss Mizer recommending they quit school at sixteen and learn a trade.
We all could write by the time we entered high school. That’s astonishing to me now, having taught composition to college students. If Ketchum Elementary crippled us, it was a crippling with a purpose, one that prepared us for the world we had to live in, where you had to know how to read and write, watch out for angry people, eat what life put on your plate, and prefer PTSD to really seeing what the world was like and losing one’s shit.
Hailey Grade School, that mortal threat to generations of students, didn’t burn down. It was condemned and bulldozed. A new, fireproof school was built across town, next to the high school.
Students from Ketchum, Hailey, and Bellevue all attended that high school together, in a building the same age as Ketchum Elementary. It was a violent place, too—more violent, if you considered that the bullies were bigger and some of them were administrators.
If I had gone to Hailey Grade School, I would have spent more time with my grandmother, as my parents’ workday ended two hours after school got out. I regret not being able to ask the questions I would ask her now, but back then I didn’t have the words to ask them. If I had, she wouldn’t have given me answers I could have understood. Once she told me I was an old soul, and when I asked her what that meant, she said, “You’ll find out.”
Toward the end of her life she collected books on the occult and reincarnation. I have a few of them on my bookshelves, but they raise more questions than they answer. I was better off in Ketchum, where the books did not tempt one down mystical rabbit holes.
I spent many two-hour stretches in the Ketchum Community Library, where the wonderful librarian, Mrs. Conley, let me start on the adult books after I had read everything in the children’s section. I was twelve when I began reading Peter DeVries, a New Yorker writer who wrote decadent novels of manners, whose male narrators were profoundly disaffected lawyers and doctors and academics. These men fought nasty verbal battles with nasty spouses and had serial affairs with unpleasant lovers. They were trapped and bored in their lives, which grew ever more confining, and the novels usually ended with everyone in a state of sullen emotional exhaustion. I decided DeVries was writing operator’s manuals for adulthood.
DeVries was an esoteric writer for 1960s Idaho, but there were a number of wealthy aging divorcees in town that liked his work, and they bought his books as they came out, read them in book club, and donated them to the library. I read them all.
I was too young to understand the vicious subtleties of sexual ennui, but DeVries was a master of dialog, and that dialog answered more questions than it raised. An old soul, for example, meant a soul that was world-weary and cynical, and capable of witty repartee when prodded out from under a slough of despond.
It was easy enough, as a seventh grader, to adopt DeVriesian dialect as my own. I told Mr. Bell, who liked words almost as much as he liked administering corporal punishment, that my life as a seventh grader was a slough of despond, but I pronounced slough to rhyme with cow.
“It’s pronounced slew,” he said. “Besides, you’re too young. Save the sloughs for us.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, which was a good thing at the time. Now I might tell him that his life must be a slew of sloughs, or simply say that he should slough off and die. That would have gotten me in bad trouble with Mr. Bell, and I might never have made it to the age I am, a young soul in an old body, with, as my grandmother might say, more than a few traumatic incarnations and educations and hot lunches ahead of me.