The ghosts of my past life: Emerson School

I don't know how many citizens read the columns I write. I live out in the boonies west of Muncie and don't get into town much where I might encounter people who read my wandering letters.

But, the other day I did meet a man who reads my drivel. He stopped me as I was grocery shopping, and he wanted to know what educational influences in my past had caused me to "deviate from the normal way of looking at things."

"Well," I told him, "the most important schooling that I had was at the far-famed and long-ago-demolished Emerson Public School." It turned out that he had no idea where Emerson School had been. Further, Emerson was named after the world-famous Ralph Waldo Emerson. Who knows anything about him today? I don't. Fame is fleeting!

I hasten to point out that there were two Emerson schools back then in the medieval times. There was my Emerson Public School and then there was the "Emerson Country Day School" on Tillotson Road near Jackson, which was out in the country at that time. My Emerson School accepted everybody - poor kids, dumb kids, cretins, drop-outs, drop-ins, etc. The Emerson Country Day School was available only to rich kids.

My Emerson School was a place where I was hazed and bullied for a year because I was a first-grade immigrant from the Jefferson School on Jackson Street near downtown Muncie. After a year of turmoil I was granted full Emerson citizenship and was no longer considered an immigrant.

My Emerson was the place where we boys once let several bottles full of angry bees loose in our seventh-grade class. This Emerson was the place where we used dried cow pies for Frisbees. This Emerson was the place where Miss Summers disciplined us boys by striking our palms with a one foot wooden ruler.

This Emerson was the place where one classmate taught us an entire dictionary of profane language. This Emerson was the place where we boys signed our own names on the bottom of the framed wall plaques (one in every room) of the Declaration of Independence. There was Geo. Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, etc., also Phil Ball and Don Harrold and Charlie Lamb and Tom Dawson.

My nine glorious years at Emerson are now just a fading memory of spit balls, paper wads, irreverent graffiti, stink bombs, loud whispering, evil notes passed back and forth, and fake "calls to nature."No kidding, we had to hold up one finger or two depending on the gravity of nature's call. Then there were stray bits of education here and there.

My class group at Emerson had some 15 boys and 15 girls. The girls were all so nice and proper and polite that it was enough to make you sick at your stomach.

Of the 15 boys - looking back I realize that 14 of us suffered from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity whatever), although that disease hadn't been invented yet. The 15th boy was teacher's pet and considered by some to be a genius, but not by we 14.

After my "education" at Emerson, I graduated from Central (1936), and then tried to matriculate into Ball State Teachers College out there in Normal City. Ball State gave us an admission test back then and I flunked English grammar. So, I had to take a remedial course in the King's English. I was so dumb back then that I didn't even know that the King was English.

Enough about me. If you want to see what remains of the old Emerson Public School, drive west on Ashland Avenue from Reserve Street, and you will see a square block of grassy park. That's all that's left. Oh, there is a lonely limestone cornerstone lying there. It says "Emerson."

Yes, Emerson School made me what I am today - mildly confused, often hostile, anti-authority, semi-illiterate, undisciplined, and an untreated victim of ADHD.

Phil Ball, who presumably writes these columns for The Star Press, has not been seen by anyone at this newspaper office since the last great flood in Muncie.

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The ghosts of my past life: Emerson School

I don't know how many citizens read the columns I write. I live out in the boonies west of Muncie and don't get into town much where I might encounter people who read my wandering letters. But, the