1952 – 1957 Howe Elementary School, Green Bay.
I remember those years well.
We still lived on our original Green Bay home at 912 South Madison Street. The walk to school was exactly 4 1/2 blocks down the street from that house. Back in those days, nobody thought about locking a door or letting kids out to play outside totally unsupervised. I would walk those four plus blocks every day, even in the snow, by myself or with my brother.
It is interesting to me that the only teacher names I remember from my past were my elementary school teachers:
Our home on Madison Street holds many good memories. In the back, we had a huge carriage house garage that even had a couple of rooms that we never used. All around it grew wild rhubarb. Behind was a hill that went down to railroad tracks and Fox River, the main river that divides Green Bay east and west. I remember in those years we still had a coal furnace that had to be fed large chunks of coal regularly. It was me and my brother’s job to take the burned chunks of coal to the curb in a huge steel container. We called them “clinkers”.
I put pennies on the railroad tracks for trains to press flat and buried treasures (small jars of pennies) beside the river. Every summer was baseball with friends all day long on a small vacant lot and fall was tackle football games at a nearby park. We would be gone all day except when we got hungry. My mother rang a cowbell at dinnertime. The only time I ever hit anyone with my fist was a fight with one of my brother’s friends during one of those games. I swung wildly and hit him in the temple. I have never been in a fight again.
A few years ago, on a trip back to Green Bay, I knocked on the door of this house and told the lady living there that this had been my home in the late 1950s. She was gracious enough to let me in to see what I remembered. They had greatly improved the home, but it still had the old fashioned black and white checkered tile and claw foot tub in the downstairs bathroom that I remembered. It brought back many memories.
We did not even have a television until the late 1950s. I was never given a key to the house. I never needed one.