Waterman Street School - Side View

Wait! I haven't moved on yet.

This is the east side of Waterman Street School. See the front entrance to the right? Actually, there were two twin front entrances. This one is the one nearer to the eastern side. On those steps leading up to the front doors I remember discussing the life's mysteries, such as how to make an egg's shell soften to feel like a thin membrane and to make it look like a hog's ball (soak it overnight in vinegar). I was fooled. Somebody, I don't remember who showed me the soft-shell egg and told me it was a hog's ball.

On those steps one time Larry S. pulled out a condom and showed me, and I was impressed with the little white O-ring around the opening of it. Which I had a very scientific observation that went something like this: "so that is a rubber? Where do you buy them at?"

About 12 or 13 years later again Larry would take a condom out of his pocket. This time it was on the back row of the Hill Street Baptist Church. I wasn’t along with Larry and my other friends that Sunday night but I got several first hand accounts. They heard that on Sunday nights at Hill Street Baptist Church some loose teenage girls went there and they were easy to pick up. So, the boys went to check it out. During the sermon Larry got bored and pulled out a condom and started playing with it. It wasn’t long until he blew it up and tied a little knot in the O-ring thing. His cousin, also one of us, reached over and flipped the balloon shape rubber. Larry wasn’t expecting it and it got loose from him and landed in the aisle. There was a big fan at the near the back pews that kept the air circulating and brought in air from the outside. The inflated rubber was yanked into action by the fan’s wind current. It floated and gently bounced down the aisle like it had a soul of its own and wanted it saved by coming down to the preacher’s inspiring sermon. Larry and the others quickly left.

Many years later, Larry's younger brother became the preacher of Hill Street Baptist Church.

In the picture see the fire escape ladder coming from the two class rooms on the second floor? One time a boy named Van rammed my head into the fire escape at ground level and it took about 8 stitches to sew me up. It was right in the center of my head, I looked kind of like Frankenstein's Monster for several years until the scar finally went away. If I look closely, I can still see a hint of it.

Van died about ten years ago. He was a diabetic. He died because he went to the hospital to have a leg amputated and they removed the wrong leg which caused complications.

His brother died last month at age 78 because he got fed up with all the medications he was taking and threw them all out.

Once, when I was in about the 3rd or 4th grade a boy and girl from Poland came in the middle of the year and were enrolled. The spoke with a strong accent. They just were different from us. Not different bad, just different. If most of the kids wore denim or corduroy, they wore what looked like dressed pants. This was not long after World War II, so I would think they were refugees. They were in school over a year and one day they just quit coming.

Mrs. Whitehead, the principal, called me out of class and asked me if I knew where the Polish boy and girl lived. I said I did. I was pretty much all over the area. She asked, or told, me to go to their house and see why they haven't been at school. Which I did. The house was empty. They vamoosed. I remember it was pouring down raining. And what is even more strangely, their house, by the railroad tracks were only about three blocks from the rooming house Mrs. Whitehead lived in. Why send an 8 year old to do a job of a grown up, when it was just down the street form where she lived? One of my puzzles.

When Van rammed me against the fire escape Miss S carried me to the teacher's lounge and padded and kept a towel on my head. She had my head in her lap. I found out how nice and soft unrelated women can be. We stayed in that position until my Daddy could get there in his police chief's car to rush me to the hospital.

Darn! I was enjoying using her thighs as a pillow.

Miss S one time had me walk to her apartment with her after school. She had caught a pigeon that somehow got in her room and she wanted to give to me. She had it in a box for me and I carried it home. We lived in an older house and had a non-working bathroom on the back porch.... actually, we haven't tried using it since my parents had one built inside the house. I kind of treated the bathroom on the back porch as a secret hideout or a private den. I put the pigeon in there, had bread crumbs all over the place and water.

The next morning I rushed into where the bird was at and there was nothing but scattered feathers. I suppose a rat or a cat got ahol of it. I don't remember telling Miss S about the extinction of the pigeon.

Miss S that year married Bill Kenney, who was a young reporter for the Marietta Journal. He is now an elderly editorial writer and history writer for the same paper. I hear his wife, Alberta S Kenny doesn't even know her own name anymore.