Growing Up In Ballard
Tue, 12/11/2007
Curiosity brought me back to see home
By John Oliver
As inescapable as daylight and dark, growing up in Ballard involved going to school; for me, Adams elementary and later James Monroe Junior High, and of course Ballard High.
They were special worlds, each in their own time. At Adams I lost my sweetheart Signe. In the third or fourth grade we performed "Tom Thumb's Wedding." Signe was the bride; some other kid was the groom and I was chosen to be the pastor who married them! Well, so much for rejection. I didn't take to drink, but it was tough.
I had one moment of fame, at James Monroe Junior High. I became the school's yoyo champ. It got me into the city championships held at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Seattle. My fame ended there on stage, when during one demonstration as I faced the audience, my yoyo string broke and the yoyo went sailing out into the crowd. I came home with a baseball, the symbol of my booby prize.
The school playgrounds were the sites of lots of festivals and competitions. I remembered a kite contest that I entered with a homemade kite. The winner would be who ever got his kite farthest out into the sky. I was way out there, chasing the leader, when I ran out of kite string. Fortunately my mother was among the bystanders so I quickly persuaded her to hightail it to the nearest store for another ball of string. My poor mother. She came back, huffing and puffing with the string. I tied it to the end of what I had and let that string till my kite was out of site. You know, I don't remember if I won or not. I think I did. But Mom was the heroine of the day.
Our visit to Ballard brought back a horde of names, people long forgotten and many of them long gone, I'm sure.
Sooner or later most kids get involved in a fight, not so different from now. For some reason a bully loved to beat me up. And he took advantage at every opportunity. Trouble was, he lived between my house and Adams school. I walked many miles through backyards and alleys to avoid walking anywhere near his house. But he inevitably found me and took great pleasure in pounding on me. One day during recess he caught me in the boy's restroom in the school basement. Somehow as he sat on my chest with my back on the cement floor I managed to bring my legs up and hook a foot under his chin. I straightened my legs and his head whacked the cement. Unfortunately for me the school principal walked into the restroom just as my attacker started crying at the top of his lungs. One look told the principal I was the culprit and deserved discipline. My punishment was to help the janitor clean up the restroom. Yessir! However, I had my glory; the bully never bothered me again.
My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Coleman, a really delightful lady, firm, kind, and a disciplinarian taught me more than academic subjects. One day she kept me after school for misbehaving. Several other hoodlums (Not real hoodlums. Ballard didn't have any real hoodlums.) and I were in her second floor classroom for an undetermined length of time. It so happened that I also had a piano lesson that afternoon. Now, unless you're gifted, a piano lesson isn't the most exciting pastime. However, this afternoon that piano lesson loomed larger than ever as the most important thing I could do with my life. Nothing was nobler than going to that lesson. So when Mrs. Coleman left the room for a few minutes I was like wildcat in a cage. I scrambled around the room and noticed that outside one window was a drain pipe to the ground. And ... within reach of the window, I opened it, climbed out, shinnied down and fled. The next day, I could have stayed home from school for all the good it me to attend class. Mrs. Coleman totally ignored me - didn't call on me, didn't scold me, didn't even look at me. I was a nonentity.
On my way out of class she took me aside. All she said was, "I don't talk to little boys I can't trust."
That's all.
But now, more than 70 years later, I hear her words the same as always, quiet, unhurried, direct but with only the emotion of the words themselves. "I don't talk with little boys I can't trust." That is easily the greatest lesson I learned in all my education before or after.
You know, I still can't play the piano. Worse, I can't find that window I climbed out of.
But what's left, for guys like me and others following behind? Frankly, much is the same. Ballard is a kind of everlasting community, not given to vast malls and unending new residential areas (those exist on the fringes, not in Ballard's heart). I was lucky to have grown up in days when change wasn't such a relentless pressure and so its character is a settled thing, like sunrises and sunsets. Ballard had a kind of lingering reputation as a tough berg ("You're from Ballard? Wow.") But I never remember any community toughness, no gangs, no frequent crimes of great notoriety. Funny to put it this way, but I grew up able to depend on Ballard. Events beyond my control moved me into the big world out there, and it's too bad I let the place be crowded out of memory for so long. It's not mere nostalgia that has drawn me back. It's curiosity, I think. So we returned and are glad.
Best of all, we'll come back. More often than before.
John Oliver may be reached via bnteditor@robinsonnews.com
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