Kiest and Hexter Days

It must have been in late August of 1958 when my mother accompanied me to my first day of school, at Kiest Elementary in far east Dallas. Whether the other students were as nervous as me, I do not know but after about an hour in Mrs. Smithey’s first-grade class, I turned and said, “Mom, let’s go home.” She patiently informed me that was not an option. I adjusted to the life of a DISD student which would define my next 12 years. This was during the baby-boom era, and Kiest was overflowing with students. Such a surfeit of boys and girls explains the existence of “the portables,” the temporary structures erected alongside the brick-and-mortar school building. Made of wood with floors that creaked and groaned, they were never satisfactorily explained to me. They were flimsy and cold in the winter time. Somehow I got the impression that the portables were a depository for bad kids or dumb kids or unimportant kids, and was happy to vacate them in second grade.

Distracted by Vicki

I hope this confession does not scandalize my readers. Most of us boys pretended to be utterly indifferent to girls. Speaking only for myself, I can tell you it was a façade and a big lie. I knew nothing of anatomical differences or sex, but for this six-year-old the pull was strong, very strong. While I would not have admitted it publicly, those feminine faces and high voices affected me a lot. There was a girl named Vicki (always pictured in my mind as wearing a pink dress) from whom I desired to sneak a kiss. Needless to say, I never attempted to do so.

One more anecdote from first grade at Kiest is as follows. A contest was arranged to see who could bounce a basketball the most times. The other kids did a few bounces and lost control of the ball. Three bounces or five bounces or eight bounces, but not many. Sports was already an integral part of my life, and I realized the absurdity of this competition. I stood there and bounced it. Everybody was counting the bounces, and when I got to 100 I intentionally made a mistake. I could have bounced that ball all day long.

Mrs. Smithey—who had some serious halitosis—was my teacher in second grade also, while Mrs. Boley handled classroom duties in third and fourth. Third grade. That’s when I was selected with 25 others to be in the “accelerated class.” I have never understood what the criteria were for making such distinctions at age eight, although I knew it was an honor of sorts. I remember some smart kids from those two years: Tony Sandow, Barry Payne, David Twedell, Rodney Elkins, David Posey et al. A few of us formed an after-school science club and talked earnestly about becoming doctors, inventors or engineers. (I soon found out that, given my inability to do more than add, subtract, multiply and divide, I would have to consider other career options.)

The situation in Dealey Plaza

The Pennington family moved a few miles away in the summer of 1963 which meant I would be a Hexter Hawk the next three years; Kiest’s mascot was the Indian. I think Hexter was gentler than Kiest, and the same could be said for the neighborhood. It was less rough-and-tumble, and sports was less emphasized. Mrs. Baker was our teacher in fifth grade, Mrs. Dixon in sixth and Mrs. Sharp in seventh. Easily my most vivid memory of fifth grade was on November 22, 1963 when Charles Allison came back to school after eating lunch at his home across the street. He started telling everybody that President Kennedy had been shot in downtown Dallas! Soon we were in the classroom where Mrs. Baker could barely hold herself together. It was true, and Kennedy had died. We all went home, turned on the television and watched Walter Cronkite.

I was on the basketball and football teams at Hexter the last two years (in the accelerated class, as at Kiest). The P.E. teacher and coach of those teams was Bob Jett. He was a good guy who encouraged us and tried to give us some perspective about sports at the junior high, high school and college levels. For example, I recall him telling us about how the UCLA freshman basketball team—with the supreme Lew Alcindor in the pivot—had its way with the varsity, winner of the 1965 national championship.

Come to think of it, Hexter also had a female P.E. teacher, Peggy Seale. She was short, a bit rotund and not to be messed with. During one gym class, I got in a scuffle with a guy named Daryl Petton. I suppose I prevailed, which irked Miss Seale. She laid out some mats and told all the kids, perhaps 40, to gather around because Richard was going to take on Tommy Carbone. Tommy was widely understood as the best athlete at Hexter and something of a bad-ass. I had no bone to pick with him, but she told us to face off. He came flying at me with feet and fists, and I did all I could not to get embarrassed. Brothers and sisters, what Miss Seale did in arranging a fight on the gym floor would be grounds for suspension or even dismissal these days.

A European-American setting

We were almost entirely monolingual and monocultural. I remember one Hispanic family at Kiest and one at Hexter, a Jewish girl at Hexter and a boy named Geoff who came from Germany. That, to us, was exotic.

At both Kiest and Hexter, many of the girls were in the Brownies, Camp Fire Girls and Girl Scouts. They sometimes wore their uniforms to school. Very cute, but they were not all softies. Let me tell you about the cherished task of wheeling the film projector from room to room. Hey, you got out of class for a few minutes and were able to walk the halls. But the teachers, overwhelmingly women, only chose boys to do it. This was apparently a subject of grumbling among our female counterparts. How well I recall a girl who boldly raised her hand and asked, “Why do you only let the boys move the film projector? Why can’t the girls do it too?” One could easily dismiss this as a meaningless grade-school squabble, but she was absolutely right.

Sex-ed night at Hexter

Some of the boys in 6B and 7B took a special interest in cars—which at that time meant Fords, Chevys, Plymouths, Dodges, Pontiacs and so forth. We read Road & Track and Car and Driver. We wondered who would win the Indianapolis 500, the Daytona 500 and the 24 Hours of LeMans. Steve Riewe and Bo Byrd often went to the Devil’s Bowl and Green Valley to see auto races. I doubt the girls cared much about that, which brings me back to the gender issue. To my knowledge, there were no “couples” in our class those final two years, but we had clearly abandoned the guise of not being drawn to the opposite sex. The parents of a few of my classmates put them in weekend dancing classes, which meant an occasional close embrace. Oh, my goodness—things were obviously changing. We had reached puberty, and the boy-girl electricity was out in the open. It was palpable. Principal Carl Nutley called for two gatherings in the Hexter auditorium in late 1965 or early 1966: one for the girls and their mothers, one for the boys and their fathers. Fifty years have passed, so the details are long gone. I do remember a slight sense of embarrassment, seeing a film that purported to show how babies were conceived and a speaker up on stage. My father certainly lacked the finesse to tell me what I needed to know. Like most of the other students at Hexter, I just kind of learned on my own.