Chapter 42

Although I was a kindergarten dropout, I was a good student from Day 1 of first grade.  I loved Miss Fetters, my teacher in Green City, Missouri, where we lived at that time. She was tall, with a kind face, and always wore these beautiful wool suits. She never married, but her affection for children was evident from the beginning.  We learned phonics, and I was an avid reader by the end of the year.

My second grade experience, as I have already related, was not so much fun, under the glaring eye of the cranky Sister Michelle, at Maple Lake’s St. Timothy’s School.

Already feeling alienated from the other kids, who made fun of my name incessantly, I retreated into learning. For years, any time a teacher asked a question, my hand would go up. I almost always knew the answer. One teacher once looked around the classroom and said, “Anybody besides Linda?”

I think she was being sarcastic.

Teachers often gave me extra tasks because I was often done with in-class assignments before the others. In eigth grade, the school principal and my teacher, Sister Arnolda, asked me to put together a school “newspaper.” It wasn’t really a newspaper, but a compilation of poems, short stories, and other writing by students in every grade, to be published at the end of the year.

Our school mascot was the St. Tim’s Ponies, so we called it The Pony Express. I thought it was very clever.

The school had a basketball team, and the cheerleaders were the top girls in eigth grade. Chosen by the nuns, it was not a popularity contest, so I was chosen to be one. I felt awkward in this role, not being the most athletic person, but I could shake a pom-pom with the best of them.

When I got to high school, I became even more shy and reserved, always afraid of being taunted. I wanted to be on the school newspaper but was too shy to ask anyone, so I just went into the room where it was produced and worked on my lunch hours, writing (without a byline) and editing copy, running the mimeograph, whatever was needed. The school yearbook always showed the newspaper staff without me in the picture, because nobody ever noticed was a member, I guess.

During my senior year, the English teacher, Mrs. Anderson, asked me if I could help two of the boys in my class by tutoring them for the final exam.

“If they don’t pass it, they won’t graduate,” she told me.  I was proud to be asked, but nervous about being alone with two of my popular classmates.

So for about a month on Sunday afternoons, they came to my house, and I helped them understand how to diagram a sentence, some basic grammar, and what Macbeth was all about.

It was actually fun!

They really appreciated the help, and neither one had been mean to me over the years. After graduation, they both came up and thanked me.

Now I had taken classes in high school to prepare me for life on my own. In those days, and in small towns, when you graduated you were on your own. You got a job, found a place to live (besides with your parents), and embarked on your adult life. So I took classes that might help me find a job: typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, and such. All girls were expected to take home economics, and all boys had to take shop. Everyone had to take physical education. (Not my forte.)

I got good grades in everything except math, and straight As in English, history, and biology. But math beyond the basics just defeated me.

In my sophomore year, I took algebra and struggled with it — even more so when I missed several weeks of school for strep throat, flu, and so on. The first D I got in life was in that class. So what did I do in my junior year? I took advanced algebra. Now, I could have taken geometry, but it looked really hard, and I figured I had lived through basic algebra, so how much harder could advanced algebra be?

Lots. The clue is in the word “advanced.” Duh.

It didn’t help that I missed almost two weeks of my second go-round with mumps, plus a fall from a horse that put me out another week. I was lost. My second D. They were both for just one report card, not the whole year, but I was devastated.

One of my favorite teachers, besides my English teachers, was Mr. Bolyard. He was the high school principal, taught senior social studies, and was also the school counselor. He was a stern disciplinarian, but I really liked his clear approach to teaching. In the fall of my senior year, I was in study hall, working in the school library which was at the back of the room, when someone came and told me Mr. Bolyard wanted to see me.

I was intrigued but a little panicked. I mean, this guy was kind of scary and kept a wooden paddle in his office — which he used. Oh, the good old days!

When I got there, he sat me down and leaned forward across his desk and pinned me with a black-eyed stare.

“So,” he said. “Where are you going to college?”

I was stunned and speechless.

“I don’t think I can go to college,” I said tentatively, not wanting to rile him.

“Oh, yes you are,” he said. “Not going would be such a waste.”

“I don’t think my parents can afford it.”

“There are ways,” he said.

He talked to me for a while, and I got excited about the idea. It was a dream I never dared to dream

“You go home tonight and talk to your parents,” he ordered. “See what they think. Come back tomorrow, and we’ll talk.”

That night at supper, I told Mother and Daddy I needed to talk to them about something after dinner. They looked surprised. God knows what went through their heads, because I never asked such a thing before.

So after dinner, we went into the living room and sat down. I told them I wanted to go to college. Before I could explain the conversation with Mr. Bolyard, Daddy slapped his knee, threw his head back, and laughed as hard as if I had told him a great joke.

Once again, I was stunned.

I was trying not to cry when I asked, “Is there any way you could help me if I try to go?”

Daddy replied, “I have one college fund, and it’s for your brother.”

Dale was eight.

(Mother later said that he never had a college fund for any of us.)

I went upstairs, trying not to cry, and Mother followed me.

“If you can find any way to go to college, you do it!” she said. “I’ll slip you a little bit from time to time to help out, but that’s all I can do.”

The next day,  I met with Mr. Bolyard again.

I told him about Daddy’s reaction.

Have you ever seen a cartoon where steam comes streaming out of somebody’s ears?

It was like that. His black eyes snapped, and he leaned forward toward me over his desk again.

“You are going to college,” he said in a clipped voice. And then he told me about scholarships, loans, grants, work-study, and such.

He drove me, along with his own daughter, 35 miles away to St. Cloud to take the college entrance exams, and helped me fill out the paperwork as much as he could.  Daddy only had to fill out a financial form so I could qualify for student loans. He reluctantly agreed to do that. Cheated on his income, just like he always did on his taxes.

And so I went to St. Cloud State.

Epilogue (Cindy): Linda and I had drifted apart but she had, as she always did, paved the way for me to go to college. I didn’t find it quite as daunting because she told me about student loans, scholarships, and work-study, all of which I eventually used to help me pay for my education. I also spent my first year after graduating from high school working full-time and saving every penny I could so I, too, could go to St. Cloud State. It never dawned on me that I might go somewhere else — after all, that is where Linda went. I wanted to make up for the year that I had to spend working after high school, so I took as many classes as I could and didn’t take the summers off but continued taking classes. I also worked at least 20 hours a week, either waitressing or via work-study programs at school. But I saw very little of Linda and was deep into my “hippie” phase: protesting the war and marching for civil rights. I left St. Cloud State as I entered my senior year, heading to Alaska where the plan was to finish my degree. That never happened.

But that’s another story.