This is St Lawrence Roman Catholic Elementary School, located at 231 Main Street, West Haven, Connecticut. It opened in 1917, and it's still there. I expect in five more years, I'm gonna get dinged for a donation for the 100th year anniversary . . .
The nuns at St Peter's in New Haven not having deterred mom with the threat of hell for tapping for the Jewish Community Center, this is where she and dad sent us. I attended from 1954 until 1962. My older brother was two years ahead of me, my younger brother one year behind.
In 1955 (second grade, shortly after my first venture into the world of dance) Miss Splain* requested mom's presence at a meeting wherein she told mom how when her back was turned, I would be dancing around in the aisle trying to make everybody laugh. Apparently, I wasn't nearly as circumspect in my efforts as I thought . . .
But I was already tuned into the very earliest stirrings of the "Hey! Look at Me!" impulse that I believe nearly everyone is endowed with to some degree or another. Kind of akin to the red-neck impulse that says "Hey! Watch this!" with oftentimes equally disastrous results. Like the time in 8th grade, when the four biggest guys in the class stole the girls' jump rope and I confronted them with, "Hey! I bet you can't tie me up!"
The lesson in all this? If you're gonna cry out, "Hey! Look at me!" then you need to have something to show that's worth looking at, just in case anyone does . . . otherwise, they'll stop looking really quickly.
Is this worth looking at? Don't know yet. So far, no one has looked at it but me . . .
*Miss Splain-- sounds like what Ricky would do when he made a mistake talking to Lucy . . .
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