Chapter 10 of Tales That I Can Remember by Elsie Swagerty Burton
Grandma and Grandpa had always gone to Centrella Methodist Church in San Jose but Mother and Father, after visiting around, determined that the most comparable group of people their age was at First Episcopal Methodist Church at Fifth and Santa Clara Streets. This meant another group with which I was to become acquainted. While I was not able to participate in all activities outside of Sunday School, I did get to go to some of them. Mother and Father became active in the adult activities of the church and made some close friends among the group.
The years I spent at grammar school, grades three through eight, were almost pure torture. After that unfortunate start, I did very poorly scholastically in most everything but grammar, history and geography. There was one activity of which I was particularly fond. It was called tumbling. I guess I spent more time upside down than any other. This was an activity which I could enjoy by myself and I became passably good – good enough to elicit signs of approval from others.
I was a bedwetter and didn’t seem to discipline myself during the day much either. To ask the teacher to excuse me for toileting was a seemingly impossible task. I was so shy. My appearance was nothing to encourage a very favorable self image. I was always in the slightly overweight side. My hair was never well groomed, all in all, not a very attractive child. I formed a very poor opinion of myself and felt all others had as low a regard for my abilities as I did. I had very low expectations.
Tardiness was still a great problem. We lived four miles from school. There were no school buses. We walked. Dad had laid a big plank across the creek at a narrow place for us to walk over, cutting the distance to two miles. However, on rainy days mother took us in the car since providing rain gear for all of us would have been much more expensive than providing the transportation. Regular trips to Milpitas had to be made for the mail anyway. As mother had grown older her sense of punctuality had not improved. My brothers and I were in the after school group a good share of the time for that reason.
A piano instructor came weekly to the school and those who paid for lessons could have them. Grandmother left her piano with us so that I could have the opportunity to learn. This was fine for a while until Evelyn Hamilton, Cousin Leo’s wife, convinced my parents that she could do a better job than the instructor at school. This lasted for a time, but soon petered out. She had a family about like Mom’s – a child every 18 months or so. She became much too busy I am sure.
During the sixth grade, an unfortunate incident occurred. For some reason our regular teacher was away, we had a young substitute teacher. For English we were to write poems. Somehow that intrigued me. I became very excited and started right in. The words just came to me as though someone were dictating, the verses just rolled out. It was a very strange experience. It was in some sort of Edgar A. Guest style. That was the only style I knew. Instinctively I just knew it was well done. We turned the work in on Friday. I had to wait over the weekend to see what my grade would be. On Monday each person’s work was passed out to the rightful owner, except mine. I was asked to come to her desk. She said, “You copied that.” I was not prepared for that. There was no way to disprove her accusation and she wouldn’t accept the poem as mine. I was so outraged, humiliated and discouraged. The poems had been written in class so I had not had an opportunity to share it with my parents. Now when I needed to share my predicament with them, for some reason, which I cannot remember, they were occupied with some other matter. By the time they were free, I didn’t care to go into it. Instead I destroyed the poem that had caused me so much pain. I just wanted the cause of my extreme disappointment out of the way. Many times since I have wished that I had not been so rash because I have no way of knowing if it was so good that one should have accused me of copying it.
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