East Rockaway High School - Rock Yearbook (East Rockaway, NY)

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CO

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CLASS OF 1939 • Recollections of our days together would be half-hearted without a mental trip back to our grammar school years at Center and Rhame Avenue schools. To those of us who attended Center, the sight of the monument of our childhood brings back a flood of memories, some wistful, humorous, or sad but still typical of every day occurrences. Recalling these days, we find pictures of ourselves not too flattering and a little unbelievable in our present status. • For many of us, our first memories originate in kindergarten where we can faintly visualize a vegetable garden tended by such earnest agriculturists as Edgar Schultz, Dorothy Simonson, and Joseph Gleason. • Our grammar school days on the whole were mostly carefree days marked by such events as the daily mid-day bottle of milk, all-too-short recesses and the advent of home work. JOHN McNAMARA ELAINE GRIFFIN • Several of our most president vice-president amusing incidents were caused by such incorrigibles as Frankie Arnoth, Jimmy Rothston and Alexander Maloney. 1 wonder if we will ever forget the day Frankie Amoth locked the sixth grade door and threw away the key much to the consternation of the principal and janitors who spent fifteen anxious minutes with stubborn skeleton keys. And of course you recall that great lover of aquatic life, Bobby Holmes, cooing kitchie, kitchie at Miss Pease's gold fish? • A familiar grammar school scene was that of those two ambitious girls, Totts Peabody and Janet Walker, vying for the honor of washing the black boards. Similarly fa- 9 miliar was the sight of those three women-haters, Jimmy Rothston, Harvey Columbine, and Mortimer Jewett Husted, pushing fair damsels into the bushes. Need we remind you of the hectic day that Evalyn Jelley heartlessly placed a tack on the substitute teacher's chair while the class breathlessly anticipated the result? ® One very clear memory is the feud between Mildred Nitshke and Elaine Wood over the Beau Brummel of Center Avenue, Herbie Frank, who was hurt in a fight. Both girls wanted to aid our hero so they finally compromised—Mildred applied mercurochrome and Elaine bandaged him with her hanky . Perhaps what we remember best of all was the day William Greis brought an oil can and a screw driver because his desk squeaked and annoyed him! The child is father to the man. o As we of the Rhame Avenue Clan reminisce about our grammar school days, the thought that we must have been some brats is uppermost in our minds. We senior girls blush when we think how stylish we must have looked in our long black gym bloomers with white middy blouses and the inevitable big red bow. Then we are none too proud of the fact that we spent our recesses playing house in the dirt. But, of course, the fact that the boys played cowboys and Indians makes us even. • Doreen Payne, our dramatic star, lacked finesse in those days, for her nervous giggle echoed everything she said. Jackie Sterett was the cause of palpitations of the heart, experienced by the majority of the girls. But the fact that this Romeo's favorite comment on the feminine sex was that all ELAINE WOOD FRANK MATZKE SECRETARY TREASURER