March 10, 1965
The dates that stick in your memory
March 10, 1965
I got an F on the test - that's not a flunking F, it's a C+ or B- equivalent. He didn't mark anything wrong, so I guess there was just something missing. We had a test on basketball in gym and then played one short game of basketball. I only made one violation - TRAVELING!! Of all things! I guess we start tumbling Friday, I guess.
March 10, 2006
Tests, mysterious tests. I still do not understand this grade on my 10th grade history test, which, if you recall was a single essay. My guess, now that I am a teacher, is that the entire class bombed and he got tired of writing comments before he got to my exam. But he couldn't fail the whole class, so he curved the grades.
This was modern European history, which I think went from the 1400s to sort of the present (i.e., a little past WWII). I started off strong in the course, but slipped second marking period and stayed in the B range, by the skin of my teeth. The odd thing is that I experienced one of my great "aha" moments sitting in Mr. L's history class. We were learning about Voltaire, and something he said made me look at Voltaire's portrait in my text and realize he had actually lived. Suddenly, I was able to grasp the reality of history -- flesh and blood people, now accessible only through the documents and artifacts they left behind. But Mr. L never asked me about that.
March 10, 2023
It’s funny how dates can stick in your mind. March 10. It’s the day Pop-pop died in 1964. My dad’s father, Harry Chester Barraclough, was the only grandfather I knew well, since we visited him at least once a year. We had also lived with him and his third wife (Grandma Mabel) for several months when we moved from Nebraska to New Jersey. As a kid, I used to say I had eight grandparents, which wasn’t quite true. Pop-pop had been married three times. The first was Emma, with whom he had two children; all three died between 1911 and 1915. The year Emma died, he married his housekeeper Rachel, who was the mother of my dad and his older brother Joseph. She ran off with a younger man when my father was five, and eventually married him, becoming Grandma Hanby. Husband 2 died when I was a baby, and Rachel lived with us for several miserable months (according to my mother). Sometime later, she got hitched again and became Grandma Walker. In 1944, the year my parents were married, Pop-pop found love for the third time and married the feisty, garrulous lady we knew as Grandma Mabel.
Elsewhere in the country, my mother’s parents were married 55 years.
Ancestry labels Emma, Bob Hanby, George Walker and Grandma Mabel as my “step grandparents”, which is probably genealogically true in some way, but only I only knew Mabel. It is weird that realize that Pop-pop was the only grandparent I really knew who was a blood relative. I saw my mother’s parents twice in my entire life, for short visits when I was four and again when I was twenty-four. So my laconic, probably introverted Pop-pop, who hated to travel, provided my only insight into my genetic heritage. Grandma Mabel did the talking for both of them, as he spent his mornings in the downstairs printing shop. He’d come up for lunch and watch soap operas on tv while he sorted his huge stamp collection. If the weather permitted, he would be out in the garden or tending his bee hives. If he had to be inside, he’d nap on the couch. His snoring voice and his speaking voice were the same: low, nasal, and very sonorous.
Here’s the kind of person he was, in three stories.
Young Bob Hanby came to plead for Harry to give Rachel a divorce, threatening to throw himself into Richard’s Run, the creek that ran by the print shop. Dickie’s Ditch, as it was known locally, was mostly mud except during hurricanes. Harry looked at the ditch, said “Go ahead and jump, you damn fool” and went back to work.
There used to be a trolley line that ran through town to the oystering communities about a mile away on the Delaware Bay. It shut down in the 1920s, and Pop-pop bought a trolley car and put it in the far reaches of his property, where it became the favorite playhouse for my father and his schoolmates.
Southern New Jersey is below the Mason-Dixon Line, and the town where he lived was about as segregated as any small town in Dixie. But Pop-pop hired and trained Black men as Linotype operators and printers. Before he died, he sold the business to one of them, passing over a grandson and prompting much grumbling in town.
He went into the hospital on November 22, 1963; we got the call the evening, a few hours after the news of the Kennedy assassination. When he died on March 10, 1964, it hit me harder than Kennedy’s death. It pleases me deeply that he shares a birthday with my daughter.
Nice photo too! Back in those days, people dressed to the nines for their excursions! The glasses were back in style in my "day".