1967: The Fifth-Grade Spelling Words

By Corinne H. Smith

1967:  I turned ten years old.  I was in Miss Enders' fifth grade class at Farmdale Elementary School.  Daddy was 38, and he worked as a research chemist at Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster, Penna.  Mom was a stay-at-home Mom.  We lived on Hathaway Street in West Hempfield Township.  The #1 song on the radio on my tenth birthday was “To Sir With Love” by Lulu.  Mom snapped this photograph.  No, I wasn’t wearing pantyhose yet.  Mom was growing impatient to take the picture and was yelling for me to hurry, so I slipped my shoes on quickly and ran downstairs to stand in position.  I may even be poised on tiptoes here.  You know that raw feeling you get when your bare feet touch the clammy insides of shoes meant only for socks?  Slick and sticky.  Yuck.

     Each week, Miss Enders gave us a list of spelling words.  I don’t remember how many there were.  10?  15?  20?  Our assignment was to write out each word (in our best cursive handwriting, of course), to copy a definition from the dictionary, and to use the word in a sentence.  This was a simple and universal assignment, back then.

     When you’re the only child in the household, it’s difficult to hide.  I was working on my spelling words early in the school year when one of my parents stopped by the kitchen table to see what I was doing.  (In my opinion, the inquisitor was more likely to have been my logic-oriented father.)  I explained what had to be done.  My parent thought that writing random sentences was silly and almost a waste of time.  He/she suggested that I write a story instead and incorporate all of the words within it.  This would make more sense, as it would end up as a final, cohesive and worthwhile product.  And it should certainly meet Miss Enders’ requirements, since the words would indeed be used in sentences.  It’s just that each one would be connected to all of the others.  A story would be far more interesting for my teacher to read, too.  After all, she would have to grade 28 of these homework papers each week.

     So that’s what I did.  I first looked up the words and found their meanings.  Next, I stared at them for a while and considered the possible plot that could develop from them.  Then I started writing.  I set my weekly series in a neighborhood of mice.  Why mice?  I probably wouldn’t have been able to explain it at the time.  But the choice could have something to do with the fact that our cat Tigie was an adept and ardent mouser.  Since I often had to clean up the remains after his kills, I must have subconsciously wondered what kinds of lives these tiny innocents had had.  (You can read more about Tigie in a previous post, “1960: Brother-Cat Tigie.”)  My stories came complete with at least four recurring characters -- two boy-mice and two girl-mice -- that had first names.  I don’t remember their names or any of the other details.  The stories themselves have unfortunately been lost to time.  (Miss Enders would later tell my mother that she wished she had kept them.)

     It was fun to make something out of nothing, especially with words.  I’d gotten my first taste of this glee the previous year, in fourth grade.  That’s when we learned about the poetry form of haiku.  We were all asked to write an original three-line poem with the 5-7-5 syllable pattern.  Then we had to draw a picture that went with it.  Our artwork was thumb-tacked up in the hallway outside of our classroom in time for Parents Night.  Mine was of a wheat field lying between two green trees; a gray spot with a tail sat at the right-hand edge.  Across the lower portion of the page, I had printed my haiku:

          A golden meadow

          Can hold secrets to explore.

          Maybe a small mouse.

     What can I say?  I was fascinated with those little guys at the time.  And I was reading books like E.B. White’s Stuart Little and Beverly Cleary’s The Mouse and the Motorcycle, too.  I knew that mice had other lives that could be written about.  And I wanted to be one of the people writing about them.

     I don’t remember Miss Enders talking to me about my spelling word stories.  But I do recall being taken out of class and given a series of intelligence tests.  I assume now that the school authorities were determining whether or not I would make the cut for enrollment in the district’s “Creativity Classes.”  Every so often, a handful of top fifth and sixth graders would get on a school bus and go somewhere else for the day.  No one ever spoke about where they went and what they did.  They must have been the kinds of kids who would later be labeled as “gifted.”  I guess I showed some promise along these lines, what with my story-telling prowess.  But I turned out to be relatively normal instead.  No Creativity Classes for me.  I was just an only child with a thriving, very vivid imagination.

     More than 40 years later, I was sitting around a table with other members of our local writing group, Women of Words.  We were looking through dictionaries for interesting words that began with the letter D.  We found five doozies:  dryasdust, dingus, dotard, dystopia, and dolichocephalic.  (If you don’t know that last one, check it out for yourself here.)  Then we gave ourselves the assignment of writing something with those five words in it.  We shared our pieces aloud at the following month’s meeting.  I came up with a fictional short story called “Fortunato.”  You can read it by clicking here.  This one’s not about mice.

I still use my favorite dictionary, which I got as a high school graduation present.

     I still think it’s an amusing assignment:  to take a few random words and to craft a new story around them.  Isn’t there a saying about the dictionary having all of the other books in it?  It’s true.