Hilo Days: Third-Grade Memories

Elementary School is rather a fun time for most kids. Two years of school behind us and a sense of comfort and confidence begins to infuse our souls.

I have fond memories of third grade, it's where friendships are solidified and where I learned penmanship. No longer were we the littlest ones in school. Halfway there, we were, halfway from moving up to intermediate school.

Here, from my defunct Hilo Days website, is a little about what I remember:

Mrs. Deverill’s Class

Mrs. Deverill was our third-grade teacher at Riverside School. She was a stern-looking lady who actually was quite soft-spoken. I liked her. In fact, I guess I liked all my elementary school teachers.

Anyway, toward the end of the second grade, we all started talking about which third-grade teacher we were going to get. The other teacher was Mrs. Wessel. We used to call them “Mrs. Devil and Mrs. Weasel.” The outgoing third-graders used to pull our legs and tell us that it didn’t make any difference who you got.

Both the Devil and the Weasel were terrible, they told us. As usual, we believed them – after all, they were older than we were.

Third grade is when I won second place in that Easter egg decorating context I told you about earlier. For some reason, I mostly remember things connected with this table that was in the back of the room. That’s where the Easter eggs were displayed.

The table was also the place where we put our CARE package donations. This is an interesting story. Mrs. Deverill told us we were going to have a CARE drive. Everyone was to bring something that could go into a CARE package that would be given to needy people in needy places.

I told Mom about it that night. After thinking it over for a while, she said it would be nice to send soap to the needy people. I didn’t argue – it made sense to me. So I brought three of four bars of Camay soap to school the next day. Most of the kids brought canned goods – Vienna sausages, soup, corned beef, packaged spaghetti, you name it.

A few other kids brought soap, but they brought Ivory soap. Cheap Ivory soap. My Camay was expensive, and it was perfumed. Some of the kids (mostly the girls) look at me in awe as I laid that “upper-class” toilette item on the table. The rest of the kids (mostly boys) snickered.

That table was also the place where we had our practice neighborhood store. We were told to bring empty product packages so we could practice making change and learn how a real store is run.

We had a whole bunch of different stuff to “buy.” Most of it was cheap stuff (we had a lot of bread wrappers filled with paper), most of it was common.

Not Craig’s. Craig brought an empty ham can. Again, the awestruck looks and snickers (“You mean they’re rich enough to eat ham?”) as I laid my contribution down on the table.