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Philip Spiess
Sally Fox: My mother, my sister, and I, all readers, all learned to read from Miss Scarborough in 1st Grade; I remember her as a quiet and kind teacher. My mother (were she still alive), my sister, and I would all attest to Miss Scarborough instructing us to say "Please?" rather than "What?" (as, I believe, part of Cincinnati's German heritage, though "Scarborough" is certainly an English name). In this she was less successful than in teaching reading, as we all continued (and continue) to say "What?", though we acknowledge her effort.
Further, Rich Beziat, whom I have recently reconnected with (he's in Nashville, Tennessee), has sent me copies of most of our Clifton School class pictures (he says that Elena Fuentes has all of them; my mother accidentally left ours behind when she moved out of our Clifton house). It's a little hard to tell which years they are (except for our aging in them, year by year); I suspect 1st Grade is not among them (perhaps Rich was not in our 1st Grade Class), as I do not see you in any of them, and I am pretty darn sure, Sally, I would recognize you if you were!
All: So, to sum up the previous comments, the German "Please?", far politer than the vulgar "What?", and possibly carrying with it from Cincinnati that strain of gentle courtesy down the Dixie Highway to the Old South of Kentucky, never made it as far as Carol McCammon's West Virginia.
Judy: Though I blush (well, maybe) to boast it, I remember well back before 1st Grade to my Nursery School days at the University of Cincinnati (the College of Home Economics, of which my mother was a graduate, was housed in the Women's Building on campus, behind the Van Wormer Library, and ran a training nursery school on the top floor). I remember the outdoor roof playground with its jungle gym and storage shed; the three rooms allotted to the nursery school -- one, a general purpose room with a skylight, where we danced to the "Chinese Dolls' Dance" from Tchaikovski's The Nutcracker; one (the middle room, with access to the roof playground), the lunchroom, which also held the favorite books they read to us (Dr. Seuss's "Horton the Elephant"; I also remember the lunches -- they occasionally served liver, which I hated, and junket, which I loved, also rhubarb pudding, which I also loved, and still do); and one, at the south end of the hall, which housed our cots for naptime. The cots, which I found to be dreadfully uncomfortable, must have been World War II Army cots; while we were supposedly napping, the teachers would play records; we could bring in our own to play (all 78 r.p.m. at that time), and I took in "The Abba-Dabba Honeymoon" and "Hooray for Honkety Hank and His Hootnanny Automobile."
But I never tackled to naptime (I'm still an insomniac), and, more often than not, I contrived to convince the head teacher to take me, while the others were napping, on a tour of the Women's Building. Indulgently, she let me operate the old-style elevator, with its outer door, then its inner closing gate, then turning a key to operate the elevator (she had to hold me up to do this), then pushing the floor button -- and away we'd go! I always opted for the sub-basement (its name intrigued me), but there were fascinations down there: the master time clock that operated all of the clocks in the building; the girls' swimming pool (and their dressing room with hair-dryers), which was filled by a faucet exuding from the mouth of a sardonic Greek mask (much like those in the Walnut Hills auditorium or at the Pavilion cascade in Ault Park); the coal chute; and so on. Halcyon days!
Dale: Should "nucular power" be applied to Fernald, Ohio? (I had no idea that I spoke with a Midwestern "accent" -- though my good friend Jim Stillwell, of our class, spoke with a "twang" or drawl which I considered must be Midwestern -- until I moved to the East coast.) And then I married a northern New Englander with a whole different set of syllabic pronunciations!
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