Fifth Grade

Fifth Grade was one of my all time favorite years. I had Miss Sisk, now Mrs. Vance Hunt in our church, and it was her first year to teach. She was really wonderful.

Our room was again in the temporary buildings. I found it without any problem this year. Our "lockers" were really just open shelves mounted on the wall with would dividers every 18 inches or so. Miss Sisk's mother made nice little yellow cutains for each of the lockers. It was really pretty.

Miss Sisk went to our church and I often saw her there. That's why I was so surprised when I found out that she was going to vote for John F. Kennedy. How could she vote for Kennedy? Everyone knew he was Catholic and we couldn't have the Pope running the country. My folks had supported LBJ until he accepted the VP slot with Kennedy. Then they switched to Nixon. I can remember going to the Nixon Arlington campaign headquarters and even doing some work there.

I did really well in Miss Sisk's class and made excellent grades. I think that was the year I broke my right index finger. They put it in a curved splint of foam with an outside cover of heavy aluminum. I had to play the piano recital with my index finger curved and in this metal splint. I reworked my fingerings so that I played all the second finger notes with my middle finger, but sometimes there was no way around it and you hear a loud click adn then the note as my metal splint hit the key. That was also when I hit the inside the park home run off Mike Nicole in Little League.

Miss Sisk, now Mrs. Hunt was a great teacher and has remained a good friend all these years. Vance Hunt was a car racer. He regularly drove a dragster at Green Valley Raceway. It was a 1/4 mile track and they reached really high speeds in that short time. They had a parachute that opened at the end of the race to help stop them beofre they hit the wall at the end of the track. As a condition of them getting married, Vance had to quit driving the cars but he continued to help build them and was part of a race team. One day, on the car he would have been driving, the chute failed to open and the car wrecked killing the driver.

That was 5th grade and it was really a good year.