William T. Johnson in the Eleventh Grade

A Good Year:

My last year of high school was a good one. My home-room teacher was Mrs. John C. (Esalee) Burdette. At that time my school had only eleven grades.

Unscored on in Football:

Despite my dislike of football, I played for four years and this was my best year. I don't remember having a new uniform anytime, but we didn't complain. The season of 1940 started with a 0-0 tie with Batesburg-Leesville in South Carolina, a team coached by our coach Earl Carson's brother. After a few games without points being scored against us, we got a little nervous. After the tenth game we had scored 269 points to none for the opponents. Not counting the seventh graders we had about 15 players. Since we played both offense and defense, our games were not easy.

No basketball:

I left off basketball entirely. I did think at one point in 1937 that I should at least try, so I went to practice one afternoon. (Later, in the army I played a few games in combat boots.)

No baseball:

I don't know exactly why, but our school never played baseball while I was there. We played baseball in the third grade but that was all.

Enjoyed track:

I was never really good at track, but I enjoyed it. Our own running track was of loose dirt and was terrible. It had been built as a half-mile automobile track. I enjoyed the short dashes and by the fourth year I was fairly good at the 220-yard dash. In what must have been a district meet we ran on a cinder track at the University of Georgia, and I managed to place third. That was good for me.

Frequent class officer:

For some reason I was frequently elected a class officer. The last year I was vice-president with Lelia Cheney as president.

Editor of The Blue and Gold: 

In high school I could write well and was appointed editor of The Blue and Gold, the school newspaper. It wasn't a real newspaper, just a section ofThe News-Reporter, the local weekly newspaper. I wrote occasional editorials.

Succeeded in the District Literary Meet:

Literary meets provide competition in academic subjects. The disrict literary meet seemed to be limited to seniors, but maybe not. At any rate, I was chosen to enter "Boys' Essay" in the 1941 Disrict Meet in Evans, Columbia County. In those days we didn't have television, but short subjects at the movies took its place. The meet was to be on Saturday and on Friday night I went to a movie and saw a short subject with journalists discussing the question "Should we have reciprocal trade agreements?" Dorothy Thompson was on the panel. That was the question to be answered on the essay I was to write and I won first place.

Supporting Role in Senior Play: 

I don't remember much about our senior play except that I was the butler, Reunette Bennett was the maid, and Hirsch Wengrow was in it.

Tenth Grade

This year was marked by the arrival of a large number of students from Rayle and Tignall schools, which did not have tenth and eleventh grades. so many, in fact, that we had two tenth grade classes. This was the year I signed up for physics and so many dropped out the first week that the class was canceled. I changed over to chemistry and took physics the next year. This year the band and choir went to festivals in Milledgeville and West Palm Beach, FL. My athletic career continued to plod along.

Ninth Grade

This year was my first full year in the band and choir. I enjoyed both of them immensely. In the Spring we went to music festivals in Milledgeville, GA, and in Charlotte, NC. I don't remember who our home-room teacher was since we ran off so many young women. My athletic career continued to be unspectacular.

Eighth Grade

This grade meant that we went upstairs, that we moved around from teacher to teacher, and that we were almost grown. Much happened to me this year. For one thing, I finally joined the band. I said "finally" because my friends had already joined. After much talk and trial I settled on the clarinet. The instrument cost $22.00 and lessons cost $1.50 a month. As I recall, I also joined the high school chorus that year, and since I also joined my church's choir that year that means I've been in that group for 70+ years, except time spent in college and Military. In the eighth grade Miss Clarice Guillebeau, of the Lincoln County Guillebeaus, was our home-room teacher and our geometry teacher. In that year I also began my illustrious athletic career, of which the less said, the better. I suppose the brightest spot was beginning to court my classmate Louise. 

Seventh Grade

This year was not as much fun as last year. The teacher, Miss Annie Neeson was too old to control her rowdy students, and I don't remember that I learned very much, except for public-school music, which was wonderful. I remember Mr. Walter Graham, the new band director, looking into our classroom with his black hair and bushy eyebrows. Over the next few years he was to teach me most of what I've learned about music in my lifetime. I do remember our spelling bees with the class lined up around the room. In one of them Louise Callaway was the last one standing because she was able to spell "aisle". The students were merciless in their treatment of  Miss Annie.

Sixth Grade

This was a very useful year for me and several of my friends because of the teacher, Miss Emily Fluker, who was an expert at teaching English grammar.  Lawrence, a much younger friend, told me that he frequently quoted Miss Emily in his conversations in the Air Force. On occasion, another officer in a conversation about grammar rejoined, "What would Miss Emily say about that?". I found that English 101 in college was not a bit better than Miss Emily's classes.

Fifth Grade

I started this year with a problem at home, as I remember. My younger brother, Jimsie, had stepped on a rake bare footed on his birthday, August 25, and the doctor gave him a tetanus injection that didn't work. Jimsie developed tetanus and seemed at the point of death. I was distressed, of course, and had a big problem going to school. Mrs. T.E.(Elise) Granade was the teacher. Among the new students transferring from the one-room, one-teacher schools in the county was Louise Callaway, who had been in the school at Celeste the previous four years. Louise and I married 20 years later. She told me that her parents were distressed that she got a C in deportment on the first report card because she talked too much.

Fourth Grade

I don't remember much about this year except that it was pleasant and uneventful and that I made all "A"s.  I do remember spending a lot of time drawing, cutting out, and folding a castle from paper. Miss Annie Sue Wynne was the teacher. She was the daughter of Will Wynne and the sister of Evelyn and Jack Wynne. I don't remember any delegation going from this grade to the third grade to demonstrate long division as had happened the previous year.

Third Grade

I have several memories of the times before and during this grade. Some time during the summer I went to Rome, GA, for a short visit to my aunt Frances Daniel and her family, husband Mather and daughter Jeanne. My trip involved riding in the rumble seat of a car heavier than a Model-A Ford. I remember I was wearing a red-and-white striped coat they called a blazer and that we took a detour around some of the construction of Highway 78. We turned left at Rayle onto the Philomath Road and rejoined 78 somewhere east of Lexington. I remember that we stopped on the street in Atlanta, probably Ponce de Leon at its intersection with Penn Ave., to let my aunt Tina's husband Malcolm out to walk a short way to their apartment. I remember the night in Rome in their cottage in the Summer Hill section when I fell out of the bed. No injury. The next morning, as I remember, I walked about the cul de sac near the house, and that afternoon I went to play with a boy my age in the neighborhood. I vaguely remember his name as Jimmy Garner. At any rate, I remember that I used him as the recipient of a letter I had to write in class that year. Mrs. Johns was the teacher, and I remember that I had brought lunch and ate a grape surreptitiously, but not enough so to avoid a reprimand by the teacher. I remember that this year taught us a little about working together. For example, some of us chipped in a few cents -  perhaps a quarter - to get enough money to buy Mrs. Johns a Christmas present, a very nice, brass-tipped yardstick. She was delighted, I understand, and kept it the rest of her life. Also, in the spring we had a baseball team that we thought was so good that we could challenge other teams.  On the most memorable occasion we challenged the fourth grade to a game and went out town writing chalk advertisements about it. I remember Lelia as being particularly good at printing with chalk on the sidewalk. As a matter of interest, Lelia's mother kept all the things about her children's schooling, and Lelia found the scoresheet from that game and reproduced it for the fiftieth anniversary meeting of our high-school class. The sheet showed that Mary and Charles scored five runs each and that I scored only two. We beat the game 36 to 21.

Second Grade

The teacher of my second-grade class was Miss Annie Louise Smith. As I recall, there was a constant emphasis on a chalked-in calendar on a small blackboard. My best friend that year was Golden Cown. I haven't seen him since. I think that was the year I got my first bicycle, a small one. Our room was on the east side of the building near the stairs, with windows on one side so that I think of it as a dark room.

Kindergarten

When I was five, in 1929, I went to a kindergarten operated by my great aunt Elizabeth Sims Smith in the upstairs area of my Uncle Hillyer's new house at the NW corner of Jefferson Street and Water Street. There were nine children in that kindergarten, including me; my cousin HillyerHarris Johnson, Jr., who lived there; my cousin Mary "Sister" Elizabeth Johnson, who lived next door to me; Lelis Sims Cheney; Adelaide Wood; Osborne McKendree Bounds; James Hines Blackmon, Jr.; Lucius "Jack" Jackson, Jr.; and Sarah Oslin. The school was in the big room upstairs. I don't remember learning much there. We used a lot of time making stuff out of clay and adding colors to it. I remember my aunt taking Adelaide's beret outside during a light snow to bring in samples of snowflakes. In April or May someone took a picture of us nine on the front steps. We stayed together until we graduated high school in May 1941.