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.