At that time, the education program consisted of seven years of grade school followed by four years of high school. Rylie School was the area grade school. Mr Godwin was the principal and seventh grade teacher while his wife taught second grade. My memory is a little fuzzy on this, but I think she also taught first Grade. Their son, Harold was in the my class, so many of us felt extra pressure to be on our best behavior whenever Harold was around, just in case he was one to tell his parents everything we did.
To provide heat during the cold days of winter, each classroom had its own heater, a metal-encased unit with a slotted vent at the top for the heat to rise and warm the room. As morning recess began on one particularly cold day, my inquisitive nature was aroused when I looked at the thermometer hanging from a nail in the facing of the classroom door as I was leaving the classroom. While everyone else went outside to play, I doubled back to the classroom and, with no one to see me, I took the thermometer from its nail, put it in my pocket and then went to stand just outside of the schoolhouse door.
When I felt sure no one was watching, I held the thermometer so that it was exposed to the cold air and watched the red fluid as it contracted to show the outside temperature. When it had settled at the low temperature, I went back to the classroom amd held the thermometer over the heater vent, watched the red liquid's rapid rise til it stopped and went back to watch it drop again. About the third or fourth time I was watching it rise, the top of the thermometer popped off. I had destroyed the thermometer! Quickly, I returned it to its nail and went outside, hoping that no one had noticed my curious behavior of the past few minutes.
Later in the day, the teacher noticed the broken thermometer and asked if anyone knew anything about how it got broke. She got no response; I was very reluctant to admit my error in front of the whole class. Either after school that day or the next day when I could speak to her alone, I told Mrs Godwin the details of what I had done, that I had not intended to break the thermometer and I was very sorry it was broken. She told me that it wasn't a good idea to do experiments with things that belonged to other people, however, it was a good thing that I had admitted having done it, even though I waited a while to do so and, if I do something wrong, it would be best that I admit it to the right person sooner as it might be very important to do so.
When Valentine's day approached, I told Mom that I wanted to give a Valentines greeting to every girl in my class. She said we couldn't afford to buy cards but she'd think of something. In those days, oranges came packed in wooden crates and each orange was wrapped in its own orange colored heavy tissue paper. Mom said we could do it with construction paper diamonds and ironed out orange tissues. I went to the store and asked Mr DeHart if he'd let me have enough orange tissues for the Valentines. He was always a very nice man and this time was no exception. I returned home, happy, with my tissues.
Most of the time that weekend was spent in the making of Valentines. First, I flattened each tissue as much as I could by hand; then Mom ironed them to remove almost all of the wrinkles. Next, I cut the diamonds from construction paper and, with crayon (remember second grade, terrible pencils and no ink), wrote a different girl's name on each diamond followed by the message, "Will you be my Valentine?" and then wrote my name at the bottom. I think I even made one for Mrs Godwin. On Valentine's Day, I went to school early and managed to place them in each girl's desk before anyone got there.
The end result was that most of the girls didn't take me serious because they could see that all the girls had the same Valentine greeting. I was the only boy who gave one to all the girls. Some of them thanked me. For a few days I took a lot of teasing from some of my classmates, both boys and girls, for trying to have all the girls be my Valentine. A few made remarks about the cheap cards but more thought it was nice that I took all the effort to handmake them.
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