THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 14, 1995 TAG: 9505110557
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GEORGE TUCKER
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
I'm sure there are other old Berkleyites like me who deplore the impending demolition of Robert Gatewood School.
It was there where we were first subjected to the three Rs. Opened in 1912, six years after the town of Berkley was annexed by Norfolk, the once-handsome school on Poplar Avenue was named for the Rev. Robert Gatewood, an Episcopal clergyman and educator who was headmaster of Norfolk Academy from 1865 to 1882.
Now sadly derelict after being abandoned for years, the building will be torn down to make way for residential building sites.
I joined Gatewood's student body in September 1916, and was fortunate in acquiring Miss Margaret Borden, a dedicated teacher, as my first-grade instructor. From then until I moved a few years later to George Washington School, Berkley's secondary institution of learning, I garnered many experiences that I still cherish. Two are particularly memorable.
At Gatewood, I received my initial introduction to Virginia history, a subject that has been one of my greatest delights ever since. My textbook - Mary Tucker Magill's ``History of Virginia'' - was one of my childhood treasures, and I was so afraid someone might deprive me of it, I scribbled the following doggerel under my signature on its flyleaf:
Steal not this book my noble friend
For fear the rope will be your end;
For when you feel your thick neck crack,
You'll wish by heck you'd brought it back.
As for my other recollection - one of life's most embarrassing moments overtook with a vengeance when I was a third-grade Gatewood pupil. The incident was compounded of testy temper on the part of my usually long-suffering mother and impishness and stubbornness on mine. It was one of those situations that could easily have been explained; but since I decided to play dumb, it exploded in my face before I realized what had happened.
Our home on Mulberry Street had a wide stair landing that was outfitted with a gilt-framed pier glass. Early one morning my mother was putting the final touches on my unruly hair with a wire-bristled brush before sending me to school. Meanwhile, I relived the tedium by making monkey faces at myself in the mirror.
When I disobeyed my mother's order to stop, retribution came swiftly in the form of a smart whack on my right cheek with the bristle side of the brush instead of its flat wooden back. The thin skin of childhood did the rest, and by the time I reached school, my cheek looked as if I were coming down with something lethal.
This went undetected, however, until our penmanship teacher arrived to give us a lesson in the Locker system of push-pulls and ovals that hopefully would result in our acquiring a legible hand. Alarmed by the hectic condition of my cheek, she summoned my regular teacher. After a consultation, before which I had been hastily isolated from my classmates, they took me to the school nurse.
After nearly gagging me with a wooden tongue depressor, she frowned and rolled her eyes heavenward. I was sent home in the care of the school custodian, who treated me like a miniature male replica of Typhoid Mary. I had a note from my teacher saying I was apparently suffering from something sinister.
A practical woman, my mother didn't believe in coddling her children. She laughed at the ridiculous diagnosis, then telephoned my teacher and invited her, the nurse and the penmanship teacher to our house for tea and a slice of cake after school. To make the invitation more alluring, she added that I would then be happy to explain my facial eruption.
I can still see the pearl buttons on my high-topped patent leather shoes as I stood there later on our flowered Brussels parlor carpet, hanging my head in shame as I confessed the real reason for my pox-marked cheek. Even so, the experience taught me a salutary lesson. The next day, when the teachers and my classmates looked me over and tittered knowingly, I vowed that from then on I'd only use mirrors for self-admiration rather than juvenile jackassery. by CNB