Back to School

School starts today; yet it still feels like mid-summer. The temperature has been 100 degrees or more for days, with no sign of a break. Of course, schools today are comfortably air-conditioned. Back in my school days, that would have been an unheard-of luxury. But of course, our homes weren't air conditioned either. Nothing was, except movie theaters and a few large downtown buildings, so we didn't know any better.
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We started school around the second week of September and in a few weeks there were hints of fall in the air. On the playground, between hopscoth and jump rope, we collected acorns, took them home to shellack them and make them into necklaces. Football season brought cool nights and the sight of the University of Texas Tower bathed in orange light.

I remember most of my teachers (Long-term memory is the last to go.) Miss Lamar, my gentle first grade teacher; Miss Cook, the music teacher who always made me come up to the piano and try again to sing "I'm here" because I was, and am, tone deaf; Miss Hunter, the art teacher, who read Mary Poppins between art projects; Mr. Davis, the junior high science teacher who liked to read stupid answers from tests, which made me cringe with trepidation; Miss Brown, our high school English teacher who was married to the play-by-play sportscaster for the high school football games and who, we thought, was quite old. I glanced at her picture many years later in our high school year book and realized she must have been just past twenty.

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My favorite of all my teachers throughout school was Miss Hill, my high school Latin teacher. She was a small, thin woman with iron-grey hair, whose life revolved around Latin. She taught with love and filled us with love for Latin as well. From her came my delight in vocabulary words and their origins, my love of classical mythology and my fascination with Roman and Greek history. Not a bad inheritance.



Miss Hill was prim and proper and when we read the Aeneid and reached the story of the birth of the Minotaur, half man, half bull, she thought it too pruient for our adolescent sensibilities (How times have changed.) so we skipped it in class. But
at home, the telephone wires buzzed as we all worked to translate the "dirty" passage.

Miss Hill's greatest dream was to visit Rome and during my senior year her students raised the money to buy her a ticket, which was presented to her at a party. She was overwhelmed.

She is remembered as the remarkable teacher she was in Austin High School's Hall of Fame.

Did you have a memorable teacher--good or bad?

You Grew Up in Austin, Texas If...

Fall makes me nostalgic. So this is what I think of when I remember growing up in Austin.

You grew up in Austin if...

1.Burnt orange is your favorite color, but you remember when it was just plain orange;

2.You thought "The Eyes of Texas" was the national anthem;

3.Your favorite landmark is the UT Tower, especially when it’s orange after a football game;

4.You inherited a “football fan” gene, and the names Darrell Royal, Earl Campbell, and Vince Young are as familiar to you as Sam Houston, Stephen F. Austin, and Davy Crockett;

5.“Drag” is a place, not a guy in women’s clothes;

6.Bluebonnets are your favorite flowers;

7.You know the Texas rivers in order because the downtown streets are named for them;

8.You know what artificial moonlight is;

9.You had your first kiss at Mt. Bonnell;

10.You could live on Tex-Mex;

11.Pralines only come from Lamme’s Candies;

12.The Night Hawk (gone now) was your favorite restaurant for Friscoes, top chop’d steak, and ice box pie;

13.Barton Springs was part of every summer you can remember;

14 Your high school team was called the Maroons;

15.You only admit in a whisper that one of your kids attended A&M.