Memories of Enterprise: Summer draws to a close with the beginning of the school year

By Ricky Adams
Ledger Correspondent

Published: August 7, 2008

It wasn’t a holiday, but Tuesday, July 29, was a great day whose memory will hopefully linger until another great day arrives.
July 29 began when a pre-arranged phone call from lifelong chum/classmate Harold Stanley led to a three-hour visit with him and his child bride, Carolyn (nee) Rodawalt, which included a motorcar trek of many of our childhood haunts - beginning on Headless Horseman Road - where dwellings and other structures now stand.
Our visit ended following a visit with classmate Danny Carmichael, who provided several bags of seriously-boiled peanuts from yet another member of our Enterprise High School class of 1968, Robert Redden.
Grandson Lane Marler, 10, later provided more memorable moments when he called proclaiming time had arrived for us to set out to buy fifth-grade supplies he and his peers begin using today, August 7.
Lane was delighted to discover the presence of ballpoint pens on his list. Wide-eyed, Lane was further surprised when “crayons” weren’t required supplies for the first time.
“Did you start writing with ballpoint pens in the fifth grade, Papa?”
“No, we started in fourth grade, but we didn’t use ballpoint pens in Miss Arwood’s class at City School. Ballpoint pens were a fad, Miss Arwood said, so we used fountain pens; most of us had Scripto pens that used ink cartridges. There’s one at the house you can have.”
Lane’s list also included a ruler marked in inches and centimeters, something we certainly didn’t get on Coca-Cola Golden Rule rulers early in elementary school.
At some point, we were taught, the day would come when the U.S. would join much of the rest of the world measuring things metrically. Thankfully, that day hasn’t arrived.
We also learned to walk on the right side of hallways and store aisles, and were taught computers would one day relieve the vagaries of the adult rat race, allowing us more leisure time with friends and family.
Before computers, and electronic calculators for that matter, we were taught to use a Chinese abacus to solve mathematical problems.
While most of us haven’t used an abacus since fifth grade, our skills with the ancient manual calculator will be handy beginning tomorrow when the torch opening the Summer Olympics in Beijing, China is lit.
When we were in fifth grade, perhaps the most exciting “thing” we’ve ever experienced began when the U.S. Space Program literally got off the ground with manned space flights.
Now, NASA, recent reports have it, is getting a shot in the arm with plans for a return to the moon, followed by manned trips to Mars are being made.
Another recent report said there are more technological capabilities in one cell phone than were in use throughout the Apollo Space Program.
Lane and his contemporaries have technologies at their fingertips even our brightest students, Harold and Carolyn, for example, never imagined as fifth-graders or in EHS physics’ class.
Hopefully, Lane and his group will use technologies wisely, while simultaneously understanding what traditional lessons, using ink pens for example, mean.
Writing with ink, we were taught, showed
we took pride in our work, a lesson that, even when writing a letter to
a newspaper editor, means a person should sign the letter, even if
he misspelled seven words and completely missed the point of the column.