Fifth Grade, Hitler, Ceramics and Christmas

I just got word my best friend as growing up, Phil Lent died of a heart attack last night in his home in Juneau, Alaska. I was hit pretty hard because I am currently writing a story about one of our adventures. I had not seen Phil in a lot of years but he was rarely far from my heart and always n my memories of growing up in Valsetz. I thought I would repost this story to give you an idea what kind of miscief we often found ourelves in. Here's to you Phil. I love you man.

One day in the fifth grade my best friend, Phil and I were teasing this girl from our class about her coat. We were 10 years old and ruthless. I actually don’t recall teasing her about her coat but that is what we ended up getting into trouble for

As soon as we were back in our class sitting at our desks, Mr. Shenk our fifth grade teacher comes storming into the room and headed directly back to his desk. From his desk he yanks out his paddle (I was in grade school in the 1960s so beating the shit out of kids like me was the norm) and turns to both Phil and I and says, “You two up in the ceramic room now! Before I go any further I need to tell you a little about Mr. Shenk.

Mr. Shenk looked and talked just like Adolph Hitler. I know you’re saying yeh, sure he did. I mean it he did. This guy had jet black hair greased down and parted right smack in the middle. And he sported a little tickler mustache. He was proud of his German ancestry and loved telling us about it. This is the man that one day stood in front of the class and without batting and eye or fighting off a smile told the whole fifth grade class that there will never be a black quarterback in the NFL because blacks were too stupid to lead teams to championships. Keeping in mind this is 1969. Kids our age didn’t have a lot of world knowledge; hell half of us didn’t even have televisions least not cable. If it wasn’t in a Mad magazine or a comic book or a Hardy Boy’s mystery it most likely didn’t exist.

To my memory Mr. Shenk was the first person to introduce us to the outside world. What he had done was he started bringing in what I thought was home movies and slides. They were our introduction to the Holocaust. Here are all these nine and ten year olds watching skeletal people being marched into death camps and eventually into the gas chambers. I mean this shit scared the hell out of us. And when he’d talk about the movies and slides the guy would get so excited he would march back and forth waving his arms. Almost like a fit or something.

Any way on this day, Mr. Shenk or Hitler as most of us little smart ass fifth grade boys referred to him as, was marching right behind Phil and I. Down the hall and up into the ceramic room we marched with Hitler waving his paddle in the air behind us. The ceramic room was one of the pride and joys of our little country school.

Mrs. Barth who was at the time older than mud and was the fourth grade teacher was also the keeper of the ceramic room and all that was ceramic. There weren’t a lot of modern technologies or conveniences in the little town I grew up in, therefore, ceramics pretty much ruled for Christmas gifts, Mother’s day gifts and any other reason for gift giving. There wasn’t a house in the town that didn’t have a knick-knack shelf full of ceramic animals, or wise men from Mrs. Barth’s ceramic collection. The ceramic room also doubled as a torture room.

Hitler got us up into the room and parked our little butts against the window and started in on another one of his diatribe speeches about, loving one another, being nice to others, treating others as you wanted to be treated all the stuff that was foreign to a fifth grade boy. I mean heck she was a girl. Why would we want to be nice to her? You know cooties and all that crap. He continued his wrath, yelling and spitting and waving the paddle around. All of a sudden I began to laugh. Uncontrollably I laughed and laughed and laughed. And Phil started crying, Frank shut up he’s going to kill us. Ceasing on my laugh or Phil’s fear Hitler moved in on us. Face red, eyes glued on us, saliva streaming from the side of his mouth he slammed the paddle on the worktable next to us. “Turn around and grab your ankles, Booooyees!” he sneeringly commanded us. Phil crying and me laughing and Hitler about to burst we both slowly started to turn around. But before we could turn completely around a pretty little ceramic canary fell from the shelf above the table and smashed on to the floor into little pieces.

We all stopped and stared at the smashed canary. Then another canary fell and then another and then all of a sudden the shelf gave out and it fell. As the top shelf fell it started taking other shelves with it. Hitler began trying to catch as many of the falling ceramic pieces he could, catching one to every three or four that fell to their death. Before you we knew it the floor was littered with dead wise men, dead canaries, dead frogs and dead ceramic Christmas gifts. Hitler looked up at the two of us and said, “Get your butts back to class”.

Later that day we were walking home with the girl we had teased earlier in the day and saw Mr. Shenk pleading for his life with Mrs. Barth. Needless to say Christmas was little commercial like that year.

Mr. Shenk left us several years ago and I hope he and Phil are waiting in some ceramic room somewhere in heaven to see if we can fix any of those canaries.

Phillip Douglas Lent, March 31, 1960 to January 3, 2006