I hear educators complain we need more teachers, that a teacher having to have a class of 15-20 is unbearable.Now comes St Joseph school, It was an ugly, dark black-reddish, 3 story brick building. Handicap accessible: throw um out the window or down the steps; and if you needed a bathroom your wheelchair could go into-well, just hold it to you get home or if you were lucky, someone to carry you into the stall and drop your drawers: how humiliating! More on classroom size later.
First floor: an auditorium for school assemblies where we could find which rung of Dante's Hell we were going to end up in; a cafeteria that served hot luncheons with mom's volunteering to help the 3-4 hired ladies get us all through the line. Cost per meal: 25 cents. The source of the food: mostly government donations, like 100# bags of rice, big cans of peanut butter, just butter, blocks of cheese, spam, pasta and a false tooth. We were having Spanish rice one day and i bit into something hard: when I took it out of my mouth, it was white and silver: someone's false tooth had fallen in the pot, probably in the kitchen. Yum, yum. I have refused to eat Spanish rice to this day. If we had spam sandwiches, it was served with tomato soup. On Friday's. The joke being was that it was laced with saltpeter(potassium nitrate) -it tasted like salt and prevented those boys who entered puberty from being able to perform over the weekend. Nothing was wasted: if we had carrot sticks(uncooked), one day, then the next day we were sure to have lime jell-o with finely shaved carrot in it. It was easier for a mom to hand a kid a quarter than fix him a lunch everyday.
Stevie Bednarik a real close friend, always smiled, was slightly mentally challenged and his family ran a grocery store on the next block. Stevie and I would get a lunch from the store, then take my quarter next door to Factor's drug store and buy 2 cigars. Forget about ID's: money was money. we would then go and hid in a crevice of the church where the bell tower was and enjoy our cigars. One day had a problem: didn't know it was my mother's day to volunteer in the cafeteria and she kept looking for her little Tommy. Had to come up with a fast excuse: Stevie and I ate at his family's store and I put the quarter in the candle rack in the front of the church, lit a candle and said a prayer for the poor. Usually we just put a flat stone in the metal box, so the 3 or 4 old ladies, who always sat in the front pews and they were probably dead because they never moved and were always there with their rosary beads-anyway, they would hear the clank of the "coin," and think nothing of it. Usually we went to the opposite side of where they sat, and lit ALL the candles in the rack-about 50. They were votive candles in little red' glass holders and would burn all day. There alsowas the tall, BIG candles that would stay lit for a week. They took a 4 stones donation-and we lit all of them also. That side of the church looked like a bonfire burning. Later-more about the school and church. Side note: you would think the 4 old ladies would stir with all the candles ablaze: they didn't budge, which is why I said earlier, they were dead.
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