Marilyn Patton
Born: 1935
Steubenville, Ohio
I Was a Skinny Little Kid with Glasses
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“I Was a Skinny Little Kid with Glasses”
Grammar school was good, but in second grade I had an experience that was supposed to terrify me out of sucking my thumb. My mother used to put stuff on it, and I would wash it off. I set my thumb a lot.
In second grade there was a hole in the chalk board, and the teacher would have me stick my thumb and the whole every time she caught the sucking on it. It got so that I was up there all day long, so she decided to send me to detention. She had a sixth grader come down and take me to detention. That was supposed to scare me from sucking my thumb. But eventually, I just quit sucking my thumb.
My most humiliating experience happened in first grade. I asked the teacher if I could go to the bathroom. She said: “not until you finish.”
Well, I had an accident right then and there. I ran out that door and all the way home.
I liked school and I especially liked the elementary school part. I had a lot of good, encouraging teachers. I loved math.
When I started high school I was a skinny little kid with classes. People used to tease me about my glasses, which I’ve had since second grade.
We used to have a place called Swing Haven, where we would dance. Sometimes I would just sit in the ladies room because I didn’t want to go out and watch everyone having a good time. But as time went on I became a majorette and became more popular.
We used to dance three nights a week. It cost a quarter to get in and it was fabulous. It kept a lot of kids off the streets. They played good jitterbugs and music from the forties and early nineteen fifties. I graduated in 1953, before Chubby Checker and Elvis Presley were really popular. By the time I went to college the music was starting to change.
It was good music… the kind where you could slow dance… the kind where you could understand the words. Songs such as Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” That song is six or seven minutes long and if you could jitterbug all the way through that, you were really in great shape.
When we have our reunion, we have to pay the band extra to stay over, because we would just dance our feet off. We had a great time dancing to “Leroy Brown.”
And our 50th reunion we had a disk jockey that played all the music from our school days. It was fun.
During these times we didn’t have dance classes. We just taught ourselves how to dance. I used to watch Fred Astaire movies, come home and dance around.
Grammar school was good, but in second grade I had an experience that was supposed to terrify me out of sucking my thumb. My mother used to put stuff on it, and I would wash it off. I set my thumb a lot.
In second grade there was a hole in the chalk board, and the teacher would have me stick my thumb and the whole every time she caught the sucking on it. It got so that I was up there all day long, so she decided to send me to detention. She had a sixth grader come down and take me to detention. That was supposed to scare me from sucking my thumb. But eventually, I just quit sucking my thumb.
My most humiliating experience happened in first grade. I asked the teacher if I could go to the bathroom. She said: “not until you finish.”
Well, I had an accident right then and there. I ran out that door and all the way home.
I liked school and I especially liked the elementary school part. I had a lot of good, encouraging teachers. I loved math.
When I started high school I was a skinny little kid with classes. People used to tease me about my glasses, which I’ve had since second grade.
We used to have a place called Swing Haven, where we would dance. Sometimes I would just sit in the ladies room because I didn’t want to go out and watch everyone having a good time. But as time went on I became a majorette and became more popular.
We used to dance three nights a week. It cost a quarter to get in and it was fabulous. It kept a lot of kids off the streets. They played good jitterbugs and music from the forties and early nineteen fifties. I graduated in 1953, before Chubby Checker and Elvis Presley were really popular. By the time I went to college the music was starting to change.
It was good music… the kind where you could slow dance… the kind where you could understand the words. Songs such as Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” That song is six or seven minutes long and if you could jitterbug all the way through that, you were really in great shape.
When we have our reunion, we have to pay the band extra to stay over, because we would just dance our feet off. We had a great time dancing to “Leroy Brown.”
And our 50th reunion we had a disk jockey that played all the music from our school days. It was fun.
During these times we didn’t have dance classes. We just taught ourselves how to dance. I used to watch Fred Astaire movies, come home and dance around.