School officials called in a grief counseling team, which has become the normal, and prudent, response in these types of crisis situations.
As I have followed the search for and subsequent discovery of Rowan Ford, I tried to remember what it was like to be a fourth grader at Triway.
At the time, fourth graders went to Fairview and not Stella, and as I recall, drifting through the cloudy recesses of memory, nothing particularly tragic happened to any of my classmates during the 1965-66 school year.
It was my first time away from good old Midway Elementary and I remember one girl in Mrs. Sue Cole’s class crying on the first day because she had never been away from the Stella schools before.
The principal was Mr. Pete Schofield, a nice enough man normally, but someone you did not want to cross.
All of the fourth grade boys were in a competition that year to see who could get the most swats in Mr. Charles Lee’s vocal music class. I finished third, as I recall.
I remember learning a lot at Triway Elementary, both at Fairview during my fourth grade year and at Stella in grades five through eight. The teachers were caring, the friends were plentiful, and the horrors of the outside world, things such as the war in Vietnam, the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Richard Speck murders- those were things that happened outside of our little cocoon of learning.
It was a time when fourth graders could concentrate on being fourth graders, with the troubles of a crazed, sickened world not riding heavily on their shoulders.
That all ended for Triway fourth graders when they returned to school Monday and saw an empty seat and realized their friend, Rowan Ford, would no longer be with them.
The innocence of fourth grade…lost forever.
1 comment:
Great article!
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