Some 1965-66 Nova Elementary Memories, Part 1

How old are you?  I'll be 59 in October and sometimes, looking back on my life, have vivid memories of certain circumstances along with big, gaping holes of time, my recall of which seems elusive.  One of those "vivid" times was entering the Nova educational system in 1965, when I was starting the fourth grade. Eventually, I would graduate in 1974 from Nova High School.  But that first year at Nova Blanche Forman Elementary School, which was also the very first year of its own existence, still evokes strong memories...

The previous three years, I had been attending Boulevard Heights Elementary School, which was about a block and a half from my home in West Hollywood, Florida (before it all was annexed into Hollywood in 1965).  To get to Nova, though, I needed to ride a school bus to cover the five mile distance north into Davie.  So from the very beginning I got to know a circle of kids at my bus stop like Martin, the two brother combos of Jim/Greg and Mike/Scott, along with pipsqueaks Harold and Kenny (who got us into trouble at our bus stop with his uncontrollable shrieking)...and also Glen, the "senior" among us.  Yes, for some random reason at the beginning my bus stop was all boys...and this eventually may have been one reason why we tended to get into trouble.  But I digress...

Nova Elementary School, when I went through it, comprised grades one through six, the concept of "middle school" still yet to be implemented in the public school system.  My school was divided into four "suites", as they called them: A,B,C, and D.  I was assigned to Suite C, which had all of the fourth-graders and half of the school's fifth graders.  How the folks in charge of all this decided which fifth-graders were to be assigned with us fourth-graders and which were assigned with the sixth graders in Suite B (renamed Suite D the following year) is beyond my understanding...but there we were.  I was in Miss Kidder's home base Room 7 (initially it was Room 8, but for another unknown reason we were all switched around a few weeks after the school year began).  Let's see if I can remember the other teachers in Suite C: Mrs. Hernandez (who replaced a different teacher whose name I forgot) in Room 8, Mrs. Jenkins in 9, Mr. Drew in 10, and Mr. Johnston in 11.  Normally, a suite would have six classrooms, but where Room 12 would have been was the Practical Arts room, where Mr. Mielock held fort. Across from our suite, looking westward, on the far left, was the Multi-Purpose Room, aka the cafeteria (why couldn't they have just called it that), then the Science Room, complete with a botanical section and a top-level lab equipped with hard tops and gas jets for bunsen burners...Mrs. Bethune was in charge here.  Then, continuing to the right, there was/were one or two little conference rooms, a hallway (containing the audio-visual equipment room) going back to the back of the building (where the supplies store and Suite B were) and then the library to the right (I have a mental block about the librarian's name).  At the far right, from the perspective of Suite C, was administration, which for the main purposes of the students, was where the principal (then it was Mrs. LaBelle) and nurse's station was located. Across the hallway from the library, and next to our suite was one of the first-through-third graders' suites.  Our outside-directed windows faced the bus-loading area (my bus number was at first #79, changing later in the year to #75...they were both rickety, old buses)...

I'm taking up a lot of blog article space writing about this topic, so I think I'll continue writing about it in a couple (or more) days.  Part of all this is expository, to give a picture of my experiences back then to those (almost all of you) who weren't there.  And part of this is just for my own sake of putting my memories on the record, as trivial as some of them may seem...