Some 1965-66 Nova Elementary Memories, Part 2

This is a continuation of the article I wrote on June 13...

There were a lot of different things going on at Nova Blanche Forman Elementary School (in Davie, Florida) during the 1965-66 school year, when I was in the Fourth Grade, assigned to its "Suite C".  But there were also events taking place in the news as well.  The War in Vietnam was escalating throughout this time as more and more troops were sent over there, out into the jungles and enemy-occupied lands to basically "draw fire" and locate them for aerial attacks.  This cynical strategy of my country's military planners to sacrifice the precious lives of our young soldiers (many of them draftees, not volunteers) as bait wasn't to be revealed for decades.  Instead there was a great patriotic fervor about how brave the soldiers were and they were out there preserving our freedoms back home.  In my school, we would often have assemblies within our classrooms when we would do nothing but sing American fight songs and anthems.  Mr. Johnston (the Room 11 teacher) and the librarian (whose name I have forgotten) held a mini-course about American patriotism, complete with a nifty textbook.  We would meet in small groups in one of the library's conference rooms and discuss topics like patriotism...and, of course, being willing to lay down one's own life in a war like Vietnam.  I remember the librarian mentioning that her own son was over there...which in retrospect was probably why Johnston had enlisted her help in teaching this course.  I believe it was at that time that I mentally began to calculate the number of years before I would be old enough to have to go over there and dutifully sacrifice my own life...not something very appropriate for a nine-year old to have to be considering.  Anyway, Mr. Johnston, who must have been a soldier of sorts in his own youth, possessed a sizable collection of military insignia and mementos, which he displayed in his home room.  One day, though, someone must have stolen some of his items, for the entire Suite C was told to sit there quietly in their rooms for upwards to an hour while the teachers went around haranguing everyone about the theft and that the thief was making everyone else suffer for their misdeed.  How "professional" of my teachers to do that to us...

Aside from Vietnam, during my Fourth Grade at Nova they would send up the orbital Gemini space flights, which preceded the Apollo Moon missions and were designed to prepare the astronauts for space walks and docking and releasing the modules in space.  Whenever such a flight was going on during the school day, I remember the TV being on, with endless coverage of the event, complete with tedious, unchanging "simulations" interspersed with Tang commercials...

More on my 1965-66 Nova Elementary School memories to come...