5th Grade EDucation

I met 'Ed' on my first day of fifth grade. I was the new kid in school. He was coming out the door of the classroom as I went in.

"Are you Shauna?" he asked.
"No."

He pushed past me and let the door slam in my face. I had to open it myself.
(I learned later that Shauna was new that year, too.)

Ed was one of the popular kids. He was athletic and handsome and smart. Most of the girls had a crush on him, and he was already the star of the football team. Flag football, but everyone said he had a lot of potential.

He had a little gang of boys who hung out with him at recess. They went around doing things like knocking hats off other boy's heads, shoving into them while they waited in line for the slide or the swings, and farting loudly or belching during a lesson and blaming someone else.
The kid most frequently targeted with all this hilarity (yeah, real funny, huh?) was Kenny.

Poor Kenny was a natural target.

He was nothing like Ed's Gang of Turds and the giggling girls who watched them.

He didn't wear jeans and tennis shoes and sweatshirts.
He wore pointy toed cowboy boots, western shirts with snaps, double knit pants and a belt with a huge buckle.

Kenny was from Texas, and on the very infrequent occasions he was forced to speak out loud in class, many of the kids laughed. He stammered a bit and had a Texas drawl to go with it.

Ed and the Turds picked on him a lot.

They let him play foursquare only after being told they could not exclude anyone from the games, and slammed the ball down so hard in his square that he was always out.

They frequently tried to hit him with it, too, and often succeeded.

Dodgeball in the gym was another opportunity for them to hit him with a ball and have a legitimate reason to do so. He often had red marks on his legs or arms after P.E..

Ed's entourage followed his lead and took advantage of every opportunity to belittle and tease Kenny.

One day I was partnered with Kenny on a map project. I found out that one on one, he was a really nice kid. He had a sense of humor and was intelligent. After that, I ended up being his friend. We sat on the swings together at recess, and when we had to be partnered for other academic activities, we usually chose each other if we were given a choice.

We were eleven.
It wasn't a boyfriend/girlfriend thing at all. We were just... friends. I was feeling sort of lonely since it was my first year in the new school, and he was totally ostracized by just about everyone.

It's probably not surprising that Ed and the Turds followed us around chanting the obligatory sittin' in a tree rhyme that still makes me bristle 38 years later.

Kenny started to become quieter as the year went on. He often blushed and had tears come to his eyes when being tormented, which of course made Ed and the Turds treat him even worse.

"Oh look. He's crying. Waaah baby. Waaaah."

By Christmas that year, Kenny became kind of a fringe person. He never spoke in class anymore. If he was called on, he looked down at the toes of his boots, shuffled his feet and said, "Dunno."

He stopped trying to play foursquare.

If by some chance there was a foursquare game going on that didn't have one of the turds playing (rare), he'd join in, but if one of them got in line, he quit the game and spent the rest of the recess time walking around the field with me or kicking little rocks on the pathway.

We had music classes one day a week. The way it worked in John Day, Oregon back in 1971, the district had one music teacher. He traveled between schools and taught us to sing and read a little music.

Our instructor that year was fresh from the USMC.
His name was Mr. Pyle.
I'm not kidding.
If you're as old as I am, you get the joke.
If not, never mind. I have to add here that his first name was NOT Gomer.

After teaching us music for a few months, Mr. Pyle passed out some staff paper one afternoon, and told us to write a song. He suggested we find a poem we liked and set it to music. He said that if we could not find someone to help us put it on the staff paper, that he'd sit down with us and help individually. He gave us a month or so to do it, I don't really remember.

I do remember my mom helping me with mine. I could play it on our electric chord organ, but could not write it on the staff paper in correct musical notation.

After they'd all been turned in and he had time to play them, he told us that out of the entire fifth grade, only one person had turned in what was a recognizable song. It was mine. My happiness over that achievement was quickly smashed, as Ed proclaimed loudly to the class, "Yeah. It was dedicated to Kenny. They're in loooooove!"

And Kenny blushed and I got tears in my eyes when everyone laughed.

Not long after that, Kenny was called to the assistant principal's office. While he was gone, the teacher and principal gave our class a lecture. They said that Kenny had been picked on enough, and that it was time for it to stop. They said that his feelings had been hurt, and that the way our class was treating him was not nice and that it would no longer be tolerated.

In a perfect world, that would have worked.

What actually happened is that the victimization became a little more subtle. Kenny's lunch was "accidentally" smashed almost every day when he came to get it off the lunch cart. At least once a day someone accidentally stepped on his feet or knocked into his desk while walking by.

Kenny moved away over Spring break.

Now I don't know why Kenny's family moved. Their fortunes may have changed. Perhaps they moved to be closer to family. I never knew.

Inside, though, I've always thought his family took him away from the place where he was being hurt so badly and found a better place to live.

I've occasionally thought about Kenny over the years. He had a very common surname, so looking him up on Google wouldn't work. Since he moved away during 5th grade, I doubt seriously he'd want to be part of the Grant Union High School's reunion bash.

Kenny Phillips from Texas?

I've always wished you well and I sure hope you found happiness and a good life away from Ed and his gang of Turds.