by Karen Smith

Created on: March 14, 2009

I absolutely, totally and completely loved kindergarten from day one. The doted-on princess of the family, I was magic, long-awaited girl child: first since my mother on the one side, first since my grandmother on the other. In short, I could do no wrong. Able to enter school just under the wire in terms of birthdate, I was both younger and a good deal smaller than my classmates, which didn't bother me in the least. My parents took me the first school day, and they took lots of pictures. There I am in my little houndstooth fall coat, with matching hat and satchel, quite the fashion plate. My father had a lot of clients in the rag trade in those years, so I had the wardrobe of a Hollywood starlet, albeit a very short one!

My school, PS 63, was built around 1899 and had the high ceilings, pendant lights and enormous windows common to New York City public schools of its era. The wooden desks still had their inkwells in some rooms; in others, the brass inkwells were gone, leaving a neat hole testifying to their absence. Each classroom had a blackboard across the front wall with a wooden chalk rail beneath, filled with black erasers that had long since lost their ebony in favor of a chalk-absorbed grey tone. In the kindergarten rooms, those desks had been removed in favor of small tables and chairs, Lilliputian against the huge windows. We of course had the mandatory George Washington in the soap suds portrait in the front of the room, www.ameshistoricalsociety.org/exhibits/school/bloomi ngton/g_washington_painting.jpg but otherwise it was much like any preschool setting anywhere: lots of learning toys, bright colors, pictures and posters and a passel of little children enjoying it all in half-day sessions. There were suddenly too many little ones in the neighborhood to accommodate more.

In fact, at the time, the school contained grades K through 9 as there was no separate intermediate or junior high school in the neighborhood, although there was one in the planning stage as the southeast portion of the borough of Queens was expanding and new neighborhoods developed. Rockwood Park grew and Lindenwood sprung up, and most of those World War II veterans and their wives were filling the new bedrooms with kids.Everything was wonderful from my point of view, and I looked forward to each school day's delights. A precocious child, I had already advanced well beyond the alphabet song and was reading simple books secured with my own library card now that I could laboriously

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