Grant Avenue was a busy street, a main artery going east and west in Escondido, now considered a northern suburb of San Diego. Back then Escondido was an isolated valley, an outing away from the big city of San Diego by way of U.S. 395, a two-lane route through vacant hills.

The year was 1965. Lyndon Banes Johnson was president of the United States and Mrs. Jumblot taught fourth grade at Central School. Poor LBJ and poor Nancy Jumblot! They both had a rough time. LBJ had recently taken over for the assassinated JFK while facing dangers in Vietnam. Mrs. Jumblot had taken over a class of fourth graders, facing dangers from her first year of teaching. She couldn’t have had a more difficult class.

Keeping order was chaos. But I adored her. Young and pretty, she was the model schoolboy’s crush. So I pitied her when one classmate spent the quarter pretending he could not speak English. I never told his secret. I felt less pity for LBJ; he was Democrat.

Maybe so was I.

Electioneering months before, I scolded my parents for supporting Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, saying, “Why don’t you vote for someone who’s going to win.” I absorbed and memorized Goldwater jokes – a bratty, nine-year-old, know-it-all pundit. A season later, I apparently converted to naïve San Diego conservatism; LBJ could not keep my allegiance, the war and all. Mrs. Jumblot, however, was a different story.  She won my heart convincingly, though I remember not a single lesson she conveyed.

I lived at 620 Grant, just down the street from Grant Junior High School. We couldn’t play in the street for the cars. It didn’t matter. I really didn’t have any friends there. I was new in town. That summer we had moved to Grant Avenue leaving my first-ever home in Vista. My old friends were now 15.3-miles away. Our residence on Grant Avenue was to be temporary. Frank Schwartz, a gray-haired painter with a truck, owned our rental, and he lived next door. My parents had made a deposit on a new tract home on Fig Street, just a mile north. The home in the coveted “El Dorado Estates” development was still being built, so the Grant Avenue rental became home only for the summer and fall.

Frank’s home and our rental were separated by a long, shared driveway. The property seemed enormous to my nine-year-old eyes. It would be smaller today if I revisited, but truly it stood wide and open – enough room for the old oil drums where we burned trash — and spacious by the standards dictated by today’s developers who maximize every inch of real estate.  Our rental consisted of two buildings. A detached set of bedrooms and a bathroom sat in the back of the property. The main house facing the street was essentially a square box, as I remember. We usually entered through the back, having driven up the driveway in our blue 1963 Rambler sedan. Facing the back of the house, the entrance on the right of the house took us through the kitchen. Attached to the main unit was a screened back porch. That’s where Freckles lived. The kitchen opened to the dining and living rooms in the center of the structure. Two bedrooms flanked the other side, opposite the kitchen. There was enough room for my parents and my sister, my brother having sped off to UCLA for an education.

Lucky me! The building to the back of the main house was like a fort to me. I enjoyed the privileges of having my own “house,” but soon grew tired of novelty. I recall alternately sleeping in the main house, but can’t remember where. My vacancy from the fort remains vivid in my memory because of an embarrassing moment with Frank. I had complained that mosquitoes were coming in through a hole in the screen of my fort’s bedroom window. My parents asked Frank to come over and check on it. He did ― after I had been vacant from the room for a while. My bedroom was a total mess. He placed his knee on my bed which was blanketed with clothes and toys. I thought I would die, having the landlord see how I hoarded my possessions all amok. Fortunately, Mrs. Jumblot never had a need to visit.

My brother, though off to college for most of our stint on Grant Avenue, shared my ‘fort” for at least part of the residency covering his school breaks. Once incident rekindles the memory. No fence surrounded our rental property, unlike our half-acre home in Vista. So Freckles, the family dog, had no place to run or play. I hated the chore of walking him. He stayed in the screened back porch where he was tearing away at the mesh fabric. Whether he was instructed or whether he took it upon himself to take action, my brother delivered Freckles to the Humane Society – a kind gesture to the landlord I am sure, and looking back, a solidly wise business decision. The Humane Society also found its home on Grant Avenue. So, for days when I passed, I professed hearing the barks of my pet behind wire cages. Of course, looking back, I realize he had been quickly euthanized; I merely heard the barking of other pets awaiting their fate.

I cried a little. However, nothing harmed how I looked up to my college-aged brother. I imitated him, the cool, young man who was successful at college and whose handwriting is my model to this day – printing, not cursive.

Since it was fourth grade, Mrs. Jumblot assumed our handwriting skills were fully developed. I abandoned cursive in favor of simple print lettering, making it easy for a school district clerk to convert the handwriting of my stories on a typewriter. Mrs. Jumblot shepherded us in development of a publication. Our writing, converted to makeshift galleys by the dutiful clerk, were glued to a paste-up. We used Liquid Paper to hide all the scratches and galley shadows of our publication before going to press ― all this taking place in school district headquarter offices just blocks away from our classroom. On that day I was a published writer.

Years later, as a professional writer, I would report upon district efforts to close old Central School, with its thick green walls and depression-era art in the school cafeteria. Those efforts were silenced by the public outcry of moms-turned activists. I saw them with my own eyes plot anti-closure strategies around kitchen tables, then wrote about it. The school never closed.

Mid-year, we moved to the new housing development on the north side of town. Suddenly, my teacher-publisher was gone. My final mental images of Mrs. Jumblot still focus on her large hoop earrings and short brown hair.

Lincoln School was to be my new home and Mr. Spencer my home-room teacher. He stood thin and spectacled. Unlike Mrs. Jumblot, he delivered lessons I still remember. His drill and practice of multiplication formulas replaced the nine-sided multiplication table I consulted inside my Pee-Chee All Season Portfolio. We studied Japan and Nigeria. I tried to make a model of Mt. Fuji with plaster of paris. What an epic failure!

So progressive was Lincoln School that we found ourselves shipped out to other teachers around the campus for instruction in specialized subjects. Mr. Grandstaff was a roly-poly bore who tried to explain 1960’s economics to apathetic fourth-graders. He got across one truth I remember: “We have unlimited wants and limited resources.” The rest of each afternoon’s content was insufferably incomprehensible.

But just a couple doors down from Mr. Spencer, we spent many mornings in a classroom devoted to English. To this day, I credit the teacher for the rock-solid lessons of correct punctuation. He took a liking to me and placed me and my Spanish-speaking friend in the front row abutting his desk.

Five columns across and who-knows how many rows back, the array of students sat spell bound as an effeminate English teacher would read aloud children’s contemporary classics. He was a classic stereotype himself – a Scottish pedophile. Sitting on his desk, legs swinging, he would decipher the printed text of his book to spoken words while capturing my legs between his. Satisfied, he would read another chapter before adjusting in favor of my classmate. The exercise was annoying and wished I were not in the front row. It would be years and years before I figured out that his crushing squeeze, contortions, and occasional shivers were selfish, criminal acts, but I am thankful I know how to use commas properly.

Winter came and so did pneumonia. The medication arrived in pills so large, I could not swallow them. I choked and complained. They may as well have been large, plastic rocks. I missed two weeks of school and more lessons about Japan. Teachings on the fundamentals of long division also missed my ears. When I returned, school had not yet begun that morning when a classmate approached and said, “I have diamonds.”

He was willing to share. He handed over a pocket of sparkling gems. It crossed my mind that my family might now be rich. Kids were talking. Maybe it was a booty from a robbery gone bad. Others speculated that the spectacular rocks were dug up from the playground ― until authorities caught wind of the danger.

The night before, a car had run into a telephone booth. Tempered glass spilled across the front of the school. It took no time for dozens of children to pick up the shards and distribute them as treasures bound to half-told tales.

Escondido was growing. While I was adoring the recently married Mrs. Jumblot, architects, engineers, and contractors had been fashioning a modern, saucer-shaped school closer to my home. As fifth-grade started, Conway School would be my fourth campus in six years. My longing to make books would haunt me, until an elderly Mrs. Williams promised a foray into publishing

I wrote Dr. McPlatter Comes to Town ― some assembled writing attached by comb binding.

Oh, that black, plastic, stretchy, comb binding – a tarradiddle to convince a child he’s a published author. It seemed as if I’d come a long way from Grant Avenue.