It's great to be able to communicate with my first school, Daniel Boone Elementary School on the North Side of Chicago. I have a November birthday, so I was not quite 5 years old when I started Kindergarten in Mrs. O'Conner's classroom in the Fall of 1964. Mrs. O'Conner was a wonderful Kindergarten teacher, kind and patient. I remember drawing a "cornucopia" for Halloween 1964. I remember reading "Fun with Dick and Jane," the first books read by many kids years ago. Boone school was somewhat different about 40 years ago than I imagine it to be today. Remember, back in the 1960's, there were no electronics like today. No cell phones, DVDs, CDs, VCRs, cable TV, personal computers, etc. The only phones were rotary dial phones. The only television available required a signal through the air with an antenna. So things were a lot simpler back then, and there were far fewer distractions. In the 1960's NASA was racing to get a person on the moon by the end of the decade, to fulfill President Kennedy's pledge to achieve this goal. Every so often school staff would literally roll a television into our classroom on a cart, so we could watch one of the Apollo rocket launches or moon landings. Back then, there were no permanent televisions in the classroom. Fourth grade was significant for me. When I started Boone in the Fall of 1964, students were split into one of three classes per grade based on "perceived" academic talent. There were the "smart kids" the "average kids" and the "difficult kids." Until fourth grade I had earned my way into the class of "difficult kids." But by fourth grade school policy changed, and all us kids were "mixed together." This was an eye opener for me. Instead of being in classes where kids like me spent too much time fooling around, I was in a classroom with kids who took their school work very seriously. For some reason, this stimulated an inner competitiveness I didn't know I had inside me. I wanted to compete with the "smart kids" in my class, and show them I could achieve what they could achieve. So, in fourth grade my behavior improved, I made a point of trying to impress and please my teacher, Mrs. Gertz (who either moved or retired toward the end of the school year). Poor Mrs. Lustig, my third grade teacher. Rumor had it that kids like me, in the "difficult kids" third grade class, had driven her to retirement right in the middle of the school year. We were a handful. But, as I said, fourth grade at Boone was an eye opener for me. Mrs. Gertz expected a lot, and I didn't want to disappoint her. As I recall, she was more firm than warm, and strict in a way that she just expected kids to behave well, and do their best. I was her "left hand man," meaning I was her 2nd "favorite" assistant. I believe Tim McFarland was her "right hand man." I was in charge of getting the audio-visual machines of the day to work. The thing I remember most clearly was that it was my job to run the movie projector. Back then, if you wanted to watch a movie in class, the movie came on physical film, wound in large rolls and stored in gray cans. Longer movies were in two or three parts, or cans of film. It was my job to take the film, place it on the front reel holder of the movie projector, string it through the projector, and get it to roll up properly on the back of the projector. The trickiest part was getting the film to run past the lamp so that the picture projected properly on the screen. If the film got stuck it didn't take long for the very hot very bright light bulb to melt the film that ran right in front of the bulb! If that happened I would have to physically spice the film back together with tape. Another problem with the old projectors was that if the film wasn't looped properly through a certain part of the film path, the result was a loud rattling noise. I had a blast being responsible for running the projector in fourth grade in Mrs. Gertz's classroom. No mention of Boone School of the 1960's would be complete without noting how papers were copied. There were no "Xerox" machines. No photocopiers. As I recall when teachers wanted to hand out a homework assignment or handout to students, the document was prepared on a special type of paper and the process was called "mimeographing." Mimeographing involved a special process (see Wikipedia or Google it!) that required a hand cranked machine and special fluid that smelled really good but was probably bad for you! But mimeographed papers were handed out by our teachers everyday, and those old machines and that smell was a memorable part of our life in Boone School back in the 1960's.