Miss Flag

Brookwater Elementary School is a one-story brick building accessed off Brook Street and Water Street, hence, Brookwater. The name has since changed to honor a person from town, but I like to use the original title. The flat-roofed, sprawling structure was built on a hill, with the two hallways of classrooms connected by a bridge. All the classrooms have a wall of windows that lets the sun in and our imaginations out.

There was no state-of-the-art playground equipment in the mid-sixties. Set in the back of the field at the top of the hill, by the upper grades, were swings and a tall metal slide. The mid-day sun beat down on the long, smooth metal chute and heated it to dangerous levels, rendering it unusable.

The lower grades were at the bottom of the hill. The only playground for these classrooms was the pavement leading from the parking lot to the classroom doors. Scattered about the surface of the black asphalt were a few yellow-painted hopscotch and four-square games. That was all we younger kids had to work with. But ingenuity and imagination ran rampant, and anything could turn into playground equipment. 

Take, for example, the American flag. The flag was placed prominently at the edge of the blacktop play area in front of the school. The flagpole rose from the center of a square cement base, approximately three feet by three feet. The sides of this base were a height equal to half of a conventional step.

This impromptu playground equipment kept many girls happy and occupied while waiting for school to start or during our twice-daily recesses. I have fond memories of my sister and me, pigtails switching to and fro, hopping up on this half-step base in all sorts of patterns. Our dresses were short (and we modest), it looked like we were doing a version of Irish Step dance; hopping with all our might, arms straight at our sides holding down our dresses. The bell would ring, and we would go back to the classrooms and collapse into our creaky wooden chairs, worn out yet at the same time invigorated.

Three steep cement steps led up to the classroom doors. Round, green-painted metal pipes were placed securely into each side of the cement steps. The thought was to keep children safe, but those railings were just too tempting. Most of the time, the students boycotted the stairs. Instead, they would swing on the side railings like monkeys, spiraling up them to get into the classroom and sliding down them to leave. The trick was to do it without the teachers seeing you. 

One teacher in particular, my second-grade teacher Miss Flag, knew where everyone was and what they were doing. Her name fit her perfectly. As the American flag gets our attention and respect, the same is true about Miss Flag. She was a symbol of all that was fair and right. One look at her, and you knew you were in the presence of a force. Tall and thin, she stood rigid, pole-like, and set in her ways.

Her wardrobe seemed to consist of only two short sleeve dresses. Except for the color, they looked identical and cut out of the same nub-covered silk material. One day she wore a bright red dress, the same color as the stripes in the flag. But the red did not end there. Her shoes, flats so she wouldn’t tower over her students, and lipstick were the same vivid red as her dress. To round out this attire she carried a red clutch purse which she trapped under her upper arm, her elbow bent at an exact right angle. 

The next day would be the same as the day before, except this day, the color scheme would be bright pink: bright pink lipstick, dress, purse and shoes. And so it went from one day to the next. Red, pink, red, pink, with her short black hair in shocking contrast to the brightness of her clothes and the milk-white color of her skin. 

She had a unique way of making her point, aside from the sharp non-verbal message of her appearance. She had a rhyme for every situation. Rather than raising her voice or yelling at the children, she would speak in a firm, monotone and bark out one of her sayings. One morning I got called out as she growled, “Get off that railing, or I’ll send you sailing!”

That did it for me! No more railing. It was the stairs from that day forward. The voice of authority had spoken, and I heard it loud and clear. And I continue to all these years later. And why is that?

It wasn’t so much what she said as how she said it. Miss Flag said the same thing all the other teachers were saying, except she said it in a way that got our attention. She used a way that we could remember and somehow made discipline fun. We knew she was not about to pitch us off the stairs, yet we respected her authority over us.

Without us realizing it, she was setting boundaries. Her rhymes may have been entertaining for us, but it was her way of keeping us kids safe. Stay in line, and all was fine; step out of line, and you would get a rhyme. 

Miss Flag skillfully defined her relationship with us. She was like the flagpole; solid, unyielding, and firmly holding an ever-moving flag - us kids! And, in a way that I understand only now, we felt a deep sense of security when we were with her.

How I wish I could thank my Miss Flag.