It was so long ago that I hardly remember a thing from my first day of grade school at Copperton Elementary located at the mouth of Bingham Canyon. All I know is that sometime in late 1960, I sat down in a chair next to a left-handed fellow, Jim Wankier, and we immediately began to squabble since his lefty arm and my righty arm kept crashing into each other.
It was a rocky start to what would become a lifelong friendship. Jim up and died a couple of years ago, which was a soul adjustment since he was the best athlete in our class. Eventually, I'd take English classes at Bingham High School from his mother, Elma, who was a fantastic instructor. His dad, Udell, was a legend himself, coaching the 1960 Bingham Miners to the Utah State Basketball Championship.
A couple of chairs away sat Kent Peterson, another lifelong friend. Like Wankier, both of his parents were educators. His mother, Dorothy, taught at Bingham High while his dad, Jim, traversed schools in the valley. Jim Peterson was my little league baseball coach during all those formative years of learning the game. He was a fantastic fellow.
A few seats past Kent sat Russell Crump. His father, too, was an educator and a coach at Bingham High—notably as the coach of many fine Bingham wrestlers, but also as the school's tennis coach. If you want to know what a real challenge is, try coaching tennis on cracking cement courts with sagging nets to a student body in which only about six kids could afford a tennis racket. But Cal Crump managed.
Our first-grade teacher was Mrs. English. She had majestic white hair and thus was well into her teaching career by the time we arrived. Our classroom was down the hall of a building extension that wasn't there when my mother attended the same school in the 1930s. The classroom itself was standard for the era—blackboards and maps covered the walls along with sundry pieces of student artwork.
Our heat came from the clanking steam radiators. We had no air conditioning. The rear windows were curved and overlooked the grand Copperton Yard where rail cars hauling ore taken from the Kennecott Copper Mine were eating away at the once thriving community of Bingham, Utah.
I think we had a bunch of aquariums along those windows. Or maybe they were terrariums. Next door to our first-grade class, accessed by a short common hall to the shared restrooms, was the second-grade classroom. It looked exactly the same as ours. Maybe it had the aquariums. No matter now. Second grade was taught by Mrs. Stillman, also a fine teacher, and who, like Mrs. English, had white hair. Or gray.
Mrs. Stillman was not a big woman at all; indeed, she was on the slight side. But I remember both Mrs. English and Mrs. Stillman in the same way. They both reminded me of my grandmother.
Therefore, I can't imagine in the slightest that either of them could have offered much protection to us had some "fatherless" person intent on doing damage to children and teachers barged into Copperton Elementary with so much as a ball peen hammer, let alone an AR-15 rifle. The only weapons Mrs. English and Mrs. Stillman were trained to use were sharp pointers and snappy rulers.
Ours was a single-entry building with a single long hallway that connected the classrooms, library and auditorium—apparently of the type the GOP is currently hyping as necessary for school safety. There were emergency exits here and there but, if a bad guy got inside, he or she could control the entire school from a single vantage point.
If Copperton Elementary were still standing, and a "bad guy with a gun" got inside, we'd have been goners. Could Mrs. English or Mrs. Stillman have saved us? Hell, no! Mr. Scott up the hall? No way! We would have been sitting ducks. And as much as I loved and respected the parents of my first-grade friends, neither can I imagine the Wankier, Crump or Peterson instructors being expected to arm up in order to engage in their chosen profession as educators. It's not what teachers are trained to do.
All this clamor by the GOP that we need better doors, fewer doors, more guards and the conversion of science labs into MASH triage units is full-fledged bullshit. In the entirety of my school years, I can think of perhaps three teachers who could or would double as a civil military police force and each of those was a World War II or Korean War veteran. On the other hand, I know plenty of veterans who'd rather not pick up a weapon ever again, so that throws it back into the court of arming Mrs. English and Miss Stillman. How stupid is the GOP, anyway? Don't answer that. We know.
To ask for constructive dialogue regarding gun control is not a call to take anyone's guns away. With rights come responsibilities. It's time to treat certain arms the same way we treat other harmful products or substances. Regulate them and the people using them as the Second Amendment already calls for.
However, you know what's coming. The GOP will soon recommend we arm priests, bishops, busboys, cashiers and the batter dippers at Hot Dog on a Stick. Like doing all of that stopped armed bank robberies.
Our educators need better from our government, for God's sake. Theirs is a most honorable profession, and it is not upon Mrs. English or Mrs. Stillman to take gunnery classes because our leaders are too partisan, power drunk and weak-kneed to take the necessary steps to protect them. Send comments to john@cityweekly.net
