(1954-1957)

I didn't enjoy the sixth grade very much. Because there were two sixth grades,  I had to go into the class taught by Sister Mary, rather than the one taught by our mother. Up til then I'd progressed from one grade to the next with the same group of friends. Now I had been switched over to the other class and left my friends behind.

Sister Mary's name had been Sister Quentin when Kathleen had been a high school girl and Kathy had hated her. She had been one of the prime reasons for Kathy switching from the Catholic School to the public one. Now she was making things unpleasant for me and picking on me. She made me stand in the comer one time for whispering, and another time when I had done my arithmetic work on the board incorrectly, she said, "Do you want me to go and fetch your mother?" Another time she wrongly accused me of telling the rank of schoolchildren to leave without pennission. She said I'd said, "Come on kids, the teachers aren't looking, let's go." I'd not said anything to the group which could be construed in that way at all.

The one advantage of moving classes was that I was now in with the more popular group. Our boys were the mainstay of the basketball team and six of us decided we'd be the cheer leaders. I was the only one who couldn't do the splitz or a decent cartwheel. We wore blue corduroy slacks and white shirts with blue silk scarves at the neck and  I invented some new cheers. 

When we were in the sixth grade, Mrs Wald who was the eighth grade teacher came into the classroom to tell us about having periods and the facts of life in such like. I found the subject fascinating and knew so little about it because Mom hadn't liked to discuss it with us. I remember coming home from school and telling Judy we talked about sex and Judy got very angry. "Don't you ever let me to you use that word again," she said.

When I was a bit younger, I read a ladies' magazine called McCalls, and one of the articles mentioned having a miscarriage. I asked Mom what it meant and she wouldn't tell me and told me to stop reading that sort of story. Mom used to put a brown paper bag into the washing bag and when I asked her what that was for, she said she'd tell me when I was 12. However, when I was 11, and she was having a bridge party, I suddenly started with my period for the first time. I called her aside and told her and she fixed me up with a wash rag as she hadn't any proper supplies for use as she had stopped having periods by then.

Judy didn't start her periods until she was 13, and Mom worried that something had gone wrong so took her to the doctor, just to be sure that everything was OK. The doctor said she was fine, it was just that some people started later than others. However, it was one more thing the Judy felt I'd beaten her out of her priority rights to.

In the summer after the six grade, I went to Brownie camp. It lasted a week, but we only stayed over night for the last night. We went in a bus each day, and came home in it each evening. We went to Apple Creek about five miles East of Bismarck. We learned to make some easy equipment for camping like wash stands. My favourte was stoves made of big empty cans from tinned fruit,  which we punched a hole near the bottom, turned upside down and put sticks inside, and then lit the fire. We made pancake on top.  We learned some good campfire songs like "Kokaburra sits in the old gum tree" "Pick a bale of cotton" and an Indian one "Pow-wow, we are the men of the olden cow. We are the red men, feathers in the head men, down among the dead men, Pow wow." (We had quite a lot of American Indians living in Bismarck, and they weren't overly discriminated against, I don't think. The nearest reservation was quite a distance away - maybe 50 miles. In the days of Sitting Bull and General Custer, Bismarck-Mandan were very much involved in the story. Custer had his headquarters at Fort Lincoln, just south of town and he started his last journey from there, to the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Our local Indians were the Mandans, and they were peaceful and agricultural, but the Sioux, from South Dakota were much more warlike. Nowdays the Indian mounds - earth huts that the Indians lived in - and the army headquarters, just across the road, are the biggest tourist attractions in the area.)

When it came time for the sleep over, I had no one to share a tent with. I had gone with Bonny Simon and her new best friend, Wanda Flanagan. She and Wanda were to share a two-man tent, and everyone else partnered up and I was left over. But four girls who were sleeping in a big tent said I could come in with them. They all had proper sleeping bags, and I only had some blankets and plastic sheet, but I didn't mind. I had to sleep across the end of the tent and kept finding caterpillers and even a small snake under the ground sheet and didn't sleep much that night. The girls were nice and friendly and I enjoyed my evening with them and kept in vague contact with a couple of them through high school.

In contrast to Judy, who was a very good person at sports, I was very bad at all sports although I liked playing softball but  I just couldn't catch, couldn't pitch and couldn't hit, so wasn't, on the whole, of much use in the team.

I was a substitute in the sixth grade team and was usually allowed in about one inning in every game, towards the end. We had a good team and won all our games. The final tournament game we played against Richter School.

It was a good game, and we were way ahead. However when my turn came to substitute and I went up to bat and after a call of 3 balls and 2 strikes, I got luckily and got a walk to first base. The captain, my friend, Mary Tschider said, ''Way to watch it, Jeanie."I knew she was trying to be nice, but I felt bad that the best I could do was benefit from somebody else's mistakes.

When the game was over I ran home crying. Mom said, of course, "You lost did you?" And I said, "No, we won. But I didn't help at all." When the team had their pictures taken for the newspaper as the  town sixth grade softball champions, I refused to be in the picture.

Another time when we were playing ball at school, I tried to catch a fly ball that bounced off my finger. The finger swelled very badly and after school I went into the clinic and had Dad x-ray it. It was broken. I had a cast on for a month which greatly interfered with my piano practice.
 
Later on that spring, we had a national adjudicator come to judge our piano playing ability. Since I'd been incapacitated by my broken finger, I was allowed to play pieces without having memorised them. She gave me a very high mark, and offered me the chance to go to a music camp. I was thrilled with the honour, but when we got the details of the camp, it turned out to be very expensive, and the closing date for applications had already gone by.

Judy never really enjoyed the piano as much as I did. So as soon as the chance came, she opted to quit the piano and take up an instrument and she chose the trumpet.