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ENTERTAINING
THE ROTARY CLUB IN MT. VERNON
by
Robert Cowser |  |
In
1941 Homer Calvert, president of the Rotary Club in Mt.
Vernon, asked Mae Green, first-grade teacher at the Saltillo
School, to present a program at one of the weekly meetings of the
club. Though I had advanced to the fifth grade, Miss Green, my former
teacher, asked me to learn a monologue and present it at the program.
She also planned for three or four children from her own classroom
to sing a few songs such as “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” and “America.”
Our country was on the verge of World
War II.
On the day we were scheduled to perform Miss Green and the other children
came to the hallway outside my classroom. From the doorway she beckoned
to me, and we all marched to the parking lot. There we crowded into
the black Chevy we would take to Mt.
Vernon. Mrs. Fay Chandler, wife of the Saltillo superintendent,
volunteered to drive us to the First Methodist Church in Mt.
Vernon where the Rotary Club met. We had driven only a mile or
so down Highway 67 toward Mt.
Vernon when Miss Green asked me whether I had brought a copy of
my skit. In my haste to leave I had not taken the copy from my desk.
I dreaded telling her that I had forgotten to bring the script with
me.
Mrs. Chandler turned the car around in the graveled area between the
railroad pool and the highway. When we reached the school, I ran into
the building, went to my desk, and retrieved the copy of the skit.
I am sure that Miss Addie Speed, my teacher, did not appreciate my
interrupting the class.
Before I delivered my monologue, Miss Green darkened my face with
burnt cork, since the piece I recited was excerpted from a minstrel
show script. The men at their luncheon meeting laughed heartily at
some of the lines in my monologue, but I cannot remember any of its
content now. Thankfully, the skit was short.
We returned to school in Saltillo
immediately after the program. That may have been the only time I
went to Mt. Vernon
during those years of my childhood that I did not buy an ice cream
soda at the Crescent Drug Store or that I did not order a hamburger
with mustard, pickle, and onions at the Gist Grocery and Café on Kaufman
Street. And since my aunt and uncle, Molie and Lewis Gist, operated
the café, I usually did not have to pay for my hamburger. |
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