When the World was Flat

When the World was Flat G.C. Compton More than forty years have passed, but the memory lingers, indelible as a bottle ofblue ink spilled on a 5-cent pack of Lucky Star writing paper. I remember the dusty blackboard beneath a frieze of paper cardinals, listing ships and crooked Crayola houses. I remember the perfectly lettered lesson and the ghost of "Jerry loves Susie" hastily erased at the ringing of the class bell. I can hear the asthmatic wheezing of the steam radiators and smell the cloying odor of books and crayons. And I remember the teacher, young but with stunningly white hair, chalk dust on her sleeve, pointing with her yardstick to Madagascar on the map. . , The school was Virgie Grade School in Pike County, Kentucky, untainted by financial, academic or moral bankruptcy, poor only by standards of the community it served, a coal community, suffering as it does today the uncertainties of a monolithic economy. The teacher was Marie Tackett, and I, a shy eleven-year-old boy in the sixth grade who thought she was the smartest, most wonderful person in all the world. Mrs. Tackett, like most teachers of the period, was expected to be a paragon of knowledge, teaching every subject from English to arithmetic to as many as forty students in a single classroom. She was, indeed, that rare teacher whose erudition and interest in every subject seemed unlimited. A spring flower or a new word could send her into a paroxysm of discovery that was contagious. Her classroom was a citadel of learning: a library and a museum. Rattlesnakes, copperheads and blowing vipers coiled in jugs of formaldehyde. Frogs and lizards peeredwith dead eyes fromMasonjars. Hundreds of moths, beetles and butterflies, who had given their lives for science, lay entombed in glass cases with pins in their backs. There was also a grand array of diseased tonsils, failed appendices, severed thumbs and other human offal designed to inspire medical careers. Mainly, they inspired little boys to chase horrified little girls around the room with a tapeworm or a gallbladder. Our parents wondered aloud why such a nice lady insisted on keeping all those nasty things. 26 In Mrs. Tackett's class we said the Lord's Prayer, pledged allegiance to the flag and sang "My Country 'Tis of Thee." Sex education was an independent study held behind the bandroom or in the nearby C & O Railroad tunnel. Discipline came in the form of a mammoth wooden paddle worn smooth from daily collision with young bottoms. Mrs. Tackett could silence a class of thirty with a mere finger across the lips, but when the time came she was not one to spare the rod. About every other day, following lunch or recess, she held court to determine who hit who first, who took whose marbles, or who peed in the aquarium. When the jury deadlocked and a guilty verdict could not be reached, she lined up the accused, the prosecution, the defense and half the witnesses and wore out two yardsticks getting to her paddle. She administered justice with an authority that resounded from one end of the hall to the other. Incredibly, in 1958, Mrs. Tackett still had the task of convincing some of us that the earth was round. Therefore, when the satellite Sputnick was launched into orbit by the Russians, she was mighty thankful. It was the evidence she needed to prove to us that Columbus was right. However, when we told our parents about this wonderful scientific breakthrough, they dismissed it as just another trick of that "lying, bald-headed Khrushchev." History in Marie Tackett's class was a subject not dead but living. I emulated Abe Lincoln and studied by firelight. I became Dan'l Boone building log forts against the red man and slaying a nation of Shawnee with my broomstick rifle. To my father's chagrin, I cut down three fruit trees and nine rows of young corn blazing a trail through Cumberland Gap. Our geography lessons were delightful journeys to Brittany, Lapland and Holland. We were ever in awe of our teacher who had seen the big world—Mammoth Cave, the Great Smoky Mountains and seven...