digging up old school photos

I needed to supply a photo of me as a five-year-old for a current project, so I dug up my old first-grade school yearbook. Here’s my mug shot, which I notice I carefully circled and labelled:

I’m almost completely blind in this photo. I got glasses a few months after it was taken, and I remember exclaiming to the optometrist, ‘…but you’re so small!’ as all the fuzzy edges came off her. (I also remember her being a bit pleased about me saying that.) The specs were thick, clearish plastic, purple on top and pink on the bottom. I got badly teased about them, but not any more than I was already getting.


Here’s the yearbook’s front page. I went to a Dutch Reform school near Seattle, which was a very strange place, but the teachers and staff were well-meaning.

The kids were not so well meaning. Just a closeup of that photo, there. I remember some of these kids, they were HORRIBLE.

Some day I will make a comic about what happened on the hour-and-a-half school bus ride, where we went all around the twisty coastal roads of a nearby island before I’d get dropped off near home. Sometimes my mother would have pity and collect me from school or one of the nearer bus stops.

Here’s my lovely first art teacher, named Charlie Brown (for real, just like the Peanuts character). The best days were when I had after-school oil painting classes and didn’t have to go on the school bus. He was very kind to me, I will always be grateful to him.

Here’s my first-grade class and Mrs Roach. Whom I thought looked a teeny bit like an older version of Elizabeth Taylor.

The page next to it has everyone in candid group photos, but mine shows me by myself. I remember those dungarees well. I wore a lot of dungarees, and loved playing with my Tonka trucks in the sandbox with my next-door neighbour, Christopher, and riding our plastic Big Wheels down the steep driveway.

(You can see a few more pictures if you click on the childhood tag.)

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