KATHLEEN KOZERO
“Who inspired you?” asks Paulette. Well Paulette Getz and my faithful friends, Linda Reimer, Hannah Kilgore, and Claudia Kleppinger, you all inspired me. But with me it is like the Emmys or Oscars…I have so many people to thank…it took a whole family and indeed a borough to raise and inspire me.
Children who entered the Northampton school system in 1951 and teachers who were there to teach us were about to experience transformation, but we did not realize it at the time. We were all on a journey to discover and remake the last half of the 20th century and for some, move us into the 21st century.
I myself found leaving home at the age of four scary. But Miss Funke, my kindergarten teacher, a single parent, was a good surrogate mother, teaching us our alphabet and numbers, supervising us while we played in the little playhouse. The girls would be inside creating a store and the boys would crash through the table which we had in front of the door at least once every morning creating chaos. But boys will be boys and little girls liked the attention even if it was chaotic.
My cousin Jimmy Kozero also went to the Wolf Building kindergarten. His mother had to work at the shirt factory (a holdover from Rosie the Riveter in WWII) so my mother provided child care. In WWII, women began working in “men’s” jobs and although I was not born yet, here is where the demand began, “Equal pay for equal work.” It was John F Kennedy in 1963, who passed the law “Equal pay for equal work” which we are still fighting for today. And so it was at this momentous time in history that my cousin Jimmy came over to my house in the morning and walked to school with me. I wanted him to be my twin ... but alas he was not, although we did get to share chickenpox.
Perhaps I was looking for family to be close by as the talk about the devastation of a nuclear bomb attack swirled around us. We practiced “Duck & Cover” under our desks brought to the school system in January of 1952 by the Federal Civil Defense. That was the year that my father replaced our coal stove in our house with an oil stove and as part of the retrofitting for the new furnace, he also built a fallout shelter. My mother stored all her canned goods in the fallout shelter…just in case. Thank goodness we never had to use the shelter, but I was inspired by my parents who sent us off in those dangerous times to school and the teachers who tried to help us practice to be prepared and confident while fighting their own fears.
TV was not yet completely mainstream in the early 1950’s. My family got their TV in about 1953. Starting in 1950, you could buy a Hopalong Cassidy lunch box with a thermos, the first of lunch boxes of its kind, advertised on TV. Instead, Jimmy and I took little melamine containers with crackers for recess. Mine was green and his was red…I still have mine. At school, we paid 3 or 4 cents for a container of milk to eat with the crackers.
At recess, it was fun on the playground in the section with the little swings. We aspired to moving up to the big kid swings. And then of course there was the sandbox where I brought a military toy truck, boat, and tank to play with which my brother sent me from the store at Camp Indiantown Gap where he was training to be shipped off to the Korean War. I was happy to have “boy” toys as well as “girl” toys. This is something that marketing experts took much longer to accept and it is still something that parents needlessly worry about. Those toys might have prepared me to fight my way into the “boys club” of the business world.
In kindergarten we painted using finger paints. I would not paint since they did not provide us with a brush. Obviously they thought we were babies and couldn’t trust us with a brush so I refused to get my hands dirty… this protest was to prepare me for the high school 1960’s chicken boycott and the 1970’s Civil Rights riots. I am not sure when the roving art teacher, Mrs. Herrick came along…maybe first grade, but I was thrilled with her classes. She came to us once a week for about an hour. She would pass out patterns and we would trace out a pumpkin, arms and legs, and attach them together with brass paper holders and the various parts could be moved making the pumpkin dance. Of course every season had new topics and everything was age appropriate.
As we aged, we would collect leaves in the fall on the way to school and iron them on wax paper and make something out of that. Naturally there were always students who forgot to collect the leaves or bring something and Mrs. Herrick had extras and taught us to share. My sister Margaret taught me to look for variety in leaves, big and small, red, green and yellow and different kinds like oak and maple and sassafras etc. Since Mrs. Herrick was only with us for an hour a week, she used to holler at us to hurry and keep sending the patterns to the person who was in back of us, and to be careful with the sharp scissors.
Then when we got to 9th or 10th grade we had Mr. Melvin Kleppinger. Mr. Kleppinger was responsible for the careers of many Northampton artists. My sister Margaret became an automobile designer for General Motors Pontiac Division around 1961 because of Mr. Kleppinger’s direction. She was one of the first women designers at GM. She and my brother helped me to think about careers outside the usual nursing or teaching. I did not make a career out of art but I continue to paint to this day and when I retire I am going to go back to college to take more art classes. In Ohio we can go to college for free after age 66. I still have some of my art projects from Mr. Kleppinger’s class (I am not a hoarder).
My favorite and most influential teacher in grade school was my 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Schisler. It was the only year I had perfect attendance. In the previous years I had already had measles (regular and German), mumps as well as the chicken pox. The only inoculations we got were for small pox and then shots and sugar cubes for polio. That year Mrs. Schisler gave out a book for perfect attendance to 5 children. I loved books; it was the Northampton Library and the librarian who kept the hot summers entertaining. Mrs. Schisler gave me a book about Robin Hood. It was this book that inspired one of my drawings in our Amptennian. I still have that book (as well as the Amptennian) but I am not a hoarder.
When I was in 10th grade, I started thinking of a vocation. Northampton offered four areas of study, college preparatory, secretarial, industrial arts and general. My brother thought a good profession for a woman would be an accountant. He had graduated from Lehigh University and one of his minors was accounting. He said that I needed to study bookkeeping because it was the basis for accounting. He said if I liked bookkeeping then I should consider going on to study accounting. But college prep and commercial curriculum did not mix their curriculums. When I asked to take bookkeeping, the principal unquestionably accommodated me. He didn’t need to ask the school board. I just substituted bookkeeping for trigonometry. I don’t ever recall wishing I had learned trigonometry but I can tell you I use my bookkeeping to this day. I also took a summer course in typing which has also served me well. Who knew eventually we would be using computers and texting messages on phones.
In junior high and high school I had many good teachers. I enjoyed Mr. Hunsicker, he made us memorize the Presidents and I can still impress people with the recital today. Mr. Gerenser made the Middle Ages come alive. He had a little catapult on his desk with a ready supply of erasers that he would lob at various students who weren’t paying attention. Andy Barr taught us geography, Harry Witemeyer World Cultures and Edward Pany Social Studies and the aptly named Problems of Democracy. If we were paying attention, every one of these courses serves us well in this world economy. Miss Weed taught us about the great poets and writers and we memorized many poems. Mr. Harry Wall would make us copy grammar “rules” into a workbook and we had to go through newspapers and magazines and find examples of the rules and paste them in the workbook. (I still have mine.) And of course there is our German Teacher, Mr. Keglovits. I can still sing the German national anthem in German at soccer matches and while watching WWII films and can sing quite a few beer drinking songs during Octoberfest. Every once in a while I come across something written in German…mostly e-mails and have a good idea of what they are talking about.
We did get to stretch our minds, painting, working on the Amptennian, singing in Christmas vespers when Christmas could still be celebrated, participate in plays and the science fair, participate in sports. There was a lot to keep us busy. All the teachers who coached and led us through these activities inspired me.
Most of K through 11 went smoothly. But sometimes life interfered and we learned life lessons. I remember the time that Marvin Schleicher got hit by a car in front of the Wolf Building as he was crossing the street. I had just crossed the street but I heard a car’s breaks screeching and turned around just in time to see Marvin sailing through the air. Fortunately he broke few bones and he got a cast and was back to school in a short time. But that experience for me was a wakeup call that bad things do happen. Then, in I believe fifth grade, Diane Petro’s family had a house fire after Christmas when their Christmas tree caught fire. I lived on Main Street and Diane’s house was a few short blocks in Newport. We of course knew the Petro family, Diane’s father had been a wounded war hero. My brother and I as well as a few neighbors went down to see the firefighters arrive to put out the fire. It was extremely scary watching the flames leaping above the house. I had nightmares that night. Diane sat in back of me at school, I sat in the first seat in front of Ms. Schellhammer and of course I frequently used to get reprimanded for turning around to talk to Diane. Evidently Ms. Schellhammer thought I talked too much…imagine that. On my report card that year, I had pithy comments from Ms. Schellhammer written down one side and up the other regarding my behavior. Ms. Schellhammer inspired me to learn to ignore or discount what other people thought of me. I still have the report card. Of course we had some other “issues” at school where some of us got in trouble for spraying our hair white, avoiding eating chicken or wearing skirts too short. But then we started our senior year.
It was supposed to be a magical year. Starting in the fall, I began the school year by taking the driver’s education class with Gordon Bartholomew. October 28th, 1963 we started the day and found out that the night before, Charles Buskirk had been out Halloweening. A terrible accident had occurred amongst all the fun out in the farmlands and Charles Buskirk who took the driver’s ed. class with me was no longer among us. I and the other students went out for our drivers ed. class and Gordon said, “Where’s Charles?” He had not heard of the tragedy and we were left to stammer out the truth. We didn’t get the opportunity to speak with counselors.
Then
When I left Northampton for college, I tried to keep track of how my classmates were faring in this terrible but exciting world. So you, all my classmates inspire me…the baby boomers who keep putting one step in front of another and always trying to do better. All the people who raised good children and better our world whether we left
I
did find that when I left school to compete with other students and then
workers, we had gotten a good academic education. We even had sports, art, and music classes,
all enrichment that there was to have at the time in the public school system. Despite what some taxpayers think, everything
we were given access to, everything we learned was important. We also had learned a good work ethic from
our parents and our teachers. We moved
out into the world looking for further education, and a good job and considered
ourselves lucky. Over 50 years later we
find we were lucky, lucky to have survived with many, many people inspiring us.
Graduate
of Northampton Area High
School Rider University Allentown , PA Palm Springs , CA SCM Inc.,
NY, NY, Borden Inc., NY , NY Columbus , OH
I am married 42 years with two children but never changed my name.  |