Down in San Antonio

[This comes from a narrative written by Emmilou Collins Edmonds Adams around the year 2000. Portions in brackets [] were added for clarification.]
 
When I was nine years old, Daddy [Carlos Collins] remarried. He married Lucretia Tubbs who had worked in the office where he did. I had met her once before they married. Daddy had me come to San Antonio to meet her. One thing I remember is that she was recovering from poison ivy.
 
They married in April [1931]. Just shortly before they married she had some serious surgery. They moved directly into the house on Avant Street. They had bought a house that was completely furnished. I guess it was a blessing. I stayed on in the Valley until school was out. It was probably a big adjustment for everyone, although I don’t remember too much about it. I realized years later that she had some more health problems that year. I do know that I never felt as close to mother [I will refer to Lucretia as “mother” from now on] as I would have wished. I was always close to my Daddy.
 
In September, of course, I started to school. The school was named Highland Park and was three blocks from our house. Texas, at least in the cities, had a system where one could start in September or January. I was ready for fourth grade. For some reason, because my report card had said promoted to 4A I entered the second half of the fourth years curriculum.
 
This system of half grades kept me out of “sync” all the rest of my school days. In high school it was common to keep back a required subject, so as not to graduate until May, since all festivities took place them
 
I don’t remember having any particular trouble except I had to work hard in arithmetic because the second half was into long division and I had not had short division. I guess they reviewed it since there had been summer vacation and I managed . I remember one of my fifth grade teachers was a Mrs. Houston. That was unusual at that time because most teachers lost their jobs if they got married. This was during the depression and the thought was that the jobs had to be spread around. I think she was a widow with a child in school.
 
I remember writing a report on Michelangelo and on some musician (I don’t remember who). Also we had to write a piece about what we wanted to be when we grew up. I remember I wrote that I wanted to be a detective. I think I must have just discovered Nancy Drew.
 
Daddy and Mother were members of the First Baptist Church there in San Antonio. I joined there too of course having joined my grandparents church while I was still in the valley. I was baptized in the Donna Baptist Church, since the Alamo church had no baptistry. They did not go to Sunday School, only to church in the morning. They wanted me to go to Sunday School so they took me to a nearby church (Baptist Temple). Then they would pick me up and we would drive downtown to church. As time went by they also took me to Baptist Temple in the evening for what we called BYPU (Baptist Young People’s Union). I grew up deciding that I would never send my children to a church that I didn’t take an active part in.
 
For some reason when it was time to go to Junior high School (sixth, seventh and eighth grades), I decided that I didn’t want to go to Thomas Nelson Page which I was supposed to go to and which I could have ridden the city bus to. (Bus was just a block from our house). Instead I opted to go to Edgar Allan Poe which was a mile away (so was Page). Consequently, I had to walk a mile there and back every day. If the weather was really bad, I could call daddy and wait at school for him to get off work at 4:30 and pick me up. I don’t remember what I did in the morning if it was bad. I guess he took me.
 
I’m sure it was because my friends were going to Poe that I made that decision, probably the friends I made at Sunday School. I guess I already knew Maurine [Maher] who has been my friend all these years. I know I got to know her in Sunday School. Though we both went to Poe, we never had classes together.
 
In Junior High School we had a home room which remained our home room all the time we were there. My home room teacher’s name was Mr. Tampke. Our “lockers” were just open bins. I don’t remember theft ever being a problem. We got report cards very six weeks. The main thing I remember about that first spring in Junior High is that I missed the second sixth weeks period. I first had the measles, went back to school for one day and was out for the next four weeks. We first thought I had the mumps, since I had swelling in the right place and mumps were going around. When I wasn’t better in a couple of weeks they called in the doctor and discovered I had an abscessed gland in my neck which required lancing in the hospital. The doctor wanted to do it without anesthesia but I wanted to be put to sleep. so I spent the night in the hospital. it was still a couple of weeks before I was able to go back to school.
 
The spring I was in seventh grade, we had a major hail storm in San Antonio. I still remember the eerie greenish cast to the sky before it hit. Everyone in the whole area had to have a new roof and many had their windows knocked out. Our windows were shielded from the west by big trees, but the neighbors were not so lucky. Mother always said that since it was happening, she wished she had been on the other side of our house so she could see their windows being knocked out.
 
When I went to school the next day, we found all the windows in our home room which was on the west were out as were others in the school. We were not able to use our homeroom for several weeks. Also around the school were big piles of hail stones, at least as big a golf balls and it seems more like they were as big as baseballs. Anyway they lasted for a long time.
 
I remember I had a Social Studies teacher in the sixth grade named Mrs. Caruthers and an English teacher in eighth grade named Mrs. Blount. I remember my seventh grade English teacher, but not her name. she taught us outlining and we had to be so precise that we had to make ourselves a ruler to keep our lines in order.