Entertaining the Rotary Club in Mount Vernon. (original) (raw)

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 Caf� on Kaufman Street. And since my aunt and uncle, Molie and Lewis Gist, operated the caf�, I usually did not have to pay for my hamburger.