In September I started 6th grade again at Littlewood with Mrs. Casey as my teacher. The area was growing and, even with the school only being a few years old, there were not enough classrooms for all the kids, our class was in a temporary classroom that was brought in an put at the end of the main school walkway past the regular classrooms.  The temporary classroom had wood walls on three sides while the fourth side had tall windows from the waist up and a tin roof.  On days it rained we could hardly hear the teacher over the rain on the tin roof. The classroom had no air conditioning and for heat had a big kerosene heater much like the one we had at home so the classroom was generally hot or cold except on those pleasantly cool days in the fall and spring.

   I remember one cold winter morning we had just come in from recess and several boys were gathered around the heater in the back of the room and while playing around one of them bumped into the heater knocking loose the stove pipe that ran up through the roof.  The classroom quickly filled with smoke from the burning kerosene and we all had to go outside in the cold while they called someone to fix it. 

I had a wonderful time is sixth grade, the teacher was nice, we were the big kids at school, the sixth graders, I had several friends in class and we were always talking and doing things together.  Mrs. Casey wrote on my first report card, “If Larry would be more attentive in class he would do much better work.  He disturbs others around him because of his talking.”   My desk was in the row by the windows so I only had kids on one side, I think the teacher put me there so I would have fewer people to talk to.  Even so talked to several of my friends and exchanged notes.  One boy didn’t have any paper one day and said he would write a story for a person if they gave him several sheets of paper.  The story wash short but amusing and soon others were having stories written.

It was also the year I first noticed girl’s breasts.  In school, two rows over from me sat a pretty girl who would wear a loose fitting blouse that had no sleeves which when she sat just right, I could get a glimpse of her perky breasts though the side of the open sleeve.  I mentioned this to the other boys during recess saying she had nice puppies.  They asked what I meant by puppies, and I explained that her breasts were like the turned up nose of a puppy.  They kidded me about it at first but over the next couple of weeks one boy or another would say something about a girl’s puppies

Sixth grade was a mixed year slipping in my spelling and social studies making a couple of D’s but I made steady B’s in arithmetic and one A in science which where were becoming my favorite subjects.

On November 22, 1963 President Kennedy was assassinated. It was a Friday afternoon; I was at school in class when over the loudspeaker in the classroom came the announcement from the principal. Everybody was shocked.  Dad came home a bit earlier from work that day and the whole family watched Walter Cronkite on the CBS evening news tell all about it ending his show with a solemn "...And that's the way it is, November 22, 1963". Walter Cronkite had just Interviewed President Kennedy on the news a month earlier on September 2nd.  The front page of the newspaper for the following week was all about the assassination.

The Gators had a mixed year when in September they tied Mississippi State, then in October beat Richmond but lost to LSU but Dad was happy when they beat Florida State Thanksgiving weekend.

Updated: 08-07-2022

The Newspaper