First And Second Grade At A Mission School In Old Tucson

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First And Second Grade At A Mission School In Old Tucson

By Thomas Keyes
June 26, 2005

Though I was born in Chicago, I moved with my parents and younger brother to Tucson, Arizona, in 1943, when I was six years old. We would live there for two years this first time, and we left in 1945, returning in 1951, when we would stay another three years.

The population of Tucson in 1940 was 36,000. A Census Bureau estimate put it at 521,000 in 2004, a 15-fold increase. In 1943, Tucson was a sleepy, backward town with mostly dirt roads. We were fairly poor, and lived in a trailer court opposite Soleng Center on South Sixth Avenue. Passing that way in 1997, I noticed that Soleng Center remains, but the trailer court is gone.

I attended classes at a primary school attached to a mission church. The teachers were nuns and I loved them very dearly. There were only two classrooms in the school, and each classroom had four rows of desks, one row for each grade. A nun would teach one grade for a few minutes and then give them an assignment to complete, while she moved onto the next grade. These were nuns that wore full floor-length black habits and great white cowls and barbes, starched stiff, with gracefully overhanging black wimples. The sight of a pretty fresh pink face in such attire was always enough to make me merry.

The name of the mission was San José Mission as I recall. It was a small stuccoed adobe church with an iron bell in a niche in the pediment. Today, it looks as if the original structure has been modernized and turned into some sort of neighborhood youth center, though I’m not sure it’s the same building. A more famous mission church is San Xavier del Bac, also in Tucson:

http://www.visit-usa.at/images/arizona/tucson_sanxaviermission.jpg

In 1943, almost 100% of the pupils were Mexicans, Papagos or Navajos. Non-Hispanic Caucasians were evanescently few. I recall with amusement that, at recess, we would go out and play touch football, except I didn’t have the faintest idea of what it was all about. I merely ran back and forth with the crowd as if I knew what I was doing.

I had a little girlfriend named Sílvia Núñez, dark and pretty, with straight black hair and always wearing colorful little dresses. We were supposed to get married when we grew up, but fortunately for her, it never happened. I can remember her as if it had been yesterday.

The open desert was a block away, and, though we were under a prohibition from wandering out there, the other children and I played there all the time. One day we caught about 100 centipedes and let them loose in the trailer court, not realizing that they are poisonous, and, also, that if you cut a centipede in half, you have two centipedes. The neighbors finally got rid of the foul arthropods, but I was in trouble.

I really loved Tucson. Then one day the blow fell. We were moving back to Chicago, and all the ice and snow and gray skies that are synonymous with that city.

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About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far.

I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents.

Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com

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