Doug Blough

When I saw the headline: “Choir Members Secure All State, All Northwest Bids” in the Jan. 6 Trib, I was transported back to fifth grade and a 60ish (when you’re 10, who knows how old someone is) teacher, Mrs. Trexel. Never in the annals of my memory has there been such a split personality of good humor and cruelty.

In Mrs. Trexel’s fifth grade class, she was preparing us for some school program in which the choir she put together would perform for the masses. I remember she had each of us sing something — probably the alphabet — and then separated us into separate sections. There was the altos, the sopranos, and the crows. Yes, Mrs. T actually had a group of students set apart as “the crows,” the group with horrid voices. I remember I just made the cut into the altos, coming ever so close to the shame of a crow.

But her humor would shine as bright as her crudeness dimmed the light. Whenever we’d come in from recess, everyone lined up at the water fountain at the back of the room, and Mrs. Trexel would slowly count out one to five, the allotted number of seconds each student could drink. One day we were all seated and Mrs. T drank from her ever-present Bubble-Up pop. As she began another drink, I began to loudly count out, “1…2...3” and she laughed so hard she spit Bubble Up onto the floor. If I’m not mistaken, some bubbled up from her nose.

Her cruelty though stands out more in my memory than her crisp humor. There was a super-shy girl who sat in the row right next to me named Karen Baranyak. One day Karen, probably from fear of being singled out, wet her pants. Mrs. Trexel ordered her to go to the girl’s room, take off her panties and bring them back. Once back in the room, she was ordered to put her wet panties on the hot radiator.

You can imagine the odor that filled the air, and of course all the kids — sopranos and crows alike — were yelling “PU” and holding their noses. That was 61 years ago and I can still see Karen’s tears rolling down her cheeks. I’m glad I remember it in such a sympathetic form and hope I didn’t join the chorus of hecklers who didn’t grasp the wrongness of the situation.

Bangs were all the rage then if your dad let you get away with it, but Mrs. Trexel designated girl’s names to all us boys with long bangs hanging down. I was “Donna,” which didn’t bother me since as class clown, I knew how to roll with the punches. It didn’t seem to thrill Dennis “Denise” Hall or Eddie “Edith” Mischler much though.

I may have been the clown, but I also had a romantic streak at that age and was madly in love with classmate Patti Kapitan, a dark-complectioned, black-eyed beauty. My heart literally fluttered when Patti was near. Now, there was a student teacher probably in his early 20s named Mr. Kravetski and I knew Patti had a crush on him. He was a tall, handsome man I suppose, but had a really ruddy complexion.

One day while in a different class next to Mrs. Trexel’s room, I wrote a profound love poem to Patti comparing myself to Kravetski, skewing things in my favor of course. I think the teacher of that class confiscated my rhyming declarations of love and it found its way into the hands of the dreaded Mrs. Trexel. When we arrived back in her class, she had Kravetski up front and announced “Donna” Blough had a poem he’d like to share with the class.

So I had to stand up and read this personal poem to Patti aloud with the macho student teacher as part of my audience. The only stanza I remember is when I stated, “Besides, he’s too old and has holes in his face, and I could beat him in any old race.” This sadistic teacher, in an effort to embarrass an alto with bangs, just made me insult a nice man with acne scars. I think even Karen Baranyak winced.

What a contradiction Mrs. Trexel was between fun-loving prankster and sadistic torturer. Who knows if she made it to heaven or not, but I can imagine her underwear on the radiator in hell and all the demons and deafening crows in the chorus shrieking “PU!”