I entered First Grade in September of 1937.  I skipped Kindergarten.   Not because I was precocious.  Such an educational luxury wasn’t offered by Drumright’s schools.   The Board of Education apparently didn’t favor naming schools in honor of presidents or heroes.  They just named them according to where they were located in town.   We lived in the “Third Ward”, so I entered “Third Ward Grade School”.  At first the idea of going to school was exciting.   All my older brothers and my sister were in school and I felt left out.       The big day came.  Mother drove me to school for my first day.  She and my sister Frances sat in the front seat, while I sat in the back seat thinking.  The closer I got to school, the more fearful I became.   Although I didn’t want to show it I knew I was moving into a new, frightening, and unfamiliar world.   When I got out of the car and looked toward that big brick building that would soon swallow me up it looked ominous.  Tears welled up into my eyes.   But with four older brothers around I had learned that “boys don’t cry.”  When the hot tears bubbled up into my eyes, I quickly rubbed my shirt sleeve across my face to blot them.  Mother was watching me closely.  “Are you crying?” she asked.  Squeezing my eyes shut to stifle the tears; I hurriedly dropped my arm and responded, “No”.  I quickly responded, “The sun got in my eyes.”   Mother knew better but tactfully said no more about it.   I kissed her goodbye and walked away into that unknown.  
I liked school and adjusted easily.  It was a no-nonsense “Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic” curriculum.   Reading came easy to me and writing was no particular problem. Of course I first learned how to print in big block letters.  I don’t remember my first attempts at arithmetic but it was probably a miserable experience.  Dealing with numbers was my Waterloo from First Grade all the way through until Graduate School. But after that first day, I never again dreaded going to school.   
My teacher began each school day with us standing alongside our seats facing the flag that hung above the blackboard and saying “The Pledge of Allegiance.”  Before sitting down we sang “America,” a patriotic song that is all but unknown today: In the second verse of “America,” the words “author of liberty” are sung.  The words are meant to imply that our country is the creator of liberty.   The teacher may have explained “liberty” to us, although I doubt it, but there was never any mention of what the word “author” meant.  Words must have interested me from the beginning of my school years for as we sang that strange word “author,” I became deeply puzzled.
No one had ever used that word in my presence and I wasn’t sure I was hearing it right.  I knew enough about sentence construction to know that whatever “author” was, it had created “liberty”.  But who or what it was remained a mystery.   No one else in class seemed bothered by that strange word and I was not about to show my ignorance by asking the teacher for an explanation.   I continued to sing and as I sang I speculated.  One of my classmates was named “Arthur.”   I didn’t know anything about him.  I spent many days singing that song while shooting sidelong glances at Arthur, wondering if he might have something to do with “liberty.”  He didn’t look proud or guilty or anything when we sang those words so after a while I concluded he had nothing to do with it.   I don’t remember when I learned the meaning of author.