Memories of Burroughs
By Paul Spika

	June 2002: Group of WHS Class of '76 and Burroughs Class of '70 classmates. John Burroughs Elementary School. Paul Spika, Rhea Kaner, Steve Fiebiger, Robin Smith Culbreath, Sheila Scott, Laurie Wessling Frevert, Ron Syme in white hat (attended Southwest H.S.), Ted Dyste.

In June 2001 several Washburn classmates, including Ted Dyste, Steve Fiebiger, Rhea Kaner, Jeff Mattsson, Sheila Scott, Robin Smith, Laurie Wessling and I, arrived at John Burroughs Elementary School for one last look inside our old grade school. We sought out our classrooms while reminiscing and reliving memories from the fall of 1963 through the spring of 1970. Shortly thereafter, the old building was demolished and a new one went up at the corner of 50th Street and James Avenue in south Minneapolis. Although the original school has been replaced, the memories remain--memories not just of classrooms, hallways, and an old building, but of an unforgettable era now long gone.

It’s impossible to think about Burroughs without recalling the neighborhood that surrounded it, or the events of the ‘60s that took place during our time there. Burroughs was the focal point of our West Minnehaha Parkway neighborhood, with landmarks that included Minnehaha Creek, Lynnhurst Park, Lake Harriet, the Boulevard Theater, Mount Olivet Church, and the ball fields on either side of 50th Street where the school’s Field Day and Winter Frolics events were staged. Back then, few of us appreciated how incredibly fortunate we were to be part of that time and place where we shared unforgettable early life experiences and friendships with the children and families who lived there.

Steve Fiebiger and Paul Spika pose in Mr. Holstad's 6th Grade Classroom (1969-70) on the third floor of John Burroughs Elementary School.

One of the most simple, yet memorable experiences of all was our daily walk to school. For my friends and me, that meant a seven block journey from 50th and Aldrich to 50th and Humboldt and back—four times a day. Because I was only four years old in the fall of my kindergarten year, my parents required an escort from a responsible, older person: my seven-year-old sister, Judy. But after that year I was on my own. Aldrich Avenue friends Rand and Jeff Mattsson, Danny Liberko, and I, along with Colfax Avenue buddies Steve Fiebiger and Matt Maynard, walked each way, almost every day, from first through sixth grade. Often we’d see other friends walking down their side of the very busy 50th Street, including Karl Bohan, Tom Teague, Kevin Baglien, Nick Hoye, Marc Fuller, Dave Flom, Ted Dyste, and Chris Covert. Our route took us Aldrich Avenue guys past the wondrous retail area at 50th and Bryant, where we were tempted by goodies from Paul’s Lake Calhoun Market, Valant Drug, Myhr’s Bakery, and Jimmy’s Café. Whenever we had a few extra coins in our pockets--and sometimes even when we didn’t—we would head over to those establishments in search of 12-cent bottles of Coke, 10-cent doughnuts, and penny candy. We sometimes charmed our way into receiving cookies and doughnuts free of charge from the doting ladies at Myhr’s Bakery. The smell of fresh-baked goods wafting from within was a Siren’s call few could resist. Sometimes we’d see our Burroughs teachers eating lunch at Jimmy’s Café (now the Malt Shoppe) and remember at first being amazed that they actually existed outside of the school.

Sixth grade spring 1970 left - to right: Paul Spika, Kevin Baglien, Marc Fuller, Tom Teague, Jeff Mattsson

Our Burroughs years took place during the turbulent ‘60s, the events from which we were generally insulated because we were so young and unaware. However, occasionally a monumental event, such as JFK’s assassination in November 1963, forced us to tune into the world at large—a world beyond our school and surrounding neighborhood. I can still remember:

• Gathering around the TV to watch the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964.
• The ’64 presidential election campaign and the Democrats’ slogan: “Johnson, Johnson, he’s our man, Goldwater, Goldwater’s in the garbage can.”
• Huddling in the southwest corner of our basement during the ’65 tornado that hit Fridley.
• Daily news reports of the war in Vietnam.
• The defining and tragic events of 1968, including the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, a war-weary LBJ announcing he would not run again, the riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and Richard Nixon narrowly defeating our own Hubert Humphrey for President.
• In July of 1969, being glued to the television to watch the Apollo 11 crew touch down on the moon, and feeling a great sense of national pride as Neil Armstrong took his “one small step” onto the lunar surface.

While there were many memories from such an incredible time in the world, a few from our Burroughs days stand out as well…

	Laurie Wessling Frevert and Sheila Scott under the watchful eye!

The Principal
The much feared Mildred Simonsen, whom we dubbed “Simonize,” was the principal for most of our years at Burroughs. I vividly recall running down the hall (a “no-no”) past the office when I suddenly felt a sharp set of claws clamp down on my arm. After I was pulled to a stop by old Simonize, her talons tightened their pinching grip while I was given a mild shaking and stern warning. Finally, I was released and sent on my way after a promise not to repeat the offense. A few years later, on her last day as principal, school officials arranged for Miss Simonsen to ride around the Burroughs field in the back of a white convertible to allow everyone to show their appreciation for her reign of terror. Karl Bohan showed his--and encouraged others to do the same--by launching a volley of pebbles as the Simonsen motorcade wheeled by.

The 1965 World Series
In the fall of second grade, Mrs. Telser's and Miss Comney's students were allowed to go into the hallway outside the two adjacent classrooms to turn on a 19” black and white TV and watch our American League Champion Minnesota Twins take on the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1965 World Series. I don't remember anything about the game, but do recall a TV commercial for Noxzema shaving cream. We all thought it was hilarious when the ad’s sexy blonde woman lathered-up the face of an appreciative guy and said, "Heads up, Handsome."

Portrait and plaque from 1926 of conservationist/naturalist John Burroughs reads: John Burroughs Grade School, erected A.D. 1926, Board of Education...

The Second Grade Desk Cleaning Ritual
Our second grade teacher, Lois Telser, had a bit of an “edge” to her. Like a volcano, Mount Telser didn’t erupt every day, but when she did, watch out! Some kids found this out the hard way. Every so often, our class was ordered to clean out the compartment beneath our desks. For most this only took a few minutes, but there was usually a kid who tested the teacher’s patience, which you really didn’t want to do with Mrs. Telser. David Larson collected everything under the sun in his desk, including expired food, wadded up gum, and an assortment of crumpled papers, paste, and crayons. That day David seemed more interested in leaning back in his chair and joking with a classmate than making progress on the pile within. Upon inspection, a fed-up Mrs.Telser decided it was time to help David "clean out" his messy desk by suddenly lifting it up, sending the desk and its contents crashing violently onto the floor. Suffice it to say her patience had been tried.

A few years later I ran into Mrs.Telser while having Sunday dinner with my family at the Anchor Inn restaurant in St. Louis Park. A much needed respite from 30 screaming kids, not to mention the pack of smokes she was puffing on, seemed to have calmed her nerves; Mrs.Telser was quite pleasant and engaging that day.

The Birds and the Bees Movie
By the sixth grade school officials determined that the 11- and 12-year-old kids should receive some formal instruction regarding the obvious changes going on in their bodies. One week, an announcement was made that a “special film” would soon be shown. The boys and girls would be split up and taken into Mr. Ryder’s classroom for separate viewings. Among the boys, the anticipated visuals of this film were the subject of much lurid speculation and interest—all strictly prurient. At that age, most considered ourselves lucky to have caught a fleeting glimpse of a Playboy magazine. Rand Mattsson was among those first scheduled to see the film. Since imagining what was to come was half the fun, Rand was instructed to give us an advance “rating” on the quality of the more provocative scenes. The choices mirrored the MPA ratings of the day: “G,” “M”, or “X”-rated. Rand pronounced the film as an “M”-for mature audiences only; however, on the whole, the thing was a major disappointment with a fairly tame discussion on girls first experiencing their periods, boys’ voices changing, and hair showing up in strange new places on our bodies.

Girls and Boys
The sex-ed film, as some parents and administrators might have feared, did not awaken a latent curiosity about the opposite sex, but our hormones did. One day during sixth grade, news of a recent “boy-girl” party thrown by classmate Eric Bodine emerged. The hot gossip centered around a game of Spin-the-Bottle. The game purportedly involved several male-female combinations locking lips, including Steve Fiebiger and Kathy Pappas, who were immediately pronounced “a couple.” Word was that Eric Bodine gave Nora Bylund a friendship ring, although we didn’t really understand its significance. In the fifth grade, a tawdry rumor circulated that a girl and a boy had gone into the bathroom between adjoining classrooms and stripped. The rumor turned out to be false, but the boy and girl were required to stand in front of the entire class while Mrs. Empie chastised the rest of us for starting and spreading the ugly rumor. The girl was in tears, while the boy looked as though he wished he were somewhere else.

Minnehaha Creek
On one unseasonably warm day in March of 1967, we organized a pickup baseball game in the area next to Minnehaha Creek known as “The Flats.” Long ball hitter Tom Teague amazed us all by clubbing a mammoth homerun that actually landed in the creek. A reporter from the Sun neighborhood newspaper showed up, took a picture of us all, and made up a story about the game under the banner, “Eagle Claws.”

Minnehaha Creek was the center of many other activities too, including an occasional swim. On one balmy May day in 1970, Jeff Mattsson, Leslie Terry, and I plunged into the water for an after school dip. Eventually I realized I hadn’t seen the other two for a while, but soon found Leslie and Jeff sharing “a moment” while holding hands under the creek’s bridge.

The Safety Cop
Once or twice a year, a policeman from the Minneapolis Schools Safety Program made the rounds to all the schools to warn kids about the special dangers involved in walking to school in the winter. Officer McLeod always came equipped with his poorly crafted home movies, depicting the dangers of “mountain-goating”: the forbidden practice of walking atop mounds of snow piled high along the curbs of busy streets.

The traffic safety seminars were unintentionally hysterical as the old cop would inadvertently create ridiculous jump-cuts by shutting the camera on and off while filming children walking down the street. This start-stop technique resulted in the special effect of kids magically popping in and out of the action, as in an episode of “I Dream of Jeannie.”

McLeod’s one genuine attempt at humor was always the same, lame one. Before the film was played, he would trot out the worn-out line: “Now, will an ‘electrician’ in the back please turn out the lights?” We mouthed the words along with their delivery and laughed because the joke was as predictable as it was dumb.

Almost Famous: a Visit by a Soon-to-be Celebrity
In the late 1960s few outside of his hometown of Roswell, New Mexico, had ever heard, or heard of, an aspiring musician by the name of Henry John Deustschendorf, Jr. By the end of that decade, only a few more knew of this artist who in 1967 penned the tune “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” later a #1 hit by Peter, Paul and Mary in 1969.

In the spring of that year, a still unknown, 25-year-old John Denver was living and teaching school in Edina. He had been a college roommate of our Mr. Lund, a student teacher in Miss Oberg’s class. Mr. Lund somehow convinced his pal Denver to perform inside his classroom for about 60 of us fifth graders—just those in Miss Oberg’s and Mrs. Empie’s classes.

While we welcomed the diversion, no one had any idea who this shaggy-haired, blonde guy with the big, wire-rimmed classes was. The playlist from that day is a bit foggy, but Denver opened with “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” performed some of his other songs, and then took requests. Most of us were focused on the Beatles at that time, so someone suggested their song “Blackbird.” He agreed and did a nice job with that hit from the recently release Beatles’ “White Album.” Mrs. Empie, in an attempt to be hip, asked Denver if he knew the1966 hit “Sunny.” He didn’t, and a few of us snickered because we didn’t think it was a cool song. There’s no known record of what else he played that day, and no one recalls whether Denver uttered his signature phrase “Far out!,” either. Steve Fiebiger remembers Miss Oberg making a reel-to-reel tape recording of Denver’s performance, but whether it still exists is a mystery.

John Denver went on to play coffeehouses and small venues at colleges before striking it big in 1971 with his first #1 song, “Sunshine on My Shoulders,” written while he lived in Minnesota from 1968-1971. Over the next two decades, Denver went on to become one of the most successful recording artists of all time--selling 60 million albums on the strength of numerous hits including “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” “Annie’s Song,”
“Rocky Mountain High,” and “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” Denver died in October 1997 when he crashed the small plane he was piloting into the ocean off the California coast at Monterey Bay.

LARC Baseball: Fourth and Fifth Grade
When the Twins played the Dodgers in the 1965 World Series, few of us six- and seven-year-olds paid much attention to baseball. But by 1967, the magical year when the Twins, led by Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva and Rod Carew, battled the Tigers, White Sox, and Red Sox down to the season’s final weekend for the American League pennant, many of us developed a serious case of “baseball fever.” So by the next spring, there was a rush of fourth grade boys clamoring to sign up at the old Lynnhurst Park field house for our first year of organized, fast-pitched baseball.

The park supplied each player with a cap and a “LARC” tee-shirt. We supplied the rest. Each team had its own signature color. Ours wore navy blue. While most teams adopted the name of a major league team such as the Twins, Orioles, Pirates, or Giants, our team had a very different name--one we were at a loss to explain. The first day of practice our coach gathered us in a huddle and with an inexplicably conspiratorial tone whispered, “Okay guys, here’s your team name: It’s the GO-MOs!” Said with such secrecy and authority, no one dared question it. We found ourselves frequently having to defend this name, the “Gomos,” with no idea of its meaning or origin. We weren’t even sure how to spell it! About a year later, we finally figured out that “Gomos” was appropriated from the first-two letters of the first and last names of our coach, GOrdon MOrris. He probably had a good laugh from it, but we concluded at the very least it was a disgustingly vain thing to do and subjected us to unnecessary humiliation while defending a name that we hated. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, we lived up to our stupid name by being the worst team in the league that year.

	Fifth grade LARC Bombers baseball team —coached by Dayton Fiebiger Back row: assistant coach Dave Teague, Tom Teague, John Villas, Bruce Bennett (green+blue stripes) 3rd row: (unidentified kid in white jersey with two stripes around shoulder) 2nd row: only identified Kevin Wacholz (2nd from left) 1st row: Steve Fiebiger, Kevin Baglien, unidentified kid in orange shirt, Matthew Shapiro, Eben Shapiro

By contrast, Dayton Fiebiger’s “Bombers,” including his son Steve, in their maroon caps and shirts, were the toast of the league, winning the league championships in both fourth and fifth grades. The Bombers had the formidable lineup of Tom Teague, Kevin Baglien, John Villas, and Steve Fiebiger behind the plate. They only lost one game over two seasons. The one loss at the hands of Mr. Ramgaard’s Dodgers that included Jeff Mattsson and me. We often wondered how the team selection process worked: just how did the Bombers end up with so many top players, including three future players on the Washburn varsity?

Field Day, Signing Ribbons, and the Winter Frolics
For everyone associated with Burroughs, the two signature events of the year were The Winter Frolics and Field Day.

The Winter Frolics took place in January and were greatly anticipated in the dead of winter. The Frolics featured a day-time speed-skating race at the Lynnhurst Park outdoor rink. In advance of the Winter Frolics, a poster-making competition was held to promote the event. Each classroom participated. The best were posted in the classrooms and a very select few in neighborhood businesses. The Friday night event was held right inside the school, with games and events in the hallways and the classrooms. The horse-pulled hayrides around the Burroughs field were a major draw, along with Mr. Ryder’s “Blackouts,” an intense array of “Laugh-In” style skits and bits.

The Field Day event, held each June, was the epitome of athletic competition and pageantry at Burroughs. The competition kicked off with a parade of little Burroughs kids from second grade and below pedaling around on cleverly decorated bicycles. The athletic competitions were always a source of much stomach-churning anticipation to see who would be awarded ribbons in the 50-yard dash, high jump, broad jump, and soft-ball throw events. The fastest boys were usually Mike Schultz, Kevin Baglien, Tom Teague, and Steve Friese. For the girls it was Sue Reid and Laurel Lehnherr. A blue ribbon was awarded in each event for 1st place, a red ribbon for 2nd place, and a white ribbon for 3rd—each with “John Burroughs” emblazoned in white or gold letters.

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After our sixth grade Field Day of 1970, our time at Burroughs was complete. The years at John Burroughs Elementary School were so very special to us all. Those formative years were full of incredible teachers, parents, and classmates, and meaningful experiences both in and outside of school. Experiences and people we will never forget.

	About the Author...
			Paul Spika lives with his wife Nancy and cat Sammy in south Minneapolis, where he recently rode his bike to the corner and back for an ice cream cone.