Reflections: Starting school with Red Ryder and Hopalong Cassidy

It seems hard to believe that another summer has come and gone.

All over the area, kids and their parents are looking forward to getting back to school. The kids became bored after about the second month of vacation, while parents, no doubt, have become overly tired of being told, ”There’s nothing to do around here, and there’s nothing – absolutely nothing – to eat in this house!”

The summer I was 6 years old, I began first grade at Church School in Wheatland Township. In those days, we had no kindergarten, and neither did we have anything like “Sesame Street,” so all the basic learning was done during our first grade year.

Of course, “Ding Dong School” was on TV. The Chicago-originated educational program, hosted by Frances “Miss Frances” Horwich, was kind of a forerunner of today’s ed