WORLD OF SCHOOLS

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Jack Day's

Worlds

Schools:
From Inner Mongolia to Chapel Hill

Growing up overseas produces a different set of experiences.

One of them is change--for a while virtually every year brought a new school, and often a new country.

In 1947 our family went to China, initially to Kalgan, North China, where kindergarten involved learning to write characters with a brush and inkpot. Kalgan is in Inner Mongolia; its Mandarin name is "Chiang-chia-kuo." I remember padded clothes for the winter cold, growing zinnias from seed sent from the US, and early morning trips with my parents in truck convoys where the dominant sound was the second-gear whine of trucks going up hill.

Then for a while in 1948 there was an American School in Peking and in 1949 a Canadian School in Chengtu.

We were in Chengtu in 1949 when the Communists took over. I sat on my father's shoulders in a crowd by the road into town as we watched an enormous several mile parade of Red Army soldiers. Some marched and others rode in U. S. Army trucks captured from the Chinese Nationalists, emblazoned with big red stars and portraits of Mao Tse-tung and Stalin.

We were able to leave China very early in 1951. My sister and I entertained soldiers on the boat going down the Yangtze River by singing Chinese Communist school songs we had learned. When we got off the train and walked into British Hong Kong, we were welcomed by a new treat -- coca-cola. It was warm, but it was good.

Our next school was 4th grade in Allenwood, New Jersey. No-one else knew much about China, and I didn't know much about baseball. The one constant was my bicycle, which went everywhere -- chasing a schoolbus until I found the house of a little girl I liked, and, one time, up over the handlebars when I failed to look where I was going and ran into a parked car. That cost a tooth.

A couple of decades later my sister returned to that school as a teacher.

In the summer of 1952 we went by ship from New Jersey to Malaysia. The ship was a Norwegian freighter; I remember learning to swim being tossed back and forth by Norwegian sailors in a make-shift canvas pool rigged up on deck as the ship sailed through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. Soon school was the Anglo-Chinese Boys School in Teluk Anson, Malaysia. We learned how to add and subtract Pounds, shillings and pence, and the teacher carefully corrected me when I referred to a place that you buy things as a "store". "Shops", she informed me are places that you buy things; "stores" are places you keep things. I had three playmates; it happened that one was Chinese, one Malay, and one Tamil. We were a mini-UN.

Teluk Anson and most of Malaya was hot, humid, tropical. But there was a place in the central mountains called "Fraser's Hill" which was cooler; it had a golf course and was a resort for Westerners, including missionaries and their children. The picture below is from my sister Vivia's collection:

Missionary Kids at Fraser's Hill
(L to R: Michael Shumaker, ? Tielmann, Robbie Shumaker, Penny Shumaker, Vivia Day, David Reinoehl, Beth Tielmann, Jack Day

In 1953 school was the Klebang Methodist School in Malacca, Malaysia, a small church-run boarding school on the waterfront with a yard full of palm trees.

Woodstock School

The pattern finally slowed in March, 1954, when at the age of 12 I went to Woodstock School, located in Mussoorie, in the foot hills of the Himalaya mountains northeast of New Delhi. The class of '59 never numbered many more than 30 at a time and totaled less than 120 in all. Now, several dozen of us correspond by e-mail. With the internet, you can visit the Woodstock School Site direct to Mussoorie or the Kodaikanal-Woodstock International alumni site in Georgia, or Phil McEldowney's Class of 1959 Site in Virginia, as well as my own picture albums of school days and reunions. (see bottom of page).

My sister Vivia was there part of the time in the class of '63, and has written a wonderful piece about life as a missionary kid in that boarding school, called Woodstock Wisdom. It brings back many memories, many of them warm, some of them poignant, one of them a bit awkward. Perhaps because we were 'underdogs', a lot of Woodstock kids have had a natural sympathy for the underdogs and the causes of marginalized, oppressed people anywhere. I was on the "Integration Committee" at Western Maryland College while it still restricted admission; I sent my clerical collar on the march to Selma, and I now serve on Howard County's Human Rights Commission. But when I read Woodstock Wisdom, I remember that as American missionary kids growing up in Asia, we were quite conscious of being "white people." I've trained myself not to think in those terms any more, but there it is in black and white -- "white people didn't cry in public." Maybe it simply meant Western people. Maybe if a black missionary kid from Idaho had turned up at Woodstock, he would have been "white people" too.

The Woodstock bond has resulted in recurring get togethers. We celebrated our 20th reunion late, in Tennessee in 1982; we celebrated our 40th reunion on time in Rhode Island in 1999 in conjunction with the regular reunion of all Woodstock alumni (Woodstock Old Students Association.). I was invited to preach the morning sermon, entitled "In Search of a Song" at the Year 2000 WOSA Reunion in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Western Maryland College

By September, 1959, I had spent my entire life since kindergarten, with the exception of two years, overseas. College at Western Maryland College in Westminster, Maryland, was a new experience. I graduated with a major in history, a Second Lieutenant's commission, and a fiancee.

Wesley Theological Seminary

Graduate School followed, at Wesley Seminary in Washington, D.C. These were tumultuous years. I was in class on a Friday afternoon, Novemer 22, 1963, when word came of President Kennedy's assassination. Later, my roommate Jim Truxell and I were co-editors of the Wesley Journal, the small school newspaper, which chronicled everything from students' theological struggles to, as time progressed, Christmas packages for American troops in Vietnam.

School of Public Health - UNC Chapel Hill

Twenty years later, after over a decade working in health care, an opportunity came for graduate study in public health. I seized the chance, and spent 1985 in North Carolina at the School of Public Health, UNC Chapel Hill.