Forty years later and I’m ready to come clean.

The year was 1983 and I was in the second grade at Dover Elementary.

It was time for lunch, which meant it was time for us to walk in our single-file line through the hallways and down to the lunchroom.

The route meant we turned right out of our classroom and took a 90-degree left as we went by the third grade room, which sat in the corner.

Then we passed fourth grade, fifth grade and the sixth grade rooms, the last of which meant it was time for another 90-degree turn.

As we began our traverse out of our room, I found myself at the back of the line.

Maybe I was just slow. Maybe I wanted to finish the last few lines on a page I was reading. Maybe they were serving pigs in a blanket and I wasn’t looking forward to lunch.

I don’t recall, but I was the last one in the line.

Nothing out of the ordinary happened as we made that first left turn.

Then, as we walked by the fourth grade room, a hand reached out and knocked on the door.

The person wasn’t trying to get in the room. They didn’t even stop. They were playing a joke.

The knock caused a chain reaction of laughs that reached me at the back of the line.

I was giggling as we continued walking, that is until the door opened.

Mrs. Cathy Howard stuck her head out and looked both directions to see who it was that needed her.

There was nobody there. I was the closest person because…I was at the back of the line.

And I was a deer in the headlights.

“Did you knock on my door?” she asked.

•••

The demolition of the century-old Dover Elementary School began Thursday morning.

Midwest Wrecking is tasked with the job and its crews began on the southwest corner, bringing down bricks, wood, steel, aluminum and generations of memories.

The memories - mine, those of my mother and father, aunts and uncles…all of whom walked those same halls - can’t begin to be encapsulated into one column.

There are just too many. But I’ll provide a few of my own, many of which came flooding back as I took pictures of the crumbling walls and clouds of dust on Thursday morning and afternoon: Kindergarten - The kindergarten room in that day was downstairs in that very southwest corner that was the first to be knocked down.

It was a quick route to the playground and the famous “little white house.” Every male in my class had a crush on Mary Ann Finnegan.

Our teacher - Mrs. Carey - was, at least as my memory serves, the sweetest and most patient lady as she provided us the foundation of our learning. I have no memory of Mrs. Carey or Mary Ann after that kindergarten year, which in its own right makes me kind of sad.

My guess is Steve Matthews scared Mary Ann away.

First grade - We had our first school play this year.

A certain Patt Sandefur - maybe you’ve heard of her - was our teacher and she wore a dress with an apple on it our first day of school. She didn’t wear it again that year...because I would have noticed.

Although our play wasn’t specifically “Peter Pan,” he was a character in our production. Every boy in our class wanted the role of Peter Pan and those roles were going to be announced by Mrs. Sandefur one specific afternoon after returning from recess.

We all waited on pins and needles as she called them out.

I didn’t get Peter Pan. That role went to Aric Rigdon.

I was assigned the role of some generic name - like Tommy or Ricky or Bobby.

It turns out it wasn’t a generic role; it was the male lead and I had a lot more lines than Peter Pan.

“It’s no use!” was the very first line of that play and it was mine.

Third grade - This is the first time I experienced true heartache when it came to friendship.

My best friend coming up through our first couple of years of school was Shane Feely, son of our girls basketball coach, Joe Feely.

Not only did we make treks to Kingfisher in the summers to dominate the t-ball circuit, but Shane and I had grand visions of what our basketball careers were going to be together, along with the rest of our class.

It never happened. During the spring of that third grade year, just as we were about to walk into the classroom, Shane told me he was moving. His dad got a job in Burlington.

Our dreams of basketball supremacy were soon to be shattered by separation.

And I had lost one of my best friends.

Fourth grade - This was the year it seemed we had a new infusion of teachers at Dover Elementary and our class got one of them.

Her name was Cheri Henderson - maybe you’ve heard of her.

Not only did she seem so young (she was…and still is of course), but to me she was so tall. So, so tall.

I wouldn’t have undertood the term at the time, but Mrs. Henderson had this sense of grace about her. She was very even-tempered and almost always had a smile on her face. Granted, there were a few people in our class who could take off that smile (I’m not mentioning names, A.J. Caldwell).

This was the year we joined the fifth and sixth grades on the “other playground” which was over by the tennis courts, north of the baseball field.

We had gone from the big dogs in third grade to the low men on the totem pole once again...and on a different playground at that.

Fifth grade - Our teacher this year was part of that infusion from the year before.

Her name was Kim Jech - maybe you’ve heard of her.

This was the year I had been waiting for….literally for years.

In our day, we didn’t play 87 basketball games a summer. We played none.

We didn’t begin school ball until the fifth grade and I absolutely could not wait for this to happen.

We weren’t going to have P.E. anymore…we were going to have actual basketball practice.

Although Shane Feely dashed my dreams in third grade, it turned out we had another decent player in our class.

His name was Dominic Bell - maybe you’ve heard of him.

Not long before our season began, we had a birthday party at Chris Counts’ house.

We started to have wrestling matches and a couple of us tumbled to the ground. One of us got up.

I didn’t. My left arm felt “weird.” It didn’t hurt at the time, but I knew something wasn’t right.

It turns out that fall to the ground - one that I’d taken dozens, if not hundreds of times - broke my ulna in two places, my radius in another and dislocated my elbow.

That basketball season I had waited years to play was put on hold as I watched the first 75 percent of it from the bench with a cast from my fingertips to my armpit.

I finally got that thing off and once I was cleared to play, scored the first two points of my career in that old gym (it was a short jumper from the left side of the lane on a fast break on the west goal, since you asked).

As I type this, that gym is now gone, but the memory of that first made shot will live forever.

Sixth grade - Gwen Campbell ruled that roost and we knew not to cross her (well most of us did anyway).

This was the year I learned to take advantage of certain situations.

About four times that year, Mrs. Campbell would declare it time to do some major cleaning, whether in her classroom or the elementary library next door.

It wasn’t organized chaos when this happened. It was disorganized chaos.

She’d bark orders to everyone, giving different tasks, which usually meant retrieving something from or taking something to the other parts of the building.

Once I got my task, I knew I was set because Mrs. Campbell was already giving someone else another chore. She was on to the next thing.

I’d get my job done….or close to it. But I also knew Mrs. Campbell wasn’t going to think of me again until she saw me again, so I made sure she didn’t see me again for quite some time.

I took the time to visit every part of that building.

I’d walk the corridor downstairs, looking in different unoccupied rooms down there.

I’d walk the halls, go in the gym and look through the storage areas underneath both bleachers (some of you really shouldn’t have written that stuff down there).

Eventually I’d find myself up on the stage (the one where I WASN’T Peter Pan).

Behind the stage was more storage. More stuff to look through.

All the while, I knew if another teacher (or even our principal, Mrs. Loudermilk) saw me and asked what I was doing, I could just say I was completing a certain task for Mrs. Campbell. I had my “hall pass” if you will.

But I never did get confronted, so I never had to find out if it worked.

Once my explorations were complete, I’d return to our class and, if there was anything left to do, get my next task.

Back to 1983…..

The first, second and third grades had recess together on the south end of the elementary.

There was the aforementioned “little white house” at the bottom of the hill, but it had all the other “playground things” like swing sets, merry- go-round, monkey bars, tether ball pole and a basketball goal among other things.

It also had “the wall.” The south facade of the elementary was a wall of bricks and faced the rest of the playground.

The wall was punishment.

Get in trouble in class? That’s five minutes on the wall.

Worse trouble? Ten minutes on the wall.

Do something you shouldn’t during recess? Go spend five minutes on the wall.

You absolutely did not want to be on the wall.

Not only did you have to sit or stand there and watch everyone else play…but they also saw you standing there and knew you got caught being bad.

The worst of all wall punishments was being banished there for the entire recess.

You could handle five, 10 or even 15 minutes because - at least with that second recess after lunch - you still had some quality time to expend some energy.

But when you were sentenced to the wall for the entire time? Pure torture.

Torture is what I felt when Mrs. Howard poked her head out the door that day when we were headed to lunch.

She looked at me and asked the question.

“Did you knock on my door?”

I don’t know if it was fear (probably), panic (again, probably) or my willingness to take a bullet for a classmate (no way), but I nodded my head in the affirmative.

I didn’t say “yes.” I was too scared. I just nodded my lie.

I don’t know EXACTLY what Mrs. Howard said to me after she stepped out of her room and approached me.

“I’m trying to teach.” “You might think it’s funny, but it’s not funny.”

It was probably some combination of that….I’m not sure.

I wasn’t truly listening because (A) I was too scared and (B) I was trying to figure out whose hand it was that knocked on her door.

Honestly, if I could have come up with it at the moment, I would have been the biggest snitch.

But I couldn’t. Mrs. Howard finished up with me and I sullenly caught up to my classmates as they were standing in line to wash their hands.

Miraculously, word had already gotten to our teacher, Mrs. Marian Shiever (now Couey).

Mrs. Shiever walked up to me and asked me if I knocked on Mrs. Howard’s door.

I said that I had not. It was the truth, but not as Mrs. Howard knew it.

She gave me one more chance to fess up, but I declined.

The bad thing is, we both knew the fourth graders would be joining us in the lunchroom before long.

So I sat there, barely able to eat (probably was pigs in the blanket), dreading when we saw the fourth graders walk in.

They did...and I guess Mrs. Howard felt she needed lunch that day because she was with them.

She briefly spoke with Mrs. Shiever, who then made her way toward our table… and I knew just exactly the person she was seeking out.

It was me. Again, not sure exactly what she said to me.

“She’s trying to teach.” “You might think it’s funny, but it’s not funny.”

It was probably some combination of that...I’m not sure.

But I did hear her final words: “You’ve got the whole recess on the wall.”

Noooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!! I’m sure it had happened, but to that point, I don’t recall ever spending any amount of time on the wall.

Maybe our entire class got punished for being too loud…or maybe our cluster of desks was being rowdy in class one day. Still, then, it was five or 10 minutes tops.

But this was an entirely different world.

Instead of playing basketball with my buddies, I was going to have to stand on the wall for 30 minutes.

Even worse, since I wasn’t a frequenter of the punishment, people were going to ask me non-stop when they saw me standing there.

“What did you do?” “Nothing.” “How much time you got?”

“Whole recess.” “Ah, man. Really, what did you do?”

(Probably fighting back tears, definitely avoiding eye contact) “Nothing.”

Then they got to go off and play while I had to wait for my next interrogator.

That wall came down Thursday.

So did my second grade classroom. That hallway. That fourth grade door. That gym. That stage. That corridor.

It’s all gone now, nothing more than a pile of rubble waiting to be hauled off.

My story is just one of thousands to come out of that building as generation after generation made its way through there.

Whether we were Peter Pan in the school play (or not), trying to reach a reading goal, looking through rooms we shouldn’t have even been in, standing at our lockers or - good Lord forbid - standing on the wall, that placed shaped many of us.

It’s bittersweet to see it go down, but it won’t take the memories with it.

It’s a time to remember, reminisce, reflect and…confess.

If you were in second grade in 1982-83 and you knocked on that door, it’s time to come clean.

I promise I won’t tell Mrs. Howard. You just owe me a recess.