4th Grade

The more I’ve delved into this look back exercise, the more I’ve discovered that whatever was going on in my small world was also going on in the small worlds of a lot of others. I doubt that changes much throughout life even though specific elements that made up our individual lives changed over time. We moved from toys to games to cars to girls/boys to work to children to homes and whatever else we could stuff into our lives along the way.

For me, the film Animal House showed that what I experienced as a college student was similar to what the Animal House writers experienced during those same years—even though they went to school elsewhere in the country far from my home turf. And as I watched some of the details written into that film, I saw some elements of my 4th grade year in it.

I recall drawing war scenes almost daily while the teacher was teaching—I was bored. While I don’t have any specific recollections of any of my classmates doing the same thing, I’m sure some of them were, we rarely did anything that others were not doing. A short scene in Animal House showed that some of the writers were drawing the same scenes. Unfortunately, none of my art work survived but the scenes were pretty much the same…fighters zooming down, shooting everything in sight on the ground.

Then I wondered where the idea came from….TV was only black & white in those days, only 3-channels, and full of WWII documentaries and movies. Maybe the idea came from those films. But I also recall having a lot of leftover Life magazines from the WWII years…Dad never threw anything like that out. Then I saw the 1944 Cadillac ad (below) online recently. That ad closely matches what I was drawing...anyway, that’s one of my 4th grade memories.

By the way, one of the Animal House writers is visible online and answered a few of my inquiries...kind of neat.

Adios