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January 21, 2010

Exploring history

Carl Keith Greene

My fourth grade teacher, Gladys Davis, was one of the best teachers I had at London Elementary School.

She and her family moved from London soon after that year and I just don’t know what happened to them.

I remember her mostly because of the way she taught us history and perhaps that is what pushed me into my love of all things long ago.

It was obvious that she was deep into American history.

The first part of the history classes came from booklets that appeared as if she had made them herself.

And we, in our spiral-bound Blue Horse notebooks, copied all she told us.

For each participant in the “discovery,” exploration and settlement of America she had a separate book of her own.

She would write the information on the blackboard for us to copy.

She started with Eric the Red and his son Leif Ericson of Norway, the first Europeans to set foot on the North American continent around the year 1000.

Nearly 500 years later, an Italian guy named Christopher Columbus talked the Queen of Spain out of some money and headed for what he thought was to be India. It wound up being some islands in the Caribbean.

Then there was the continent’s namesake, Amerigo Vespucci.

We must have spent most of the semester learning about all the foreigners who had trod the soil of early North America.

Of course the Native Americans that Columbus named as Indians had been here long before Leif Ericson.

Frankly, I’d forgotten about many of those explorers until I pulled up a list on the dependable Internet.

Next came John Cabot, Vasco de Balboa, and Juan Ponce de Leon, who discovered St. Augustine, Fla., and failed to find the fountain of youth.

Next was Ferdinand Magellan, who invented the GPS for our cars (kidding). Magellan took off on a trip all the way around the globe, but personally didn’t make it. He was killed in the Pacific, but his crew finished the trip that started in 1520 and ended in 1521.

There were so many more before 1682. Names like Cortez, Verranzano, Pizarro, Cartier, DeSoto, de Coronado, Sir Francis Drake, Champlain, Henry Hudson, Marquette and Joliet and finally Robert LaSalle.

It’s kind of appropriate that three automobiles were named for the explorers, the DeSoto, the Hudson and the LaSalle.

We learned about the exploration of Canada, Mexico, how Henry Hudson had problems at what is now Hudson Bay and Coronado’s exploration of the American west.

All of that, I think, was done in the first semester. The next semester, as I remember, we got into real American history — George Washington, Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford and all those guys.

One of the things I remember about that spring was the trip we took to the London telephone company’s office.

They took us on a tour and I remember the racks and racks of the devices that connected the dialed telephone numbers. It hadn’t been long since London had gotten dial phones.

Upstairs there were still operators connecting the long distance calls with their switchboards and patch cords.

History is fascinating for a fourth grader, at least it was for me in the late 1950s.

And I think that Mrs. Davis made it even more fascinating.

I wonder where she went from London.



Carl Keith Greene is a writer for the Times-Tribune. He can be reached at cgreene@thetimestribune.com

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