I walked under the railroad tracks at Fond du Lac Avenue and Burleigh Street on the North Side of Milwaukee from those neighborhoods of frame flats, home to two families, up and down, and into another world. I didn’t know it then, but the world I was walking in to when I came out from under the viaduct at 35th Street – across from Master Lock Company – would become my world. My world is different from the world I left in those rented houses. My world is different in so many ways.
I was introduced to other students, students who actually lived on the other side of the tracks, when I walked under those tracks. I was a student at Peckham Junior High School, and so were they, those other students. Many of them would become my friends. At least one teacher made the mistake of thinking I was one of those students, but I was always painfully aware that I was from the other side of the tracks. I never forgot that. I noticed the clothes my classmates wore. I knew that many of them came from families where at least Dad – and sometimes Mom, too – were educated beyond high school. Some of my classmates were the children of professional people. Maybe I felt shame among those students; I saw the differences between them and me, with raw clarity.
Something else happened when I walked under the railroad tracks. I was tracked into the college bound students, the smart kids, based on the IQ tests all students had dutifully taken during grade school. And that changed my life.
Some people along the way would become important to me, to my life. I would never forget their names, how they looked, things they said. For three years I sat behind Larry Atlas, who made me laugh, in English classes taught by Miss Ross. How old was she? As a student of middle school age, she certainly looked very old to me. She always wore black old-lady shoes, and she always wore a navy polka-dotted dress that hung long, between her knees and ankles. I’m pretty sure she went to the hairdresser once a week to get her hair done, cut and permed. I knew this: she was not cut from the same mold as the women I’d known up to then.
I’m grateful to have been educated by the teachers I was privileged to have in the Milwaukee Public Schools in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Not one of them knew it, but they changed my life, changed the trajectory of my life.
In Miss Ross’s class, we studied the American poets. Every week, we learned about a poet, read their poems, memorized a poem, and put our learning into a book of our own, poems carefully rendered in my own hand. I filled a pocket folder with sheets of paper that included carefully printed poems and pictures I’d cut from the magazines my mother received in the mail. Sometimes, I was called upon to stand in front of the class on Friday and recite the poem we’d been assigned to memorize that week. My own love of poetry was fertilized and grew in Junior High English Class taught by Miss Ross. I can still recite most of the poems I learned over those three years. I love to recite the poems I had memorized, so many years – so many decades – ago.
I learned to love poems then. I began to write my own poems then, too. Sometimes I still find a poem in my childlike handwriting, a few words of my own fashioned into my own poem. And sometimes – often – the words of a poem I memorized under the strong and wonderful guidance of Miss Ross comes to mind.
Reciting a poem from memory is a great joy – to me. Later, after Junior High, after High School, somewhere along the way of my now long life, I memorized “Twas’ the Night Before Christmas.” Every year, I make sure to break into a recital of the entire text for someone else’s enjoyment – and for my own enjoyment.
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Jeff was the one who encouraged me, this past year, to have a collection of my own poems published. Without his kind encouragement, I expect I’d never have sent my poems out to be published. It’s an accomplishment of my life. Its genesis, I think, began on that walk under the viaduct at Fond du Lac Avenue and Burleigh Street, on the North Side of Milwaukee.
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Moments, Mary Elyn Bahlert, Balboa Press, 2026. Available on Amazon.
