Remembering Trinity Lutheran School

My first acquaintance with Trinity Lutheran School in Cape was my first day of kindergarten. I was just about to turn five. My mom walked me from the car to the classroom, but when she waved goodbye, I started crying. The other kids started laughing and pointing at me. My first educational challenge! Thanks to a wonderful teacher, Mrs. Bender, my fears and tears soon evaporated, leaving me behaving like a full-fledged kindergartner.

My wife, Deborah, also began Trinity School Kindergarten that year. An early riser, she attended the morning session instead of the afternoon one that I did. I’m still a night owl. If only they had offered night kindergarten!

In the late 1950s, Trinity became a hybrid of old and new. Two modern wings were added to either side of the original school. The old building was used for fifth grade, and it seemed like a transitional way station where you would experience and process the old-fashioned classroom with its creaking floors, transom and antique open radiators. After this fifth grade year, you would move on to the other new wing for grades six through eight.

The old building smelled like oil soap and furniture polish. The upstairs was used mostly for storage, but we discovered small rooms once used as classrooms. Trusted older students were allowed to use those rooms unsupervised to practice for spelling contests with other schools that were broadcast on KFVS radio.

We still played basketball in the old gym with its very small court. We set up folding chairs for the spectators, and one side had room for only one row. You sat literally inches from the out-of-bounds line. It almost felt like the basketball goals should be James Naismith’s peach baskets. And part of our home court advantage had to be the ancient, murky locker rooms in the basement with their cavelike appearance reminiscent of the catacombs used by the early Christians.

Other than summer baseball, I didn’t get to know students of color until ninth grade and public school; there were very few minority Lutherans in Cape. Years later, I realized just how ethnically consistent our mostly German-American school was.

Let’s call the roll: Birk, Bock, Boren, Hahn, Haman, Heider, Hoeller, Huckstep, Kasten, Ludwig, Meyr, Schlegel, Scholl, Siemers, Vogel, Vogelsang, Volkerding and more. We had more German surnames than the Düsseldorf telephone directory. Occasionally, we’d see the odd Davis, Smith or Taylor. Our idea of diversity was to have girls as well as boys in our school.

Trinity had kindergarten through eighth grade, and each grade stayed in one classroom all day, so by the end of nine years, you really got to know your classmates. We watched one another grow through childhood into adolescence, seeing changes after every summer vacation. We spent nearly as much time together as we did with our families, and together we were kind of a family ourselves.

Families can have problems, of course, and we had kids who were picked on and some who could be mean, but we usually worked things out.

It is good to reflect upon this now, thinking about how everybody went to their own elementary school — public, private or parochial. They are the places where we daydreamed as we looked out at familiar school grounds, and where we laid on our backs talking with friends as we gazed up at the clouds and made plans for our futures — some of which actually came true.

As we leave Trinity Lutheran School in the 1960s, notice an unusual feature: fully-modern bowling lanes below the grades six, seven and eight classrooms, constructed for the church’s men’s club leagues. And as we look one last time at the front of the school, with its green, grassy hill, doesn’t the old building look like the heart of the school, and the new wings like arms reaching out to embrace new generations of students?

See you around, Trinity. You’re my Alma Schrader — er, Mater!