I had recently compared a ’97 Olds Achieva with my experience of having attended a gifted elementary school from grades two through six. My early education began, however, in a parochial school in the Lutheran church my family attended. Including myself, my kindergarten class had eleven children in it – eventually twelve, with a mid-year addition. My teacher, Mrs. Savings, drove a little MG convertible. Just two days before my Achieva essay had run last month, I was inside that same church back in Flint for a mostly unplanned visit and Sunday morning worship for the first time in decades. Being inside those walls again brought back so many memories dating back to my early childhood in the late ’70s.
Mrs. Savings was pretty, approachable, had a friendly smile, and long, brown hair. This was in the era of country music icon Crystal Gayle and her lengthy, brunette tresses worn in a style that many women emulated. My teacher had an easygoing affability that I remember had calmed my fears of transitioning into a classroom with newly-made acquaintances and having to learn things, versus the freeform structure of preschool and merely doing activities. That same classroom on the lower level of the church building was also where I attended Sunday school. One month ago, I looked at the stairs leading up to the building’s entrance and pondered just how much smaller they looked to my adult eyes.
My former kindergarten and Sunday school classroom is on the left.
One day, she had drawn small circles on the chalkboard in a horizontal row, spaced about a foot apart from each other, and a volunteer was called up to connect them with curved lines to match a card she was holding. I suppose our motor skills and ability to follow directions were being tested that day. A few of us struggled in front of the classroom before one of us finally got it (not me). To stand outside that classroom door last month made me also recall what it felt like to walk down the hallway to the cafeteria for milk and cookies.
My kindergarten class photo.
Mrs. Savings was sweet, but she didn’t play. There was one time I was roughhousing with one of the other kids and inadvertently hurt him, or so he said. Perhaps this was inevitable. Boys will wrestle, and I did so all the time at home with my two brothers. She asked me if I had injured my classmate “on accident” or “on purpose”. I knew what “on accident” was, but I wasn’t used to the phrase “on purpose” and honestly didn’t know what it meant at the time. It must have been the young test-taker-in-training in me, but I went with “on purpose” because I thought it sounded more interesting. I immediately got in trouble.
The scene of the infamous mouth-soap incident.
On another occasion, I had told this kid Michael to “shut up”, and since those were bad words (again, Lutheran parochial school), Mrs. Savings pulled me by my arm into the boys’ bathroom and washed my mouth out with soap. I’ll never forget her serious, focused expression as she tapped her hand vigorously beneath the wall-mounted dispenser before rubbing her soapy hands inside my mouth on all sides. It doesn’t matter how pleasant or fruity liquid soap smells. It will always taste terrible.
Aside from those incidents, I really liked Mrs. Savings and wanted her to like me, too. And the above incident wasn’t abuse. She was a kind teacher and person acting within the disciplinary parameters of what was acceptable and, quite frankly, expected at the time. I knew my teacher cared about me. I bear no emotional scars from this.
Mrs. Savings’ car was the only little MG roadster I had gotten close to up to that point. This was Flint, Michigan in the late 1970s. Not only were non-GM cars not that common (of course, my parents had Chrysler products, having purchased three, consecutive Plymouths from a college student of my dad’s who also worked as a salesman), but imports were super-rare. Here’s where things get a bit murky in my memory of Mrs. Savings and her little sports car. It would be probably a few more years before I realized that the MGB and Midget were actually completely different cars.
I’ve written before about how the taillamp lenses shared by the Ford Pinto and Maverick had thrown off the young me, but in the case of the MGB and Midget of the late ’70s, not only did they share the same taillamp lenses, but both also had thick front and rear bumpers of black rubber, and both were really tiny cars compared to the Cutlasses and Monte Carlos everyone else seemed to be driving. All this is to say that I can’t say for certain whether Mrs. Savings drove an MGB like our featured car, or a Midget. What I can tell you is that the sight of either one of those cars will immediately remind me of a teacher I haven’t seen in over forty years.
While sitting in the church’s beautiful sanctuary and refamiliarizing myself with the scenes depicted on its intricate stained glass, it occurred to me that there was yet another connection between this church and school and my first teacher’s car. The shape of the taillamp lenses, when viewed straight-on, looks like that of a stained glass window. Later models, with their red and amber sections, look even more like stained glass.
Also like the church, the MGB had become something of an institution, with a production run spanning nineteen whole model years, with close to 387,700 roadsters and 125,600 fastback GTs produced between 1962 and 1980. (MG Midget production totaled just shy of 224,400 units from between 1961 and ’79.) I was unable to identify the model year of our yellow example, but it’s at least a ’75, a year which brought a ride height increased by an inch and a half, in addition to the black bumpers, from a visual standpoint. With a top speed of 90 miles per hour and needing almost eighteen seconds to hit sixty miles per hour, the later editions of the MGB roadster weren’t exactly sporting. At the same time, I feel like a little MG roadster fit the personality of my friendly, peppy kindergarten teacher perfectly.
Where was she going to go in a hurry, anyway? She needed to keep that car to the 55 mph highway speed limit in force during the tenure of President Carter, so as not to have her long hair whip around into her face and impede her vision as she drove. Mrs. Savings, wherever you are today, thank you for being a great first teacher, for explaining the difference between “on purpose” and “on accident” (even if after the fact), and for teaching me that words like “shut up” can hurt. And please don’t worry about the soap incident – I have since and voluntarily done shots of liquor that tasted far worse before giving all of that up over four years ago. The school may have since closed, but I was thankful to have been able to go back to stand outside that classroom door one more time. Maybe more milk and cookies are in order.
Downtown Chicago, Illinois; Thursday, July 7, 2022; and
North Flint, Michigan; Sunday, March 3, 2024.
In my early 20s I had a 1968 mgb. It had thrown a rod through the block before I bought it. A replacement short block was found at a wrecking yard and repairs were made. The replacement was $400 if I remember correctly. Incredibly easy to work on . I learned to synchronize the SU carbs using a hose and listening to the airflow. Lost art? It really wasn’t the maintenance hog many believed it to be. And the only problem I ever had with “Lukas” was losing a coil in the middle of nowhere Kansas. I drove it hard. Had to to keep up with traffic. I accumulated about 120k miles before needing a rebuild. Not bad in my opinion. I sold it when I bought a 1975 280Z. Ah, the luxury of fuel injection and A/C. The gentleman who bought it was mainly interested in the factory hardtop. I remember the tail lights being exactly the same as the one pictured in the article.
Kent, your account of your example seems consistent with much of what I’ve read about the MGB’s robust and easy-to-work on nature. These qualities have especially endeared these cars to even a non-mechanic like me.
I, too, latched onto taillight shapes to help identify cars when I was a little kid. This was in part because I saw the back of cars when riding in them more than the sides or especially the front, even more so when seated in front (which was where kids routinely sat back then if there was no adult passenger). It helped that the roads were still filled with 1960s and ’70s cars whose taillamps were highly stylized yet simple geometric shapes, and much more distinctive than the amorphous taillights on newer cars. I quickly learned one big circle was a Ford, two little circles were a Chevy (three for the fancier ones). My family’s Dodge had a delta-shaped taillamp. Cadillacs has big finny vertical lights, and so on. Later Chevys and Fords substituted rectangles for circles, which clued me in on their age. I found most imports harder to identify – Toyotas, Datsuns, and the like seemed to have nondescript, purely functional but not decorative taillamps that all looked the same to me. MG’s were amongst the few foreign cars I could identify by their rear lights (many British cars of the day including the MG also had distinctive side marker lamps that were the same regardless of manufacturer). My taillamp fixation lasted only about a year, after which I learned to also factor in other features like window shapes and grilles when identifying cars. This too was easier back in the day – there was no mistaking the opera-window profile of a Mark IV (oval), Elite (twin parallelograms), Cougar (hexagon) or Charger SE (triple panes).
I also got in trouble in elementary school for using hurtful words, though they weren’t intended to be. A classmate told me during the after-lunch “recess” period that she found it easier to balance herself on one of the playground fixtures with her right foot forward than the left. “Ah, you’re a goofy!” I said. She then reported to my teacher that I insulted her. In skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, or sometimes stand-up paddling, a “goofy” (or “goofy-foot”) is someone whose left foot is dominant and thus positions it in back; the more common right-foot-in-back stance is called “regular”. It’s in the dictionary (dictionary.com flags the term as primarily Australian; nope, it’s been common in the US and UK my whole life; it’s even called that in Spanish. Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary correctly considers it an American term too). 8-year-old me failed to consider that people who aren’t into board sports may be unfamiliar with that usage, and mistakenly consider it pejorative. The teacher apparently did and chewed me out for calling a classmate goofy. At least they didn’t make me consume cleaning supplies.
dictionary.com is wrong. “Goofy” hasn’t the slightest currency here, and never has.
The only thing that comes to mind for left-handed is “cack-handed”, which I proudly am.
It’s not used for handedness, only for feet, and only for board sports. Someone who kicks a football with their left foot wouldn’t be called a goofy.
My point is that the term isn’t used for leftiness of any type here. In fact, come to think of it, it isn’t even used for being silly and the like.
My Dad was left-handed but had that beaten out of him (well his hand anyway) at school back in the 1920s. Different times.
You expertly broke down the how and why kids who love cars learn to associate taillamps and window shapes with makes and models as they learn them. A kid will almost always be facing forward, and in traffic behind cars.
As far as “a goofy” vs. just plain “goofy”, it’s a shame something said with no ill intent went so sideways.
Great association between the MG’s tail lamps and the classical church windows. Never noticed that before – and I’ll never unsee it now! It’s great too, that you were able to go back to your kindergarten classroom… few people have that opportunity.
Your Achieva/Gifted Program article brought back recollections of my 2nd grade teacher, Miss Sedgewick. Oddly, though I was a car-obsessed kid, she’s my only elementary teacher whose car I remember. She drove a late-1970s maroon LeMans sedan. It had those silver gauges that Pontiacs had back then, and more than once I’d sneak away from recess to look at the interiors of cars in the parking lot, and hers was my favorite. Yes, I got in trouble for that a few times.
The reason I was reminded of this from your Gifted article was because I had the opposite issue that you had. Miss Sedgewick wrote to my parents and recommended they have me tested for mental retardation (I know that’s an indelicate term, but that’s the term she used) because I was developmentally behind most other kids. They did – and the doctors said that I was simply late to develop, and was frustrated with my teachers. (My folks never mentioned this to me at the time, but I found it decades later in documents they saved. I remember not liking Miss Sedgewick, but never dreamed that she reciprocated that dislike many times over.) Anyway, that’s my one car association from my early educators. I wish it was better, but I can laugh about it now.
I got sent to in-school speech therapy one year when I was about 6 because they thought I had a speech impediment. In actually, I’d just picked up my mom’s Québécois accent which apparently made my pronunciation seem odd to those used to American inflection.
Funny… I had a similar experience as well – which may be part of the reason that Miss Sedgewick didn’t like me. I lived with my Russian-born grandmother, and ended up speaking English with a foreign accent (even though I didn’t actually speak any other language). I was put in speech therapy all through elementary school as a result.
My 2nd grade teacher was Miss Butler – a shriveled-up old spinster who seemed to have it in for little boys in her class. She was the kind of teacher that parents who knew something about her would try to get their kids assigned to another class. My mother was not in the know, and there I landed.
Miss Butler drove a low-trim 1961 Plymouth sedan. I thought of them as a perfect set – an ugly old car for an ugly old lady. 🙂
Ha! My 2nd grade teacher was Miss Murdoch, she told my mother I was destined for prison…
I don’t know what she drove but it definitely wasn’t an MGB.
Ouuuuch. One of my sixth grade teachers (we had two) told me I’d be digging ditches. I wonder if that guy has ever read any of my essays.
Thank you, Eric. Miss Sedgewick and her LeMans… I find it interesting that the car you liked best in the parking lot belonged to a teacher with whom your rapport wasn’t the best. That would potentially have killed the association with the LeMans for me.
I can imagine just how tricky it is, at that young age, how to separate one’s worth from one’s assortment of learning abilities, even when our parents and friends tell us otherwise. Thankfully, there seems to be more awareness for many different sets of ability these days.
Credit to my parents for never telling me about this. When I found Miss Sedgewick’s letter (and the IQ test that my parents had me take as a result) in an old file a few years ago, I felt like I was exhuming something that ought to remain buried. I threw it out.
Fortunately, my 3rd grade teacher was much better, which helped me a great deal.
Great opening shots of the MG! Chicago must be a good place to shoot CCs–interesting backgrounds.
It is a truly surreal feeling to, say, walk through your old elementary school after a few decades. Hardly anyone talks about this or even experiences it. I got to do it several years ago.
Who’s the kid under you in the yearbook?
Thank you, Stephen! And I did always wonder why our stuffed animals ended up in our class photo. Probably just to help fill some of the squares. Fun fact: I can still name the first names of my other classmates in that photo.
I am another who never registered the difference between the MGB and the MG Midget until the day my cousin drove to our house in a pale yellow 1969 Midget. With that car as a reference I finally learned to distinguish the two. You make a great point – for those of us raised on big Detroit iron, many small cars looked alike.
I think we could do with more people like Mrs. Savings in our educational system these days. I would be willing to bet that nobody ever got hurt from getting a mouthful of soap (or, for that matter, getting a swat from a paddle) – certainly not when administered by someone whose heart was in the right place. Now you have me hungry for milk and cookies too!
Thank you, JP! I’m glad I’m not the only one who was confused between the two cars! Granted, we’re both midwesterners, but this still counts.
And, yeah. I have many friends who are educators and they have spent significant amounts of time just suppressing foolishness. One of my good friends is a principal, and he’s got some great stories.
When I was growing up in suburban Toronto around 1960 the family across the road were a bit older. Their children were teenagers when I was in elementary school. Their son bought a Midget. I think it had side curtains so it was the first generation. His dad was a bit portly and as far as we could tell, he could not get in the car, even when the top was down. We certainly never saw him in car. They are small cars with very small doors.
It’s largely familiarity – there are a lot of 1960/70s Detroit boxes that I simply cannot identify, even today.
Probably there was a time when I struggled with Spridgets and Bs, but I cannot remember.
Mrs Savings – who, by her name alone, was surely an Oscar Wilde comic-horror creation in previous life – was in truth a deranged religio-disciplinarian fanatic, who, in places she didn’t recognize, was probably turned on by her act of violence towards you, and for a fucking perceived swear word, at that! I’m genuinely glad you have the generosity of spirit to thank her, though it is consistent with your wonderful writings here. I’m damned if I would (though in her world, I’m sure I am damned anyway). Even when I was a Catholic schoolboy, if that had happened, my passive and religious parents would have demanded her gone for her abuse, and to be clear, it IS that. Strict discipline is entirely one thing, and has a useful role: psychco-sexual ingestion of poison into the body of a child is quite another. Nerve touched, rant over.
Pininfarina’s cathedral tailights do indeed make one feel prayerful, and turned up on many of that design house’s ’60’s designs, indeed, almost too many to count. The commonality of shape somewhat diminished the effect, it must be said, and maybe accounts for the decline in church attendances.
As for B v Midget, damned if I could tell back in the day. It wasn’t till I got to adulthood and realized how ridiculous an adult looked when inserted into a Midget instead of a B that I fully knew the difference.
Oh, good grief. Project much? Not to invalidate your own experiences with your own teacher(s), but you didn’t know Mrs. Savings. She was a good person. Didn’t mean to trigger you, very sincerely. I know abuse and experienced it firsthand in a family system that was supposed to protect and nurture me. *That* was messed up. Good teachers like Mrs. Savings were my respite from that.
Not triggered, nor am I projecting: no such disasters ever happened to me, though it’s true I witnessed enough.
No, my reaction to the idea that an adult in 1985-odd could use an industrial cleaning agent in the mouth of a little kid as punishment for that adult’s perception of a moral infringement by that kid is something that so deeply disgusts me that I cannot even begin to forgive the adult, and especially when their vile action was driven by a professed belief in a loving god.
It is now universally accepted that victims of abuse will find any and every example they can of the goodness of the abuser – and of course, even the worst abuser does not do entirely bad things – but it still requires a person of exceptional calm courage to let old failings slide. And as I implied, Joe, your writing here has shown you are one such, that is, that you are able to find equilibrium and peaceability where others can’t, and here, that Mrs Savings is the beneficiary. Now, whether, in the great scheme of things, she deserves your equanimity because of the good she did, that’s another question. My view on that, you know.
Appreciate it.
I grew up in an era where various kinds of abuse of children was commonplace. But I did have one experience that still hurts and affected my relationship with religion forever.
In first grade in Innsbruck, one of the parish priests would come in once a week to teach religion (in a public school). I was undoubtedly talking to someone during his class and he walked over to me and gave me a very powerful slap on the cheek. It was hard, it stung and burned, and I was shocked, mortified and awash in shame. I can still feel the burn of that slap on my right cheek today.
Little did he know that his slap was the beginning of the end of my genuine religious feelings. I had just come to understand the meaning of hypocrisy, and I saw this for what it was.
When we moved to Iowa City the next year, we had catechism classes after school at the local church hall. I did not like it, and one day I just didn’t go, riding my bike around for an hour instead. It was a bit scary, but nothing happened and life went on. I rarely went back after that.
But then that was hardly the end of the abuse I experienced at the hands of priests; just a very powerful first blow.
Paul, just wow. That was wrong on so many levels…and for talking? Talk about the punishment not fitting the “crime”.
Interesting perspective as usual. I also fixated somewhat on tailights, in particular I liked what I call the “cathedral” lights on my previous ’76 Olds 98 and ’56 Packard Patrician (shown below). The Teague designed light was particularly well designed and added a beautiful jewelry-like aspect to the rear of the car.
These are great examples that totally fit the association I was talking about… Great examples, thanks for sharing them.
’56 Packard Senior model tailights:
Those two are amongst my favorite taillamp designs ever. A two-dimension photo doesn’t do justice to the Packard lamp, which is almost perfectly cylindrical, with a chrome arc that swoops over and around on a different plane from the red lens section. The pictured Olds lamp is from a 1975 model; the ’76 has a small “98” emblem in the center. (I was at my most attentive for this sort of trivial annual update when that car was new; I haven’t a clue how to tell a new Camry or Accord from a five year old one, much less with grey crossover SUVs that all look alike to me.)
I recall getting in gigantic trouble in first grade for stomping my foot and shouting out “Damn, Damn, Damn!” over some injustice dealt to me by another kid. For this, Mrs. Woods called my mom to come in and pick me up. The amount of trouble I got into at home (I think mostly because my mom was embarrassed by the fact that the teacher had to call HER SON out on anything) made me WISH that Mrs. Woods had just done something at school like washing my mouth out with soap. We could have kept that between us (riiiiiight) and the incident would not have been something that my Mom regularly reminded me of for another 30 years.
I love your reason for choosing “On purpose”. I could see doing that. And yet it’s just that kind of question (that teachers and other authority figures ask kids) that teaches one to give “the proper” response no matter what.
“How fast do you think you were going back there?” 😉
That yellow is so perfect on the little MGB. I’ve always fancied an MGB GT in that color. Maybe someday. Although at this point, I’m probably too old to regularly be able to fold myself into the driver’s seat.
Jeff, I would have been that kid in the class who laughed out loud at hearing another kid say three “swears” in a row! 🤣😆
I now think about how parents feel about their kid’s behavior, as many of my friends and family members have kids now, themselves.
And “on purpose”. Man, it was a calculated risk, but it just didn’t pay off that time.
Nice write-up. A lot there. Brings back memories. My first car was a 1970 MG Midget, and people would often confuse it with an MGB. Maybe to a lot of people MGB just meant any small open two seat sports car. Sporty doesn’t necessarily mean speedy though. A large point of cars like the MG was just fun. Economical fun even. I could take any corner in town in my little MG and feel like a Formula 1 star. I still have an MG. A ’52 TD. It is even slower. And in some ways even more fun.
Thank you! And this calls to mind the adage that sometimes it’s just more fun to drive a slow car fast. 🙂
I, too, had a yellow ’79 MGB much like the picture except the black stripe was narrower and above the belt line and chrome strip. It came with the optional fiberglass hardtop and trunk rack, which came in handy, and the factory rally wheels. I drove that car far and wide, mostly with the top down day and night. It taught me a lot about wrenching on cars although it probably wasn’t worse than any other 1979 car. Slow because of the smog bits – and, boy did that catalytic converter light up bright red! I put most of the miles on it (56k) over the first 4 or 5 years and then it remained largely garaged for another 15. I intended to modify it for track days, but life got in the way. I sold it for about half what I paid for it new; not bad for a defunct Brit-mobile.
Thank you for this. I really tried to find a model year identifier by the tape stripe, but was unsuccessful. Life often gets in the way. I like that you were comfortable with parting with yours and letting someone else have fun with it.
My stepdad has owned his 80 yellow MGB just like the one in your pics for a couple decades now. He has literally rebuilt everything at least once. He put a supercharger on it about 5 years ago and man did that change its character. Finally having enough torque to break the wheels loose is fun.
I love that the MGB lends itself to mods like this that can improve it’s day-to-day usability. I gain only more respect for them the more I read about them.
When MGBs were new they were popular here, I can remember reading about one in NZ hotrod thinking WT.. then seeing it had a 302 Ford V8 not long after that BMC stuck a Rover V8 in with a warranty, they werent cheap.
When I started kindergarten my family was living with my grandmother, but just before Christmas we moved to a new house in the suburbs and I moved to a new school. I don’t know how it is arranged now, but in those days in Toronto kindergarten classes were large with 2 teachers. My transition to the new school as OK, except one of the new teachers took exception to my habit of putting my hands in my pockets. Evidently I ignored her instructions and kept puttiing my hands in my pockets, so she took some knitting yarn and sewed up my pockets. Although I don’t remember it, I was quite upset, as was my mother when I got home. I don’t think of it as being traumatic, but it must have made an impression if I rember it almost 70 years later.
Wow – that also seems extreme. Hands in pockets seems natural to me. That’s me waiting at the crosswalk at an intersection. What’s the harm? Now, gum chewing… that’s cause for solitary confinement.
While I don’t live in Chicago I did see a green 70-73 MGB-GT yesterday morning running down the free way. Nice shape too. I always like those cars. Yesterday was a trifecta since as I drove the 1 1/2 miles to pick my son at high school I saw a parked 70-73 BMW 2002 in excellent shape and right after a 1965 De Ville convertible pass through the intersection where the 2002 was parked. This always happens when I am driving so no pictures.
The CC Effect sneaks up on so many of us at inopportune times. This may have been one of the reasons I ponied up a little bit more for a slightly nicer phone with a decent camera, versus what I might ordinarily have gone for, for the times when (for one reason or another) I can’t have my actual Canon camera on me. Which, I admit, wouldn’t matter either way if I was driving.
CC Effect: I saw a spotless British Racing Green MGB roadster zipping along the freeway today, top down. But despite the traditional chrome grille and bumpers, it had an ungainly tall stance. Was the ride height raised in early 1974 before the black bumpers arrived? Or perhaps it was a later model retrofitted with the chrome. Or maybe it had new suspension which was just too high? Anyway, a nice sighting despite its “lift kit”.
I’m pretty sure from what I read when I was originally putting this together that the raised ride height arrived for ’75, but my source could have been incorrect. I didn’t exactly bust out the (virtual) card catalogue when I wrote this. LOL I like your theory about a later model retrofitted with chrome grille and bumpers.
> She needed to keep that car to the 55 mph highway speed limit imposed by President Carter
The 55mph limit was signed into law by President Nixon in January 1974, three years before Jimmy Carter became President. Nixon originally proposed an even lower 50mph.
Oops. Thanks.
A 50 mph speed limit for expressways would mean a road trip from Chicago to Flint would take like the whole day. Groan.
BMC used that tail light on quite a few cars the ADO16 range had them if memory serves of course actually seeing all that range is like me seeing Mustangs close up in the late 60s,
1 was it the garage owner at the end of our street got a 65 stuffed a bigger engine in it extensive mods to the engine bay to make it fit and used it to tow his Jeep to events, its 289 went into his business partners MK4 Zodiac. I liked that Mustang it was resprayed a dark Metallic green you know why just after that movie came out
Musical chairs with the motors. And since you’ve mentioned it, I feel like I could stand to screen “Bullitt” again. It’s a stone cold classic.
aaahhh Crystal…
Yes! Crystal Gayle is just great.