COMMENTARY: May’s ‘Front Royal Statement’ is worth reading and sharing, now that the new school year is upon us.
Reluctant as I am to fiddle with the U.S. Constitution, I’m willing to consider an amendment banning any elementary school from opening before Labor Day.
That’s the way things were when I was a boy in Baltimore and could no more imagine being in school before Labor Day than I could imagine rooting for the New York Yankees. Labor Day marked the end of summer vacation: Ocean City, Maryland, emptied a few days earlier; my mother took my brother and me to Stewart’s in downtown Baltimore to get our new school uniforms (the pants of which usually had the knees knocked out by October); at McCrory’s five-and-dime we chose new lunch boxes (Roy Rogers? Superman?); and we waited with bated breath to see which School Sister of Notre Dame would reign supreme over our classroom until June.
In those innocent days, these things seemed as immutable as the law of gravity.
So at the beginning of another school year, however absurdly early its beginning, I’m remembering September 1959 and the first weeks of third grade in the Cathedral
