celebrates 40 years
of education
James Monroe School
celebrates 40 years
of education
MIGUEL JUAREZ staff Fourth-graders at James Monroe Elementary School, Edison, celebrate the school’s 40th anniversary last week with a tribute to the times, wearing outrageous hair styles and spreading peace with the universal sign of the times.
BY ELAINE VAN DEVELDE
Staff Writer
Some things are hard to forget. Officials at the James Monroe Elementary School in Edison wanted to impress that upon their student body when they brought back the radical happenings of the 1960s in a celebration of the school’s 40th anniversary last week — even though the kids commemorating the times never experienced them.
"We wanted to give them something to remember with the anniversary itself," said Patricia Pelc, a special education paraprofessional at the school and coordinator of the event. "The kids had such a wonderful time trying to re-create an era they really knew very little about. In itself, that is now going to be a strong memory for them for another 20 to 30 years."
Once you learn the words to the theme song from the "Beverly Hillbillies" or the Alka-Seltzer jingle, or how to Hula-Hoop or play Twister or juggle a Slinky, it sticks in your memory, Pelc reminisced. Those are some of the things the students at James Monroe learned about during the all-day event and, as Pelc put it, will find difficult to scrape from their memories.
Each grade had a different category of ’60s trivia to cover and convey to the public. The students wore the look and carried out the sentiments of the era well, Pelc said.
Kindergartners sang and danced to popular beach tunes of the time. Donning festive sunglasses and hats, they danced the monkey and the swim and, while they had "no clue what the heck the people of 1964 may have been thinking or why they may have invented the crazy dances, they certainly seemed to have a lot of fun giving them a try," Pelc said.
"You should have seen the looks on their faces when the adults got onto the dance floor and did the twist later," she added. "They looked very confused, like ‘What the heck are they doing?’ It was very funny to watch the reaction."
And there was much more where that came from. While the kids on the beach were dancing and sunning to the tunes of the era, the first-graders were playing games that were quite foreign to them. They tried their hands at "a favorite of girls and boys" — Slinky, as its jingle went. The long, springy mass of metal slid from hand to hand, to the floor and back.
Hips also swayed trying to keep Hula-Hoops from touching the floor and Twister turned a few, who normally sit stationary glued to a PlayStation, upside down.
"Some built the games into costumes, as well," Pelc said. "It was cute. They just thought everything was so much fun. It was really something to see."
In keeping with the motif, the second grade was responsible for bringing back the food of the era, most of which was eaten on what was called a TV tray in front of the television — a favorite 1960s fad.
They memorialized the revered and convenient TV dinners of the time, chock-full of rubbery chicken and half-cooked brownies in foil trays, not to mention the sweetest, most venerated breakfast cereals, which were also eaten while watching television most of the time. While television time is monitored nowadays, in 1964, when television was relatively new, meals revolved around favorite shows and news broadcasts.
The third-graders brought some of those shows back to life with little performances of the theme songs to Bonanza, the Beverly Hillbillies and Mayberry RFD — the Andy Griffith Show. They wore cowboy hats and rode ponies on sticks in memory of Bonanza, whistled the Andy Griffith theme and made people "listen to a story ‘bout a man named Jed, a poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed" in honor of the Beverly Hillbillies.
And they did not forget the unforgettable commercials of the era. "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz. Oh, what a relief it is" to remember the Alka-Seltzer commercial of the time and that Choo Choo Charlie used "Good & Plenty candy to make his train run."
Fourth-graders reminded people of how time, looks and sayings change.
"For instance, one student would hold a sign that said ‘2004 — radical, dude’ and another would hold a sign that said ‘1964 — cool, man’ or what would be the equivalent now of a saying then," Pelc said. "They wore afros and pedal pushers, which are now capris. It was very enlightening."
Fifth-graders called to memory the most unforgettable headlines of the time.
"They had clips of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech and clips about the Cuban missile crisis and John F. Kennedy’s presidency," Pelc added. "The day was unforgettable, just like the era. It was not just a 40th anniversary celebration, but a living lesson in history the kids will not easily forget for some time to come."