Mr. Jones was my hero at Oxford in many ways. A quiet Welsh gentleman, who was quite proper and formal in his demeanor. He wore a white shirt and tie and polished dress shoes. Then he would put his overalls on over that outfit and work all day with a tie.As I recall the school was always clean and tidy, and he was handy and made repairs on school furniture and other items.  He also took care of the furnace (see my comments in a later paragraph).

He was not overly familiar with the students, but he was there if you were hurt or needed something. I remember Mrs. Whitty and Mrs. Rutherford would occasionally tell our class what a good job he did and imply the school was very fortunate to have him.

He was our graduation speaker for my class. I assume he was picked by Mrs. Rutherford or Mr. Boyack, the principal. Before I tell you about his speech, I would like to mention that I attended a number of graduations after that. And Robert Gordon and Sue Hutchinson gave wonderful speeches that I listened to very carefully. At medical school we had an internationally famous scientist and educator from the Rockefeller Center as our commencement guest speaker. I don't even remember which student or students spoke--or what they said. The only speech I now remember was Mr. Jones's.

Mr. Jones gave a humble, but quite articulate, speech about "big wheels and little wheels" and how in an organization that they all had to work together. He pointed out how all the parts were necessary and important. That was the first time I ever had heard such a concept; it made a deep impression on me.

As I got well into adulthood, I often have thought about his speech. I think it had a positive bearing on my respect and how I try to treat all workers in a hospital or clinic. We have to have the doctors and nurses. But we could not function without the clerks, housekeeping personal, now the computer people, the administrators. lab techs, Red Cross volunteers, etc.

Yet when I told of this experience to my Oxford classmates in 1952, most of them didn't remember the speech or Mr. Jones even being our speaker. They thought I had an amazing memory. I am not sure if that was a compliment or meant I was weird.

The picture of Mr. Jones in the Oxford School, 1910-1964 booklet shows how he dressed. He appears to be shoveling coal into a furnace. He was the custodian at Oxford many years before my class entered Oxford. I assume an earlier furnace was coal- burning.

Mrs. Witty, the fifth grade teacher

Mrs. Witty was a very good teacher. But many of us had mixed feelings about her. She scared some of us. At the reunions of our1952 Oxford class in 1992 and 1998, she generated the most stories by far.

In the rather innocent era of youth, the overall deportment in the classrooms (at least in ours) was outstanding. There were a number of students who were perfect in class--Walter Moore, Sue Hutchinson, Peggy Yarwood, Eleanor, and many others.

A few of us got into trouble for talking to each other when we shouldn't. Bill Dempster, Jim Brown, and I were probably three of the occasional offenders. And in Mrs. Witty's class the price for such behavior was public humiliation. I will admit that if she hadn't been so strict we would have been worse, and some of the perfect kids would have been a little more like us.

Mrs. Witty went a little overboard on telling us how to bathe and how important it was that we wash every nook and cranny (or perhaps she said crack). This titillated many of us all through the sixth grade. Even the lovely Peggy Yarwood said that she would like to see how Mrs. Witty looked in the bathtub.

Mrs. Witty was more than a little rigid. We spent hours assembling our "binders", which had to be exactly her way. I was so stupid or naive that I never questioned why. I was fascinated in 1998 that Earl Mayeri shared with us his questioning (at least privately) back in 1950 why Mrs. Witty put us through such a useless drill. Earl was light years ahead of most or all of us in healthy skepticism and critical thinking.

I felt sorry for the two or three students in our fifth grade class that struggled with oral reading. Most of us found it quite easy and rarely mispronounced a word. When one of the strugglers would take forever to finish one sentence, I wished I could read it for them. Years later I looked back on this and wondered If Mrs. Witty couldn't have handled the reading in a kinder and gentler way.

To emphasize what a deep impression Mrs. Witty, our living legend of a teacher had on us, at the 1998 reunion, Peggy showed several of us some old drawings she had made. One showed Mrs.Witty pointing at Mr. Boyack's hands and telling him, "I TOLD YOU TO WASH YOUR HANDS!" Peggy had enough art ability that her drawing revealed the remorse and embarrassment on our principal's face.

Enough Mrs. Witty Tales. I know I still can't be objective about her now, even fifty years later, but she was a very good teacher and I am probably a better person for being exposed to her.