McHenry County Blog

My first integrated school was Middletown High School in New York state.

My father had moved the Chinchilla Breeders and Marketers Association from Salt Lake City when he convinced the members that they had to sell fur from the soft little animals and, to do so, it would be useful to be near the fur market in New York City.

Middletown was about as far from NYC as Crystal Lake is from Chicago, but the rail service on what he called the Erie and Lackadasical Railroad was abysmal.  It took about an hour and a half to go the 50 miles.

The Middletown High School I attended from 1956-58 had morphed into Twin Towers Junior High. I did notice that my Class of 1960 had planted a granite stone at the base of the flag pole.

Entering my freshman year at the high school with no acquaintances except Boy Scouts from my Methodist Church troop, I ended up sitting with those not in a clique.

One was (I guess I would have called him) a “Negro” in 1956.  We hit it off enough that I invited him to come over to our home.

When we moved to Crystal Lake in 1958, again there were no blacks.

No minorities I can remember at Crystal Lake Community High School.

After getting elected to student council in the spring of 1959, I was put in a gym class with seniors because student council met when juniors had gym.

There was one conversation I remember in which two seniors were talking about what would happen when the first black kid entered Crystal Lake Community High School.  He used the “N” word and it had something to do with being locked in a gym locker.

The college I attended was Oberlin in Ohio.  The school brags about being the first to admit women and blacks.

While I was there from 1960-64, black students were just like anyone else.

I noticed a startling change when I returned from the University of Michigan to Oberlin for Homecoming that fall.

Blacks were all sitting at the same table in the Rathskeller.

They were not the spring before.

A step backwards from my viewpoint.

The campus was fully integrated when I graduated.  It seems to have gone in the other direction after that  summer of “Black Power.”

And that brings me back to the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

One of the demonstrations during mid-year 1964 was just south of Talbot County in Cambridge, Maryland, in Dorchester County across the Choptank River.  H. Rap Brown got arrested there and, even in the midst of non-stop studying, I noticed.

I also noticed that the resistance to integration did not occur in my home county to the north. That pleased me.

If you spend some time looking at the most recent detailed board packet that the Huntley School Board kindly posts, you will find some mistakes.

Previously, administrators incorrectly did the math on a list of items on how to spend about $1.7 million of Federal Stimulus ARRA funds for Special Education.

This week, simple math mistakes appear in the list of how the Federal money will be spent on Special Education.

I was glancing down the revised list and saw this item:

Description      Amount
RtI    25 conference @ $200 each.   $3,000

OK, fifth grade math test time.

What is 200 times 25?

The item is on page 8 of the board packet section which has this link (reproduced above with the questionable item at the bottom of the excerpt).

25 times $200 each is $5,000, by the way, not $3,000.

The math carefulness is repeated on page 12.

RtI Conference/ISHA  12X$350   $7,800.00
5 Laser Printers  (5X$400)    $4,500.00

The laser printer line item is at the bottom of the illustration and the RTI is 13 lines higher.

Anyone can make a math error, but couldn’t memo writers check their work as teachers advise students?

English is better, right?

There was a memo on page 6 of 199 to Supt. John Burkey and the board of education members that was dated January 7, 2009.  It’s for the board meeting on the 7th.  The date I pulled the memo was January 6, and it’s  2010.  The mistake about the year is the kind of mistake we all make at the beginning of a new year. The memo was jointly written by three administrators.

The 2nd paragraph aught my eye.

“Proudly, the Office of Special Services has finalized this list.  Having further worked with District Administration (RtI), the Technology Department, District ARRA Committee, Special Education Parent Advisory Committee and a subcommittee of PAC to establish this final product.”

Maybe Huntley’s English teachers can use this with their students to show how the second “sentence” is a phrase and not a sentence. Maybe it will be in sophomore year of high school. I remember my Middletown, New York, English teacher in 1957. She had as her goal teaching us how to write a sentence.

You hear people complain about how students graduate from high school without learning to do math or write complete sentences. When I worked as a cashier at Crystal Lake’s McDonald’s (one with arches and a sign saying 300,000 sold) in the summer of 1960, I added what was bought in my head. Now employees punch pictures.

I wonder why.

And, just in case you are interested in the Read 180 and System 44 expenditures planned, I’ve captured that page above.

I found this Washoe County, Nevada, license plate in Salt Lake City.

It says,

It was southwest of Temple Square a bit in an entertainment neighborhood that certainly was constructed after I moved from Utah to Middletown, New York, in 1956.

A subway was being built on the street just south of Temple Square, but I think the derrick in the background was being used to construct a new skyscraper across the street from the Mormon Temple.

Earlier segments of this biography of my father can be found below on McHenry County Blog.

In 1952, my youngest sister Ellen was born.

That was also the year Dad switched his registration from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in order to be able to vote for Dwight Eisenhower for president. (Maryland has a closed primary, unlike Illinois’.)

And the state was as Democratic then as it is now.

To understand how Democratic the area was and how significant it was for the President of the Easton Town Council to switch parties, let me tell you about the 1952 Halloween paintings I helped put on the barber shop’s front window.

It was a parade to a haunted house. On a wagon was a sign that said,

A day or so after we painted it, my 5rh grade teacher, Miss Ornett, suggested that I should change the sign to

Compliant child that I was, I did.

The Eastern Shore had always been conservative. Today my birth place is firmly in Republican Party control.

But I remember in 1948 when I was six asking my mother why she and Dad weren’t in favor of President Truman. I am not sure of the answer, but that’s the first political thought I remember…unless watching my mother cry when she heard the news that President Roosevelt had died in 1945 when I was two years and ten months counts.

Just as Dad may have been the first to get a student loan, he certainly was one of the first Democratic Party office holders to switch to the Republican Party—all the rage while Ronald Reagan was in office.

My mother, who was the daughter of a Queen Anne County, Maryland, Democratic Party county board member James Clayland Stevens didn’t follow suit until 1954.

Her father was the swing vote who tried to keep the county’s two Democratic Party factions honest after he was recruited by one to run on its slate.

First home in Salt Lake City, Utah: 1265 Harrison Avenue. Remarkably unchanged 56 years later.

In 1953, the family moved to Salt Lake City.
Dad found that he could not get a job at the National Canners Association because the national association did not want to offend its regional affiliate.

So, he looked outside of the food industry.

He found the National Chinchilla Breeders and Marketing Associations in Salt Lake City. It had lots of employees, but was looking to modernize and downsize. Dad did both. The association keep voluminous records of the genealogy of the little animals with the softest fur on earth. He implemented a pre-computer filing and sorting system using cards about the size of 4 by 6 inches with places to punch out indicators around all four edges.

That must have meant there needed to be many, many fewer employees, because by the time he moved the office to Middletown, New York, in 1956, the association did not need very many people.

The office was moved because Dad convinced his board that if the industry was going to survive they needed to sell some pelts for coats and stoles. Since the fur market was in New York City, being fifty miles up the Hudson was close enough to make sales pitches in the city and far enough to avoid the high cost of labor there. The pelt is pretty poor, but the black and gray fur you see above is the natural color. The marketers experimented with dying the pelts blue, among other colors.

After about a year, my father was let go. The board figured his two top assistants earning $5,000 each could do the job he was doing earning $10,000. (My sister Jan covers this much better than I.)

So, Dad was looking for a job while I was a sophomore at Middletown High School. What he found paid less than the NCBA, but it was a job. He was the natural resources man for the National Association of Manufacturers dealing with the big lumber companies, among others.

I suspect he immediately starting looking for a job that paid more and would allow him to see his family more than Wednesday night and weekend. (While Middletown was fifty miles from New York, the same distance as Crystal Lake is from Chicago, the train trip was at least an hour and a half. The track was so bad, the commuters called it the Eire and Lackadaisical.)

Addie Louise Skinner

He stayed in a single room occupancy hotel in NYC, meeting all sorts of interesting people, as he did in Chicago when he preceded us to take his new job as Manager of the Barley and Malt Institute.

“Tell Grandmom—his mother—it’s about malt, like malted milk,” he told me by phone. (You see Addie Watlin-Skinner in her mid-nineties here.)

Addie Skinner was not one who favored alcohol or cards. She and her husband left the Methodist Church about 1944 because it was getting too liberal. My grandfather Skinner built a Holiness Church near Crumpton, Maryland, where they retired.

Dad came to Chicago while us kids finished the school year. He lived in a single room occupancy hotel.

Dad and Mom decided on Crystal Lake as the place they wanted to live. It had a lake that seemed safer than Lake Michigan.

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Here are the links to the other stories in this series:

Biography of Calvin L Skinner – Part 1 – Second Son, School Years

Biography of Calvin L. Skinner – Part 2 – College, Marriage, First Jobs

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 3 – First House, Elected President of the Easton, Maryland, Town Council

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 4 – Storm Sewer Grates, Miles River Yacht Club, Slot Machines, Chesapeake Bay Bridge

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 5 – Switching Parties, Moving to Salt Lake City, Middletown and Crystal Lake

Biography of Cal L Skinner – Part 6 – The Early Crystal Lake Days, Dipping Feet Slowly into Political Arena

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 7 – Running for County Auditor, Precinct Committeeman, Calling the Meeting that Led to McHenry County College

Biography of Cal Skinner – Part 8 – The Star Reporter, Daughter Ellen Bored in High School, Prohibited from Attending MCC Classes

Biography of Cal L Skinner – Part 9 – Responsible Republicans’ Slate, County Board Reapportionment

Biography of Cal Skinner, Sr. – Part 10 – Unsuccessful County Clerk Try, County Airport Fight, Wife’s Death

A flooding problem at the intersection of College and Uteg Streets one block north of Route 14 was being addressed by the Crystal Lake City Public Works Department last Thursday. The area is obviously a low spot in the city’s drainage system.

But, on a warm day after a heavy rain, it was a great place for kids to go wading.

I remember once when my son asked me if he and the little girl riding with us could get out and play in the water.

Indulgent father that I am, I said they could.

So, on the way home from Pete’s home, I parked about where you can see the “Road Construction Ahead” warning sign.

They took their shoes off and had a ball.

I’ll have to admit that the bottom parts of their clothes got a little wet, but it was a warm summer day, so no big deal.

Thursday, when I was on my way to visit my friend and former legislative assistant Pete Castillo, I saw the Crystal Lake Public Works Department was out fixing the problem.

One of the yellow-clad workers told me that they were going to divert the water up the street to Union Street. That’s the one that runs from McHenry Avenue to Colby’s Subdivision. My shortcut to the Crystal Lake Plaza; others shortcut to Crystal Lake Central High School. Actually, the way I used to walk home when some activity kept me at high school after the bus to Lakewood left.

And, unlike the stories of walking to and from school that others my age tell, the walk to Lakewood was not uphill.

The uphill walk was in Middletown, New York, during freshman and sophomore years. There it was quicker to walk home—uphill on Highland Avenue—to 56 N. Walkhill Avenue (note the word “hill” in our street’s name, even though it was pretty flat) than to take a public bus requiring a downtown transfer.

I am reminded also of the CLCHS math teacher, Bill Falaci, who taught those of us who wanted to prepare better for college math during the summer after graduation. He lived on the southeast corner of Union and College.

= = = = =
As usual, any of the images can be enlarged by clicking on them.

A flooding problem at the intersection of College and Uteg Streets one block north of Route 14 was being addressed by the Crystal Lake City Public Works Department last Thursday. The area is obviously a low spot in the city’s drainage system.

But, on a warm day after a heavy rain, it was a great place for kids to go wading.

I remember once when my son asked me if he and the little girl riding with us could get out and play in the water.

Indulgent father that I am, I said they could.

So, on the way home from Pete’s home, I parked about where you can see the “Road Construction Ahead” warning sign.

They took their shoes off and had a ball.

I’ll have to admit that the bottom parts of their clothes got a little wet, but it was a warm summer day, so no big deal.

Thursday, when I was on my way to visit my friend and former legislative assistant Pete Castillo, I saw the Crystal Lake Public Works Department was out fixing the problem.

One of the yellow-clad workers told me that they were going to divert the water up the street to Union Street. That’s the one that runs from McHenry Avenue to Colby’s Subdivision. My shortcut to the Crystal Lake Plaza; others shortcut to Crystal Lake Central High School. Actually, the way I used to walk home when some activity kept me at high school after the bus to Lakewood left.

And, unlike the stories of walking to and from school that others my age tell, the walk to Lakewood was not uphill.

The uphill walk was in Middletown, New York, during freshman and sophomore years. There it was quicker to walk home—uphill on Highland Avenue—to 56 N. Walkhill Avenue (note the word “hill” in our street’s name, even though it was pretty flat) than to take a public bus requiring a downtown transfer.

I am reminded also of the CLCHS math teacher, Bill Falaci, who taught those of us who wanted to prepare better for college math during the summer after graduation. He lived on the southeast corner of Union and College.

= = = = =
As usual, any of the images can be enlarged by clicking on them.