Betsy and I were allowed to go to the Pickwick Theater by ourselves on Saturday afternoons.
One day, we watched Lover Come Back with Doris Day and Rock Hudson twice. Afterwards, we went to a restaurant for a Coke and fries. We thought we had invented dipping the french fries into ketchup when the waitress at Robin Hood’s told us she never saw anybody do that before. I didn’t know what a fastfood meal was until my family started going to McDonald’s around 1960. The first McDonald’s opened in the nearby town of Des Plaines in 1955, but my family didn’t discover the chain until one opened closer to us in Niles. Even then, we went only for special occasions. I still remember seeing the number of burgers sold change on the Golden Arches sign from thousands to millions.
I loved school, and I was lucky enough to have some great teachers at Eugene Field School, Ralph Waldo Emerson junior High and Maine Township High Schools East and South. Years later, when I chaired the Arkansas Education Standards Committee, I realized how fortunate I had been to attend fully equipped schools with highly trained teachers and a full range of academic and extracurricular offerings. It’s funny what I remember now: Miss Taylor reading to my first-grade class from Winnie-the-Pooh every morning.
Miss Cappuccio, my second-grade teacher, challenging us to write from one to one thousand, a task that little hands holding fat pencils took forever to finish. The exercise helped teach me what it meant to start and finish a big project. Miss Cappuccio later invited our class to her wedding, where she became Mrs. O’Laughlin. That was such a kind gesture, and for seven-year-old girls, seeing their teacher as a beautiful bride was a highlight of the year.
I was considered a tomboy all through elementary school. My fifth-grade class had the school’s most incorrigible boys, and when Mrs. Krause left the room, she would ask me or one of the other girls to “be in charge.” As soon as the door closed behind her, the boys would start acting up and causing trouble, mostly because they wanted to aggravate the girls. I got a reputation for being able to stand up to them, which may be why I was elected co-captain of the safety patrol for the next year. This was a big deal in our school.
My new status provided me my first lesson in the strange ways some people respond to electoral politics. One of the girls in my class, Barbara, invited me home for lunch. When we got there, her mother was vacuuming and casually told her daughter and me to go fix ourselves peanut butter sandwiches, which we did. I did not think anything of it until we got ready to go back to school and were saying goodbye to her mother.
She asked her daughter why we were leaving so early, and Barbara told her, “Because Hillary’s a patrol captain and has to be there before the other kids.”
“Oh, if I’d known that,” she said, “I’d have fixed you a nice lunch.”
My sixth-grade teacher, Elisabeth King, drilled us in grammar, but she also encouraged us to think and write creatively, and challenged us to try new forms of expression. If we were sluggish in responding to her questions, she said, “You’re slower than molasses running uphill in winter.” She often paraphrased the verse from Matthew: “Don’t put your lamp under a bushel basket, but use it to light up the world.” She pushed me, Betsy Johnson, Gayle Elliot, Carol Farley and Joan Throop to write and produce a play about five girls taking an imaginary trip to Europe. It was an assignment from Mrs. King that led me to write my first autobiography. I rediscovered it in a box of old papers after I left the White House, and reading it pulled me back to those tentative years on the brink of adolescence. I was still very much a child at that age, and mostly concerned with family, school and sports. But grade school was ending, and it was time to enter a more complicated world than the one I had known.
UNIVERSITY OF LIFE
“What you don’t learn from your mother, you learn from the world” is a saying I once heard from the Masai tribe in Kenya. By the fall of 1960, my world was expanding and so were my political sensibilities. John E Kennedy won the presidential election, to my father’s consternation. He supported Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and my eighthgrade social studies teacher, Mr. Kenvin, did too. Mr. Kenvin came to school the day after the election and showed us bruises he claimed he had gotten when he tried to question the activities of the Democratic machine’s poll watchers at his voting precinct in Chicago on Election Day. Betsy Johnson and I were outraged by his stories, which reinforced my father’s belief that Mayor Richard J. Daley’s creative vote counting had won the election for President-Elect Kennedy. During our lunch period we went to the pay phone outside the cafeteria and tried calling Mayor Daley’s office to complain. We reached a very nice woman who told us she would be sure to pass on the message to the Mayor.
A few days later, Betsy heard about a group of Republicans asking for volunteers to check voter lists against addresses to uncover vote fraud. The ad called for volunteers to gather at a downtown hotel at 9 A.M. on a Saturday morning. Betsy and I decided to participate.
We knew our parents would never give us permission, so we
