5/17/24 - Friday Forget-Me-Nots by Jim Silcott

Photo Caption: School is Winding Down!

Dear Our Lady of Peace Family,

My first solo teaching experience was probably illegal, certainly against state school regulations.

It was 50 years ago this coming fall. I was a first-quarter freshman at Ohio State. Having declared myself a future English teacher, I was placed for Early Field Experience at Immaculate Conception School. I was simply supposed to observe, maybe do a lesson or two with the middle school students, under the guidance of Mrs. Dorothy Donahue, a seasoned long-time member of the faculty.

About halfway through the quarter, Mrs. Donahue’s husband became ill, and she had to take some time off to see to his care. Someone decided it would be a good idea for me to take over the classes. I had just turned 18.

I don’t remember what I taught to the sixth and seventh graders. I assume I taught it badly, but with the eighth graders, I got the bright idea to do a movie project with them. I enlisted the aid of my sister’s (Mrs. Mayo) boyfriend, Howie Gasaway (son of Lucy from Lucy’s Toy Shop for you old people out there). He was a film major at OSU.

The kids wrote the script and planned the production. One Sunday, the students and parents and Howie and some of my friends gathered at Deibels, which was closed on Sundays, for the filming.

It was a silent movie shot on 16mm film. I was the director. It is fun to direct a silent movie because you can direct the whole time the film is rolling.

The story involves a monster from the dead, played with a wig by Bill Lorenz, a romantic couple—Mert Finklewart and Priscilla Perfect (real names Max Reed and Theresa DeFrancis), and a room full of patrons, a cook, a maître d’, a waitress, a bartender, and the town drunk. Suffice it to say that asking eighth graders to film a movie on a Sunday at a saloon and portraying a 13-year-old as an alcoholic adult would most probably find me losing my teaching license today. And if I were the principal of this young wannabe teacher, I would probably have fired that teacher, although as principal I would probably be in as much trouble for allowing this unlicensed young man to undertake the project.

We used whatever props we could find at Deibels that day. Marty Gallagher, the maître d’, wore a red coat that hung on the wall and was supposedly haunted. Monica VonVille, the waitress, donned my girlfriend Mickey’s Big Bear Uniform. The monster had a scene above the old front door behind a Heineken advertisement in the shape of a windmill.

There were lots of physical stunts in the movie, including five girls pulled over the top of the bar by me, hidden behind it. There’s an epic fight scene and some old movie magic, with the help of some pretty obvious editing. At the end of the movie, you can see the whole cast and crew waving wildly at the camera in front of Deibels, which is now Barcelona Restaurant.

I won’t give the plot away as you can see it for yourself on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KwnRYZBDCQ, but it has a happy ending for all the characters except one. Hint: it’s not the monster!

The movie had its world premiere on another Sunday at Deibels with the students and parents. Kay Wray, one of the house musicians, accompanied the silent film with her own original score. As the movie is only about ten minutes long, we probably had a meal, courtesy of the owner, my dad. It was even written up in the Catholic Times, which made the kids proud.

Howie and I went on through college teaching mini film courses at St. Mary German Village, Blessed Sacrament in Newark, and a couple of Columbus Public middle schools. One involved runaway kids hopping on a boxcar at the old Union Train Station, and four pretend dead bodies, laid out in shrouds on tables down the middle aisle of St. Mary Church. Another was about a teacher who got control of her rowdy students. It was called One Flew Over the Teacher’s Desk. Those films are sadly lost.

Those students from Immaculate Conception are all now in their sixties as I was only four years older than they were. As we get ready to graduate our eighth graders, I look back on these last fifty years and wonder how the time has gone by so quickly.

Jim Silcott