Excerpt from Part One: A Box of Letters – Page 13

Love, Bill: Finding My Father through Letters from World War II by Jan Krulick-Belin

Excerpt from Part One: A Box of Letters – Page 13:

Queens, New York
October 3, 1960

Summer eventually turned into fall, and I was back in school. Alley
Pond Elementary School, or PS 46, was just around the corner
from our apartment, and I was in the first grade. The beginning of
school was an exciting time marked by new saddle shoes and shirtwaist
dresses, and now that I was no longer in kindergarten, I was
finally able to get “big girl” school supplies: a black-and-white hardcover
composition notebook, a new pencil case filled with carefully
sharpened pink pencils with pink erasers, a yellow plastic ruler, a new
box of crayons, and a red-and-blue plaid briefcase with two white
buckle closures on the front pockets. There was always something so
wonderful about the smell of those new supplies—blank paper,
wood, rubber, vinyl, wax. I didn’t need a metal lunchbox like some of
my other classmates did; my brothers and I came home for lunch
every day. We ran home around the corner at 12:00 PM and returned
to the playground at 12:40 PM before going back into the classroom
twenty minutes later.