We all want to forget past cruelty
Apparently, I’m not the only one with a “Ruthie” in my past.
When I wrote about how Susan Boyle’s performance on “Britain’s Got Talent” reminded me of a second-grade classmate we called “Stinky Ruthie,” readers responded with stories of their own. One of them was a classmate of mine from Jefferson Elementary. Bret wrote, “I can remember this girl as if it was yesterday. Ruthie was indeed the victim of a lot of abuse, and it does make us think.”
The column prompted Karen from Chattaroy to write: “We all have a ‘Ruthie’ in our lives, I suspect. Mine was a black student who moved into the Riverside School District in about 1952. He was made to sit alone in the hallway, his lunches and drinks were brought to him separate from the rest of us, and he was not allowed to use the restrooms. He only stayed a few days as I recall.”
Chuck from Spokane has never forgotten one of his childhood classmates, either. “I have to tell you my own version of second-grade cruelty some 65 years ago. Little cowtown of Argos, Ind., in the mid-1940s. The butt of all our guffaws was poor Wayne Stockburger. Kids made fun of more than the name.
“Wayne was a dirty kid from a lowly poor part of town. Often made a fool of himself in class by saying the wrong thing. He lived with his large family in a boxcar made into a hound-filled home. He always wore rag-tag hand-me-down bib overalls or crusty corduroy.”
In addition to his raggedy appearance, Chuck said Wayne was clumsy and P.E. provided more opportunities for his tormentors. “I joined everybody else in making fun of him. Don’t know why, ’cause we were poor too. But that stupid behavior on my part has prompted vivid memories of Wayne after all these years.”
Chuck said life improved for Wayne when the teacher realized he couldn’t see the blackboard from the back of the room. She put him in the front row, and “practically overnight his participation in class and his grades changed. Wayne was actually pretty smart. He was always an outcast, but amazingly the cool kids in his class started taking him under their wing.”
At their 25th reunion Wayne greeted Chuck warmly. “He pushed his way through a group of people to shake my hand. He remembered me with joy. I felt remorse and regret. I asked our host to change my seating so I could dine with Wayne Stockburger.”
Jim from Newman Lake wasn’t as fortunate in his bid to make peace with his childhood classmate. He wrote, “Her name was Phyllis. She was a polio victim as a child so she had difficulty walking. She wore the same clothes most of the time and wasn’t well-kept. She was called ‘Philly the flea’ by all of the ‘wonderful’ kids at school. I thought of Phyllis every so often, and when I read your article it hit home.”
When Jim took a trip to his hometown in New York he hoped to find Phyllis. “I was going to look her up; take her to lunch or something, just to let her know that some of us were sorry. She had passed away – I didn’t get to.”
And one reader was brave enough to share the other side of the story. Liz from Coeur d’Alene said she was a Ruthie. “I probably didn’t look that odd but I was, shall we say, ‘unique.’ ” A difficult family situation contributed to her struggles, and Liz didn’t handle being picked on very well. “Whatever I did egged them on,” she said.
Even her father’s fatal illness prompted cruelty. “One kid actually asked me if I was so weird because my father was in the hospital dying of cancer. Which was especially unpleasant as no one felt it would be appropriate to inform me of this piece of information. I went home and pried it out of my very reluctant mother after this incident.”
For Liz, the rejection and isolation she suffered in childhood prompted a lifelong struggle for self-acceptance. She said, “I spent so many years of my life trying to prove to myself that I was not what I thought they thought I was.”
Fortunately, things are better for Liz now. “I am almost 50 and am finally getting my act together, thanks to my church, lots of therapy, the 12 steps and most of all God. For the first time in my life I feel like I am not what I believed myself to be as a child.”
Liz doesn’t have much to say to her classmates, other than “No one deserves to be tormented for being odd or different or weird.”
And for those of us who were either were either active participants in childhood unkindnesses or simply looked the other way, Carol from south Spokane summed it up like this: “I used to think I was the only one who was ashamed of my childhood cruelty … . You showed me that I was not. Perhaps there are millions of others who share the special kind of guilt. Maybe we all are looking for ways to make up for it.”