The Slice: Dirty Trix weren’t involved

There’s no escaping politics right now.

“One of my first graders told me he lost his tooth eating cereal this morning,” wrote teacher Anne Remien. “According to him the cereal was ‘Honey Bunches and votes.’ ”

One drawback of progress: LuAnn Suryan misses the days when you could tell where people lived in this area from their phone numbers. The three-digit prefix pretty much told you which part of Spokane someone called home. “Now days, with the proliferation of cellphone numbers and landline numbers that can follow you as you move from the city to the Valley, you don’t have a clue where anyone lives.”

Thanking teachers: “This spring my wife and I went back to central Kentucky for a funeral, and while there I discovered my high school math teacher from 1964 was still alive, and still in the big spooky house in the middle of town,” wrote Vince Roland.

They went to see him. “He was old, frail, could not get up easily, had poor vision, but said he remembered me and was glad we visited. I could not bring myself to call him by his first name, he was still ‘Mr. Mansfield.’

“I reminded him he was a stern teacher and all of us students were scared of him, to which he responded ‘But you remembered, didn’t you?’ ”

Roland thanked Mr. Mansfield. “Because of him I got the courage to go to engineering school, which in turn set me on a path for a 34 year career with Hewlett Packard.”

Then there was this. “It was a delightful reminder of times past to see your bit about Marian Braune and Sacred Heart School,” wrote Suzanne Harris. “She was a great teacher whom I was fortunate to have for both 4th and 5th grades at Sacred Heart.”

But Harris corrected a couple of details in my correspondent’s note appearing in Thursday’s Slice. “Her name was spelled with an e at the end (Braune) and she wasn’t the only lay teacher at the school. Mrs. McAndrews taught second grade there forever. She was also a wonderful teacher and inspired a love of learning in her students.”

Today’s Slice question: Are there still people who forget about Caller ID and as a result are surprised when the recipient of the call knows it’s them before a word has been said?