By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

Forty years ago, as a Baylor University graduate heading into the classroom to teach for the first time, Lynda (Abernathy) Bumpers of Waco was a bundle of nervous excitement about her first day at Jefferson Elementary.

She was interviewed in 1968 by Waco Times-Herald staffer Rich Warren for a back-to-school article on new teachers. Asked what her reaction might be to seeing all those fresh faces looking to her for the answers, she replied, “I guess I’ll cry a lot.”

Bumpers, now a teacher at Waco High, is getting ready to begin another school year with Waco ISD.

“I had to laugh at some of my comments in the story,” she said in a telephone interview this week. “I never cried. I mostly laughed and had a good time — except when I was so tired I just fell asleep.”

This time of year can prompt not only teachers to wax nostalgic about school days, but also their former pupils.

Sharon (Liston) Griffith, now of McGregor, attended Sanger Avenue Elementary from 1950 through 1956. Getting ready for school meant lots of shopping downtown on Austin Avenue, she said.

“It was important to find the right lunchbox, too. My mother and I would search until the perfect one was discovered,” Griffith said in an e-mail. “On the days I didn’t care for what was being served in the cafeteria, my grandmother would fill it with a wonderful sandwich, cookies and Fritos.”

Sherry (Robertson) Nunn of Waco, another alumna of Sanger Avenue Elementary, recalled that one reason her 1950s school days were so enjoyable was the principal, Nina B. Glass.

“Miss Nina would go out and play softball and other games with the students during recess, and she always wore something red. If it wasn’t her dress, it would be a belt, a hat or scarf, or maybe a big red silk flower,” Nunn recalled. “She had a true love for children and education, and had even taught the parents of some of my classmates.”

Glass produced a school newspaper on the mimeograph machine each month, a missive printed in purple ink dubbed The Ginger Jar.

“I remember she told us that when she was a little girl, good things came out of the ginger jar,” Griffith recalled. Students avidly picked up issues, at a dime a copy, “because we did not want to miss the good things in The Ginger Jar. There were puzzles, jokes, and riddles and stories about your classmates.”

tjryan@wacotrib.com

757-5746