Button, Buckle, and Tie

“Buttoning, buckling, and tying were the only ways for clothes to be fastened during the Civil War. Mr. Zip had not invented zippers and Mr.V el had not invented Velcro,” I said as I held up my long white wool flannel drawers so the kids could see them.

Last week I did an all-day program for the Fifth grade classes at the KIPP Aspire Academy in downtown San Antonio.  It was my fourth time to do the “show and tell” program, aided by a Power Point slide show. I think I do a good job and the students are always attentive and the teachers welcoming.

Philosophically, I’m not a fan of charter schools. Here in Texas, charter schools are privately-run schools funded with tax dollars. Parents apply for their children to attend, and they don’t pay any tuition. What I don’t like is that charter schools drain the pool of self-motivated kids and parents away from their neighborhood public schools, effectively skimming the cream off the top. Charter schools don’t have to serve kids with learning disabilities, and they are not subject to most of the burdensome state regulations under which public schools must operate.

Having made that personal observation, KIPP Aspire Academy is a great school. I love doing my Civil War soldier program there. The kids are wonderful. The school climate is positive and focused on academics and college preparation. Notice the school motto on the back of the school uniform t-shirt worn by many of the kids: No Shortcuts. No Excuses. You can’t make up a better motto than that for young’uns, or us old guys. Life should be heavily focused on personal accountability.

Besides talking about buckles, buttons, and tie strings (Historically, there was no Mr. Zip or Mr. Vel, but both zippers and Velcro were invented after the Civil War), I touch on uniforms, weapons, food, and medicine of the 1860’s.

For some reason, the kids love the square, off-white, hard as a rock, cracker commonly called hardtack. I rap it on the table and talk about how the soldiers with bad teeth had to soften it in grease or coffee or soup to eat it.

The bayonet is another favorite, even more than the musket itself. Knives of any shape are more macabre than guns. The prospect of being stabbed horrified the real Civil War soldiers, and it gets the attention of the kids. Then I show them how bayonets were used more benignly as candle holders to provide a night light to write letters or read, and how they were used as cooking skewers for meat or to cook dough wrapped around the long slim triangular blade

But what most fascinates the students is hearing about heating the pointy end of bayonets and bending the blades into a U-shape, a fishhook shape, in order to snag the coat collars of dead soldiers and drag the corpses to mass battlefield graves. That's ghoulish enough for even Twilight fans.

And of course, the amputations of legs and arms fit a fifth grader’s mindset, too. They love the imagery of piles of severed limbs at the field hospitals. I show them a real photo of a young man whose legs have been amputated at the knee and we talk about whether he was lucky or unlucky. Life in the 1800’s with no legs or arms would have been a dreadful daily trial, even worse than it is today for our soldiers who still suffer such wounds with the same horrifying consequence of amputation.

The KIPP Aspire Academy student body is almost all Hispanic kids, so I start with a terrific photo of a handsome young Hispanic lieutenant, Jose De La Garza, who joined the Confederate army in San Antonio, and served in Co. K of the Sixth Texas Infantry, the group of soldiers around which I wrote my first novel, Whittled Away. (And, yes, I show them my novel, and give a copy to their teacher as a proud author. I'm vain, too.)

I show them a period drawing of the Alamo on February 16, 1861. The drawing was an illustration in Harpers Weekly Magazine, published in New York City, and shows hundreds of armed men in the plaza with the iconic Alamo chapel backdrop. I tell the kids that was the day when the Civil War could well have started on the Alamo Plaza instead of far away at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. That story is the blog post topic for two weeks from now, so I’ll leave it until then. But I use it to show the kids that even though San Antonio was geographically on the western edge of the Confederacy, the city where they live played a part in the terrible war.

Back to the flannel drawers: I show the students how my reenacting winter underwear button up the front, buckle in the back to cinch the waist line to fit, and have drawstrings at the ankles to pull the legs tight to keep little critters like ticks and redbucks off the ankles. Button, buckle and tie. No zip. No rip.

Baby Jackson is doing fine after his first week at home. He’s only ten days old now, so he hasn’t yet asked me if I was a soldier in the Civil War. But I expect that’s coming in a few years, when he sees his dad’s old bedroom which now is home to bookcases full of Civil War books, Civil War paintings and reenacting photos on the walls, a closet full of smelly reenacting uniforms, and muskets leaning in the corner. I don’t know where he might get the idea his grey-bearded granddaddy was part of that war.

Jackson also joined us for our annual Super Bowl gathering. I was pulling for Seattle, but I guess it’s okay that a team called the “Patriots” won, since that was the name I chose for a kids’ soccer team I coached 25 years ago. Can you believe the Seahawk’s call to pass at the 1-yard line at the end of the game? Insane, if you ask me. Talk about personal accountability, whoever made that decision yesterday, is today living with the grim unexpected consequence of his actions.

Have a great week.