me on the questions and answers required for the next day’s quiz. She was not a
Catholic so the material was as arcane to her as it was to me. I was her fair-haired
little nephew, a Rohrer, and she was determined that I do well in school.
Suddenly having a strangely attired person, a nun, for a teacher rather than an
ordinary looking woman might have been an intimidating experience. But God was
good! My third-grade teacher happened to be a smiling, caring, eminently humane
lady, who, I felt, liked me from the start. Energetic and creative, she was
appropriately named Sister Vitalis.
Never can I forget Sister’s Maryland Day pageant. Depicting the founding of
“our Great State," the show was peopled with little kings and queens and their royal
courts, statesmen, churchmen and soldiers, all resplendent in costumes tediously
constructed by doting parents, in my case Grandma Wallace. The leading character,
Lord Baltimore, was played by Junior (Wyand, Jr.) Doerner, because he was the
brightest boy in the class. (He later became my brother-in-law when I married his
sister, Patsy Ann, who was a queen’s attendant in the pageant, although she wasn’t in
school yet.) I too had a prominent part: King James I of England.
As a new kid from the “pup-licker" school and one who right away seemed to
be liked by the teacher, I was vulnerable in the eyes of the other boys. They didn’t
shun or taunt me at first, but in time resentment must have built up because at some
point I had become the target of a conspiracy to have a pudgy, scrappy kid from a
lower grade beat me up. The conspirators and their pawn waylaid me on the route
36
CWR (center) as King James in Maryland Day pageant, March 1930.
Left, Ernie Kieffer, classmate and neighborhood friend;
right, Wyand (“Junior") Doerner, future brother-in-law
