Class Rings - Education Imagery

As far back as I can remember
I’ve esteemed class rings, whether they were high school rings or college
rings. Perhaps, it was the influence of my uncles, Earl Carter and Lamar
Carter, who each held college degrees at a time when symbols of educational achievement in the Carter family were rare, that birthed my admiration for class rings.
Neither of my Carter grandparents finished high school. Hayden Carter’s father died when Hayden was perhaps seven or eight, so he was needed to help with the family’s livelihood, farming. Hayden’s formal education probably ended before the fifth grade. My grandmother’s father died at age fifty. Becky may have completed the seventh or eighth grade before she also had to drop out of school to help work the family farm.
My dad didn’t graduate high school, though he doubtless would have had he not, in his senior year, had a falling out with a teacher, who wouldn’t accept a paper he’d written as his work. My grandfather thought he could convince Dad to return to school by working him extra hard on the family farm. Dad admitted the next several weeks were the hardest of his life, but his determination to spite the teacher prevailed. If Dad ever regretted his decision to drop out of school, he never shared it with me.
Mom had dropped out of school even earlier than Dad and didn’t finish the eighth grade. Instead at sixteen, she and Dad married. The following year, my older brother was born and over the next twenty years three more children arrived, with each of us finding slightly better living conditions than our sibling predecessor. None of us experienced anything like a childhood
lived in affluence, but we were loved and cared for and given the best our parents could afford.
In my youth, there were more opportunities for me to be around my Uncle Earl than Dad’s younger brother, Lamar. Uncle Earl had settled in Senatobia, MS, but Uncle Lamar found work in Venezuela more to his liking. Since leaving Venezuela, Uncle Lamar has made New York City his home, where consulting has provided him opportunities to "see the world." So, when it came to seeing class rings in my family, I saw Uncle Earl’s more than Uncle Lamar’s.
Having so few family members with class rings made the arrival of my high school ring a memorable occasion. How I talked my Dad out of the thirty-five dollars that was needed to purchase the ring, I no longer remember, but in 1959, thirty-five dollars was a lot of money. Continue reading>>