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I started at North High in the fall of 1916 and graduated in June 1920. On the whole, I had good grades but I did flunk 3rd year French, the only course I ever failed anywhere, and had to repeat one term of it. This failure was due primarily to inattention, insufficient study, fooling around in class, getting the teacher, Miss Coffey, down on me, and getting a mark of 48 or something like that in the final exam. Mother had gone to boarding school in Brussels and spoke French very well but I'd never let her help me -- which reminds me that she also brushed up on her French on Highland Avenue when she took lessons from a tutor, a Frenchman who came around to the house, a M. Gerard as I recall. I really don't know what the point of this was as she had no need for the language at all as far as I know. In my French classes, I sat next to Tolly Archbold, who lived up on Walnut Avenue near the University but for some reason when to North High instead of Central, and was one of the Archbold family that supplied the University with Archbold Stadium among other things. Tolly and I were very congenial, too much so, in fact, for our own good because we fooled our way through French. Tolly, for example, once incensed Miss Coffey when she said to him, "N'est ce pas?" by answering, "Yes, Pa." She expelled him from class on the spot. I don't recall ever doing anything as flagrant but I'm sure I can remember having Miss Coffey reprimand me for inattention and whispering. Actually, she was a very cute, plump, pretty little teacher, probably in her twenties and I was quite fond of her but somehow I just couldn't get serious about the course. 

North was the newest high school in town and was quite nice with well-equipped home rooms which also served as class rooms, a good library, a physics lecture hall with a sloping tier of seats, a big auditorium, and a large cafeteria in the basement where you could also eat your lunch if you carried it, which I did. North High served the half of the city north of Genesee Street, I guess, while Central took care of the section south of Genesee. With this arrangement, North had a good cross section of the city in its enrollment and I became exposed to a new segment of the population including Louise Neale and Nelda Pfohl of whom I shall write more subsequently. Some of the other teachers were Miss Avery, a homely, long-jawed woman who taught English and was really quite nice; her brother, Mr. Avery, also long-faced and a sort of Abraham Lincoln type who taught math and apparently never had his pants pressed from one year to the next; Mr. Webster, a twinkly-eyed, middle-aged man with a moustache and spade-beard, who taught physics; Miss Sneller, a thin, red-haired dynamo who also taught English courses; Miss Latham, a pretty little guy who taught American history; and Mr. Ferguson, who also taught math, I think, and who was tall and skinny and had a beard that looked like blued-steel -- he had noon-shadow instead of three-o'clock-shadow. The principal was Mr.

Transcription Notes:
"went to" not "when to."