Eva Kellogg vanished following lunch. Not only didn’t her classmates notice but her teacher didn’t catch the empty chair.

Eva was a student in Mrs. Spateholts’ Sixth Grade at Cuba Elementary School. I met Eva many years earlier when we were in the same classroom, Mrs. Hillman’s First Grade. September, 1968. The little girl was just like any other first grader, full of energy and laughter and an open road ahead. Her family, we didn’t know it then, was grindingly poor. Her parents married young, as their parents married young and their parents before them. They lived out in the country, on a dirt road, in what passed for a house. Years later I was told that Eva, her two sisters and their parents, slept in one room. A common room where they ate their meals and shared the stories of their days and probably had plenty of time for talk as I don’t believe they owned a television set.

Eva’s dad worked at Agway. I didn’t know until a friend told me in high school that his dad worked with Mr. Kellogg. His first name was Maynard or Millard and he was beloved by the men he worked with because he worked hard, didn’t complain and came to work smiling. And I don’t know how he managed to smile. Not with the hardships his family suffered. The girls wore old-fashioned clothes to school. Their mother obviously sewed as a survival skill. The girls all had horned-rim glasses as anything stylish would’ve cost much more. It strikes me as amazing the family could even afford glasses as I learned years later the old man didn’t seek government hand-outs.

My family wasn’t living on easy street but every two years my dad bought a new car and we had a summer cottage at Cuba Lake. In the early 70s Mr. Kellogg was still driving one of those big old Buicks popular in the mid-50s. It was rusty and wheezed and creaked down the old back roads and it got him to work and he must have spent weeks of each year making repairs. My parents grew up during The Depression and The War much like the Kellogg family. Then in the early 60s my people bought a house in town and adopted modernity. Yet a great many people back home still lived quietly and simply out in the “sticks” and the older folks, who never chased the rush to fill homes with all sorts of conveniences, respected the old ways.

School classrooms aren’t filled with older people. By the fall of 1973 most of my fellow sixth graders had spent years in front of television sets. We had rooms at home filled with toys, spent summer days on shining banana bikes and some families were just getting something in homes called “cable”. We wanted to be part of the crowd. Somewhere between the first grade and grade six the Kellogg sisters stopped taking part in the social circuit. Probably not by choice and Eva, from what I vaguely remember, had a desk at the back of the room and the lively girl of 1968 was silent and invisible.

The day she vanished after lunch nobody noticed. Not even her teacher. We learned the next day that Eva had walked 7 miles home from school. Her mother was shocked to see her daughter wandering down the dirt road, tears streaming down her face. The Kellogg’s didn’t have a telephone. Mrs. Kellogg walked to a neighbor’s house and called the school. It seems someone had put a package inside Eva’s desk. It was a bar of soap wrapped in a note. “Hey, smellogg, why don’t you take a bath”, it read. Mrs. Spateholts shared the story the following morning. A few days later it was revealed a little boy, from similar circumstances as the Kellogg family, left the package that Eva found when she opened her desk looking for her lunch. He told his friends and one of them eventually came clean.

A fellow called me a few weeks ago and asked me on-air if I ride a bicycle for exercise or to clear my head. Both, I guess. I desperately need the first and the latter keeps my mind off the mundane pattern of my route. It has probably been more than 30 years since I last heard Eva’s name. She was my friend in 1968 and then drifted away. While biking I was thinking of an email from an educator questioning my often harsh views of school systems. Suddenly my thoughts stumbled across the Kellogg sisters.

By 1973 the education establishment was already lurching toward a model designed to ensure that the Eva’s of this world aren’t forgotten. Yet even Mrs. Spateholts didn’t know the little girl was missing until a telephone rang. And Eva would’ve been fine in 1948 but in a span of a few short years the culture that welcomed our parents was jettisoned in favor of the pursuit of “things”.

Eva and her sisters left school, married young and vanished along another dirt road.

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