Impeached in the Fourth Grade

I always tell this story in my Write Your Life classes. It certainly makes me approachable to the students who may have uncomfortable stories to tell. And the main concept behind writing your story is to move from facts to memories to meaning from the memories.

But it was not until the second round of teaching Write Your Life that I gleaned meaning from one of my most telling life’s experiences – being impeached in the fourth grade. Like Bill Clinton, I was not removed from high office, but that is getting ahead of my story.

There I was in Mrs. Portnoy’s fourth grade class in Old Bonhomme Grade School in Olivette, Missouri, in the early 1960s. And yes, my teacher’s name really was Mrs. Portnoy. I was very awkward at the time, overweight and frumpy in that fourth grade way. What I wanted most was to be liked.

How was that going for me?

In Mrs. Portnoy’s classroom, we held regular class meetings as part of our study of government and had changing class officers picked periodically by elections, probably quarterly. I was not among the first, to say the least. Late in the year, I was finally chosen for vice president, a role that usually has little or no power (present vice presidents of the U.S. excepted).

I had observed one of the jobs of the class president was to write on the board the names of the kids who were talking while Mrs. Portnoy was out of the classroom. When the president was not there, this smartypants wrote names down as well. I figured it was my job to take over for the president, after all.

One day in our weekly class meeting, the president asked me to lead so he could make a motion. The expression, “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely,” could have been all about me at that moment. Once I had the control of the meeting, I did not want to give it up. Instead of calling on the president, I instead called on another kid, who said, “I move to impeach Susie Hessel as vice president.”

I have no idea what happened next, although Mrs. Portnoy said we would not be impeaching anyone. I’m sure I cried in my mom’s arms later. It was a devastating moment that is quite laughable now.

So what meaning did I get from being impeached? First, squealing on your classmates is not the road to popularity. Second, I was unhappy with Bill Clinton’s relationship “with that woman,” perhaps because I had a daughter at the time in high school whom I knew would have internships in her future. I felt at that time that he should have resigned, but not be impeached.

Why was I so fervently opposed to his impeachment? Perhaps because he and I shared that painful memory from our government service.