Don'tcha Know Your Name and What are you Hiding down there?

In seventh grade Ronald Tipton and I were both engaging in philately. I know that sounds just terrible that two boys of twelve or thirteen were involved in such a thing.

Philately means the study of stamps. Ronald and I were both in Stamp Club. He may be the reason I picked that club over others. In the photo I am third from the left, taken before I wore glasses. Ronald is the boy at the extreme right.

Every year at Downingtown Junior Senior Joint High you had to join a club, which met once a week. In eighth grade I joined Audio Visual Aids Club. I’m not sure why I joined, except I always had an interest in film and recording. Don’t look for me in the photograph; I’m not there. This photo is from ninth grade. I don’t have the eighth grade picture. (Oddly, the boy whose face is cut off on the extreme right does look like me.)

The purpose of the A-V club was to understand how to work and use the equipment, movie projectors, tape recorders, slide projectors and overheads, any device that helped in giving speeches and doing presentations. Later in life I was involved in this area in various ways. I assisted in the sound for a church, put together media shows for the United Way and presentations at various places I worked. I had none of that in mind when I joined this club, of course, but it helped give me a little foundation in those skills. Hibbert Wells (pictured left), a Chemistry teacher by trade, was our sponsor.

It also had a side benefit that proved fortuitous that year. The Audio Visual Aid Club was responsible for bringing any such equipment, setting it up and sometimes running it for classroom use. They called for us to assist if Mr. Ratliff wanted to show a film of the happy Peruvian natives in their colorful dress herding llama or Mr. Wells needed to project overheads of chemical formula. We got out of our class to deliver the equipment and make it work. If they gave me any excuse to escape my own classrooms I was happy, especially if I could escape from English or history.

(Perhaps I should ask my Jamie, next-door neighbor, if this is how they dress in Peru, since it is the country he migrated from.)

I hated eighth grade to the point of dreading going. It was not the kids this year; it was one particular teacher . This teacher was a sardonic, bullying, belittling and ignorant individual whom I had twice a day. Her name was Phyllis Hurlock (pictured left) and she taught English and History. The report cards were printed with these two core courses while the rest were merely handwritten. I know we had English daily. We may have had history but four days a week. (Note: I have some confusion about exactly when I had Miss Hurlock. I did have her for 8^th grade History; however, I am not sure whether I had her for English in 7^th or 8^th grade.  I do believe I had Mrs. Pollock for 7^th Grade English. I know I had Mrs. Rodgers in ninth, so having Miss Hurlock for both English and History in Eighth grade is most likely correct.)

Miss. Hurlock got off on the wrong foot with me from the get go. My first name is Larry; it is not short for anything. I am not a Lawrence or Laurence or a Lorenz. I always joked my family was too poor to afford the extra letters of those longer names. My mother named me after the hero in her favorite novel. My parents dubbed me Larry and then tried different combination to find a middle name that went well with Larry and Meredith. They choose Eugene. My name has no more significance that that.

Miss Hurlock refused to believe my name was Larry. She wasn’t the only teacher I had who thought my name had to be Lawrence. I had a bit of an argument about it more than once, but she was the only one who made it an issue and then held it against me. I forget if this began in English or History, but that doesn’t matter. She resented me for it in both classes. On my first day with Miss. Hurlock we had this exchange.

           Miss. Hurlock greeted the class with a pointer in her hand. She used this to point to her name

scrawled across a blackboard. She sat down setting her pointer near at hand and picked up a pencil. She produced a small black notebook from her desk. Carefully she flipped the notebook open to an empty space.

         “I would like your names, please,” she said, and began a roll of the room. Getting to my turn, she tapped her pencil.                          “Suppose we have your name now.”

         “Lar…”

        “Stand up, please.”

         I stood. “Larry Meredith.”

        She peered over her spectacles at me. She was a great peering-over-spectacles person when annoyed with anything.

        “Your full name, please.”

        “Larry Eugene Meredith.” There were some giggles at hearing Eugene.

        She took a deep breath, laid down her pencil and interlaced her fingers. She was prone to interlacing her fingers when really annoyed.

       “Your full name. Please.”

       I blinked in surprise because I had no other name to give. She glared at me.

       “Larry Eugene Meredith,” I repeated with a gulp.

      Her jowls quivered. “It is the standard at Downingtown Junior High School that we use our proper given name. Your proper given name is Lawrence, is it not?”

       “Not. It’s Larry.”

       One eyebrow danced above her spectacles. She was a great eyebrow dancer when extremely upset.

       “I understand,” she said in measured tones, “that you prefer ‘Larry’ in the company of your friends, but school is not your friend. (Man, wasn’t that the truth!) Education is quite serious business. The school has in place very important and serious rules you must obey without question. Remember, obeying rules is the first and most important aspect of education. I will call you Lawrence in here. Your parents gave you that name and you should be proud of it.”

       “But they didn’t. They named me Larry.”

   

   She rose from behind the desk, her large bottom flipping back her chair, which hit the wall with a bang. Spittle sprouted on her lips as she picked up her pointer. I pictured her caning me like some scene out of a Dickensesque novel. She finally conceded to me that I knew my own name, but I don’t think she ever believed it wasn’t Lawrence.

         The idea she might smack me with her pointer was not farfetched in the 1950s. Teachers and

principals could inflict corporeal punishment if they felt inclined. Remember Mrs. Warren in first grade that would yank your hair if you didn’t pay attention or acted up. The scuttlebutt through out East Ward Grade School was Mrs. Yost, the principal, kept a special paddle in her office called “The Enforcer”. It had holes drilled through to make it hurt more. No one had ever seen it, but we believed it was real. Indeed, it may have been. Even today there are 21 states that allow corporeal punishment and some of those have specifically banned the use of paddles with holes.

        Miss Hurlock would not forget this confrontation. Later in the year during an English class speaking on word meaning she made these comments.

       “No intelligent parent would give their child a name ending in ‘y’. The ‘y’ is a diminutive meaning ‘little’. Such a child would go through life as Little Bill or Little Joe. They would always think small of themselves.”

        She looked directly at me as she spoke. I don’t know what Gary, Barry and the assorted Marys thought of this. I found it degrading. What kind of person would say things like that to children in their trust and care?

     

  I finished the year with a C in history and a C minus in English. Some may wonder if I was determined to be a writer, why did I do so poorly in English. English wasn’t writing; it was diagramming sentences. I didn’t have much interest in the craft. To me writing was characters getting in and out of difficult situations. I was concerned with plot structure, not sentence structure. I didn’t know the difference between Active and Passive Voice and didn’t care. (Hopefully there are not too many passive sentences in this book.)

        I really was turned off on sentence diagramming because Miss Hurlock would make you do it on the blackboard and hover over you criticizing in a caustic manner. I was usually very nervous if called to the board in front of everyone. It was a time of my life when standing before others was nerve wracking to me. I was scared to death to be the center of attention because being in the spotlight usually meant ridicule. I never raised an arm in class even when I knew answers because I didn’t want the class to laugh at me if I was wrong, but to be truthful, they often laughed at me because I was right.

       There was one thing I found I could do I enjoyed, even though it was in front of everyone. I could give off the cuff speeches. We were required to bring in an object each marking period and give a short talk about it. We were supposed to be learning how to write a speech. I didn’t do any more homework than I thought I absolutely had to, which was very little. I spent zero time at home writing out any scripts. I would find an object and make up my speech while walking to school. I generally received a good mark for my speeches. It is a good thing we didn’t have to turn in a written version.

        One time I brought in a little glass vial. It belonged to my grandmother and contained sand

weaved into a colorful design. I believe she bought it at an Indian Reservation during a trip west. Unfortunately I also had gym class that day. I don't know why I didn't put the vial in my locker, but it may be I had no break between English class and Gym. They wouldn’t allow us to go to our lockers between classes. In Gym we put our clothes in these wire baskets and padlocked them in a shelf space. Ronald Tipton and I shared a basket that day. I buried the vial down under the clothing so no one could work it out through the spaces and steal it. When we came back to dress while pulling out the clothes the vial flipped out, hit the floor and broke. I felt as shattered as the glass. It is something I have felt bad about to this day. I was extremely upset about this because I had pleaded with my grandmother to let me have it for show and tell. The vial meant something special to my grandmother and I had promised her I would be very careful. Now Ronald claims I blamed him. If I blamed him I am sorry.

       

 Sometimes there were funny things in Miss Hurlock’s classes. Once she had to leave the room for some purpose. While she was gone an eraser war broke out. Pupils were throwing the blackboard erasers across the room at each other and one errant eraser landed in the shade of an overhead lamp. Our lights hung from the ceiling on long black pipes. The shades beneath the bulbs were white and shaped like inverted Frisbees. When that eraser landed there it was out of sight and not coming down. The lamp was too high for anyone to reach in and pull that thing out, even if the tallest of us stood atop a desk. We had to forget about it. We figured no one would ever miss one eraser.

        Miss Hurlock returned and everyone snapped around in his or her seat as if sitting quietly with hands folded was what we did during her entire absence. She went about the lesson, but after a while this acrid smell of burning rubber wafted through the air. We all knew the eraser resting against a hot bulb caused it, but no one said anything. Miss Hurlock kept wrinkling her nose and sometimes looking about, but I don’t know if she ever figured it out. That smell of rubber remained a constant for several more classes in that room.

        One of the funnier moments was when Denny Myers gave one of his show-an-tell speeches. He

forgot part of it and couldn’t remember the next line. He stopped speaking in exasperation and shouted, “Shi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi-hi---oot.” He stuttered on forever, but finally managed to catch himself in mid-syllable. His face turned a bright scarlet, much like his makeup for that scarecrow he played in the East Ward Operetta. Even Miss Hurlock stifled a laugh.

It was during eighth grade that the pubescent male’s growing transition from boy to man became a constant problem and fear. If it occurred during class you hoped it would go away before the bell rang. If not you would position your books in front of you to hide it. A teacher calling you to the blackboard at such a moment was the biggest worry. This was where the odds would be against you in Miss Hurlock’s English class. She might send you to diagram a sentence, although diagramming a sentence in front of everybody may have been a more

embarrassing situation for me than the other. Besides, just the though of diagramming a sentence publicly would deflate anything for me. Her calling upon me to give my little speech was the worst possible scenario. There was no way to hide. I would be standing in the center of the floor in full frontal view.

It seemed that as that year progressed I found myself in constant arousal. It did not take very much stimulation. The vibration of riding in a car would bring it on and I often had to slink out at stops so my parents didn’t notice.

This may sound like a contradiction given the repressive sexual mores of the 1950s, but girls wore sheer blouses to school. It was a common fashion. Of course, girls wore so many undergarments in those days you saw little but bare shoulder. They wore slips, bras and crinolines. I was sitting behind a girl wearing such a blouse. Her slip and bra straps accidently slipped down her one arm. That was all it took.

Please don't call me to the blackboard!

I have been racking my brain trying to figure out my sexual knowledge out during junior high. I stated way back somewhere that some events of my life become confused as to the exact sequencing. I am certain that I did not find and read that rudimentary sex manual, booklet actually, until we had moved to Bucktown, which was after junior high. It was not until then, either, that I learned about masturbation. I knew early that babies were inside the mother, but had never had explained to me how they got there or how they escaped. Ronald had to be mistaken about me telling him the facts of life beyond the statement the baby was inside the mother. It is still possible I told him about conception, but at some time when we were in senior high. Ronald has stated his youthful naiveté on sexual matters several times in his own writing, as well as in conversations. He may have run two different occasions together when we discussed this function.

Anyway, here is what I know I knew as I progressed through eighth grade. I understood my body was changing somehow and doing weird things, but I didn’t know why. Since much of this concerned my private parts I couldn’t discuss it with anyone, certainly not a teacher. I was very close-mouth about myself around other kids for obvious reasons, to avoid teasing. I couldn’t talk to my father about it for the same reason feeling he would laugh at me. I was too embarrassed to bring it up with my mother or grandparents. I understood that some things happening to me were also happening to other boys in my class and we all tried to keep it secret and hidden. When certain things happened it felt good and I felt guilty about feeling good.

I still didn’t know what a naked female looked like, but I was determined to try and find out. The days of raging hormones, of pirates and of thievery lay ahead.

Baby, Baby, Where Do You Come From?

The 1954 Senate Hearings into Comic Books neither eliminated nor reduced the “Societal Harm” of juvenile delinquency. It did almost eliminate EC Comics, and actually did hasten the departure of some other comic book companies, 15 actually, and it resulted in the formation of the Comic Book Code.

      The government did not impose this code. It was a voluntary pledge made by the major comic publishers, led by Dell and DC. It was a preemptory action taken by the industry to possibly prevent the Congress from enacting something even stricter, although this seems nearly impossible given the 41 rules the industry inflicted upon itself.

      The Motion Picture Association had created a similar code in 1930. (It wasn’t strictly enforced until 1934.) This was called the “Hays Code” after Will H. Hays (right). In 1920 the Motion Picture Producers had brought him to clean up Hollywood films after a number of complaints about sex and violence on the screen, as well as the scandals involving Fatty Arbuckle and William Desmond Taylor. They were following the lead of Major League baseball, which had hired Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis earlier that same year after the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal. The code brought about a new look in screen fashion, as illustrated by the picture of Tarzan’s Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan) before and after the code enactment. There were 36 “Don’ts” and “Cautions” to this code, a few less than the Comic Book Publishers imposed on themselves.

These changes hardly affected me. I was born well after the imposition of the Hays Code, which explains why I don’t remember “Jane” being as under dressed as she appears in the stills from Tarzan films I have scattered throughout my chapters and I had never really noticed any of Dr. Wertham’s claimed explicit sexual images buried in the pages of my comics, beyond my own drawings of Betty and Veronica. (Ironically, the Senate Committee had found “Archie” comics to be one that was acceptable for our young minds.)

I didn’t have any EC comics (“The Vault of Horror”, “Tales From the Crypt”). I had seen some of these when I visited Billy Smith several years earlier, but they gave me nightmares. The funny thing is that William Gaines brought out “Mad Magazine” and I began buying it. My mother and grandmother were shocked by the illustrations therein and aghast that I was reading this “trash”.

Just for the record, Mad Magazine first appeared in 1952 as a comic book. After the Senate hearings it was one of the few titles Gaines still was able to publish. He was at odds with the other comic publishers over the actions being taken by them and so he changed the format of Mad from a comic book to that of a magazine, thus avoiding having to be under the Comic Book Code.

I am not certain my autobiography posts would receive approvals under either the Motion Picture Producers Code or the Comic Book Publishers Code. (Both those codes are pretty much kaput today anyway. The Motion Pictures went through a serious of rating systems since and the comic book code disappeared in 2011.)

    

        Comic book turmoil aside, my main interest was the ending of the school year and the three months of time off ahead.

Summer 1954 passed in its usual languid manner. I was in Junior High Band and we marched

in some of the town’s parades. (The Junior High Band not only marched in parades during the vacation season, we had to report to the athletic field for marching practice during August to prepare for the fall football season.) Parades were big events in the 1950s and people lined the length of Lancaster Avenue to watch the units go by. The marches always began from the black top behind East Ward School. All the participants met and formed up there. It always ended in the patch of Kerr Park where

the flagpole was. This was a plot of ground next to the Brandywine Creek where it flowed under the Lancaster Avenue Bridge. The parade would stop on that bridge right across from Borough Hall, which was also the jailhouse. Dignitaries made speeches in both these locations and the honor guard often fired a salute as well. We kids would scramble about afterward trying to get some of the spent shell casing. The last part of any parade was the fire engines from both companies. There was also a little vehicle that looked like a train engine appearing in every Downingtown parade. This belonged to the American Legion.

I was in a few of the parades. In Grade School we kids would decorate our bicycles with crepe paper to ride in the parades. I also marched with Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts and the Junior High Band at one time or another.

Most of summer was free time, except for chores and picking up odd jobs here or there to earn some money. I needed money to join Stuart, Ronald, Teddy, Bill Brookover and other friends at the Farmers’ Market, which had become the main gathering place for a lot of the area teens. We spend a good many of the Friday and Saturday summer evenings playing in the Arcade. We would also grab something to eat throughout the night at the various food stands.

Our favorite pinball game was Baseball. It was the same size and shape as most pinball machines, but you didn’t send balls rattling off bumpers. The designer painted a ball diamond illustrated with players at the various positions on the board. There was a “bat” at the bottom controlled by a button, just like the flippers on the sides of the other games. You put a nickel in to play. You pressed a button and a pinball came up and out of the pitching mound shooting down the middle toward home plate. The object was to time it so you swung the bat and sent the ball back and into a slot that indicated how many bases your hit was worth. If you missed the ball it was a strike. If the ball went down a hole on a position player you were out. Three outs and the game was over. You got points for play. You earned a free play if you got a certain total. I got very good at the game, we all did, and we took turns playing free game after free game. Sometimes we would play all evening on one nickel.

We played the traditional pinball machines and some shuffleboard games as well. Another contraption that caught Stuart and my eye was the recording booth. You could go in this booth and actually make a little 78-RPM record. I have a stack of these things downstairs, but no longer have a record player that will play that speed record. Sometimes we stood in the booth and talked, trying to be funny. Sometimes we sang pop songs alone or in groups, although three was about the limit that could squeeze inside one of those things. Stuart and I did duets, even making up songs.

During the days I would be either at Stuart’s or riding into the hills with Ronald. Ronald visited my place more often now, as well as Stuart’s, since moving to Boot Road (left) even though the distance may have been further than from

120 Washington. We continued going to the

 movie house together on Saturday afternoon.

School began soon enough. Stuart and I again walked to the Junior High together. It was about a mile from my house, a little shorter from his. Sometimes others would join us. We went through downtown, turned up Park Lane, and crossed the Pennsylvania Avenue Bridge over the Brandywine and then up Manor Avenue to the school.

One year they renovated the Pennsylvania Avenue Bridge, which was a metal girder bridge with a macadam driveway and cement sidewalks on both sides. This renovation was basically a new bridge. They torn down the roadway and cars couldn’t go that way while construction went on. They also removed the sidewalks. They placed a series of planks over the creek for the workman and any pedestrians to walk across, except I couldn’t because of my fear of height. Here were these wooden boards about a foot wide nailed to supports. You had no handrail and you could see down to the water several feet away. My friends skipped across easily. They would beckon and urge me on, but I couldn’t do it. To make matters worst, once I tried and stepped gingerly out to a distance of four feet. Gary Kinzey began to jump up and down on the far side, making the boards vibrate and I had to flee back to land. My friends would go to school this way; I ended up having to walk the long way up Lancaster Avenue.

There was a stonewall along Manor Avenue, similar to the stonewall fronting the library, but higher by a couple of feet. I would walk on the top of the library wall, but this one was too high for me. My friends occasionally climbed up and walked its length, teasing me for my fear.

Between that wall and the school was a large cow pasture. There was no fence, only a thin wire running alongside the field. A bunch of us were walking by one day. I looked at the cows milling about. That wire did not look as if it would restrain animals of such size and I asked the question, “I wonder how they keep the cows in?”

Stuart laughed at that.

“Sheer terror,” he said and grabbed my hand.

He proceeded to grab the wire alongside the field, but right before he grabbed it I grabbed Ronald’s hand. An electric charge passed through Stuart and me, but gave Ronald a shock and he jumped and yelped in pain. Stuart let go of the fence and Ronald yelled at him, “’Maphrodite!”

Stuart snapped, “What’s that mean?”

I said, “He’s calling you a hermaphrodite. It means…”

“Yeah, what?”

I was stumbling for an explanation of something I can’t believe I knew at that time. The could come was to relate it to the sex of flowers. “It means you’re perfect,” I said.

closest I

Stuart began shouting and pumping a fist in the air as he walked along. “I’m a ‘maphrodite,” he yelled, “I’m a ‘maphrodite.”

Other kids were beginning to look at us. I waved my hands, “No, perfect like a flower. You know, like a flower…?”

Stuart shook his head.

“Perfect,” I said, “both male and female sex organs.”

I believe we may have learned about the reproductive systems of plants in Mr. Ramsey Hipple’s Eighth Grade Science, although nothing about human hermaphrodites.

I seem to remember on one of Ronald and my bike excursions he had this magazine. I don’t know whether it was “Confidential” or something else. Ronald always was finding weird articles and bringing them up. I vaguely recall there was something about hermaphrodites or speculation about some movie star being one. It was confusing to us. I don’t think we discussed this in terms of sex at the time, but in terms of elimination, of urination.

Ronald insists I told him how people reproduced around this time of our life. He said he still believed the story that the stork brought the baby, but I told him the man put his penis in the woman and that was how the baby got inside her. I still find it hard to accept I could have told him this so early. In the summer of 1954 I still didn’t know what was different in the anatomy of boys and girls, so how would I know about human reproduction methods?  However, I do remember a conversation about babies being inside the mother and him being amazed about this idea.

“How does the baby get out?” he asked.

He deciding the baby must come out of the belly button.

“But why do boys have belly buttons?” I wondered.

We thought of one other possibility. Now, Ronald says when I told him about sex (which I don’t think I did) that he was appalled by the idea.

“You mean my dad pees inside my mom?” he claims he said to me in disgust.

I believe we were more appalled at the idea that the baby got out through the rectum.

Sex was such a hush-hush subject in the 1950s it gets difficult to know when I knew what. I know at some point in those years I discovered a small sex manual in my mother’s bookcase. I was looking for a book to read and came across it. No one was home and I sat down on the sofa with that little book and skimmed through it. It was pretty sketchy with some poorly drawn illustrations, but I learned what had come out of my penis that morning. It wasn’t pus. I probably did know enough to give Ronald an imperfect description of human sexuality. Still, I think I found that booklet when we lived in Bucktown two years later. I was still riding into the hills of Downingtown on my weekends at my grandparents even then, so the sexual lesson might have come later than in junior high.

It is quiet possible we had more than one discussion speculating on sex. There was a discovery we made in the winter on 1954 that might have spurred some curiosity. It occurred at a dump we came across. Among the trash was a magazine. I picked it up when I noticed the page showed a near naked woman on it. Ronald had his camera and he snapped a picture of me with the magazine as I tried to cover that picture with my hands. Could this have led to some sexual discussion?

These things become a big mish-mash in my mind after all these years.***

***In Ronald’s own writings about his sexual awareness, he has claimed he still believed in the “stork story” past junior high. He has said he believed to such an extent that he asked where the stork landing strip was when he went into the hospital for hernia surgery. The discovery of his double hernia came during his Army physical. He was at least 18 at that time and out of high school.    

Eighth Grade was as hard on me as seventh had been. It wasn’t just the usual bullying or jibes from kids, now it was the teachers. I continued to have the same teachers for Shop, Gym and Art. I still had Band, keeping me locked in a separate section from most my friends who didn’t play instruments.

I finished the year with a 2.50 average, a B minus. I got straight A in Art with Louise Remetz teaching me for a second year. I finished with a B in both Band and Music, both led by Mr. Paltrone. Mr. Paltrone commented more than once on how well I was doing and that I didn’t make mistakes and promoted me to First Trumpet. I didn’t make mistakes because I didn’t play all the notes. I could not get the hang of playing sharps. It makes no sense, because I could play naturals and flats just fine. A trumpet only has three valves. It is a combination of fingering the proper valve and the amount of air you blow through the mouthpiece. Sharps should be no harder than any other note, but they eluded me. Whenever we played a piece calling for sharps I faked it. I simply didn’t blow any air into the horn on those notes.

I’m shocked, shocked I say, to tell you math was my worse subject. The notation on my report card was  “Preparation Irregular”, meaning I didn’t do my homework. I came to the conclusion math was beyond my ability. I am a bit surprised I did so poorly in eighth grade, because I considered my math teacher the best I ever had in public school.

We had started the year with a Mr. Sauerwald, who was quickly nicknamed Mr. Sourballs. He was rather dour looking, tall and thin. He was a fresh graduate of teacher’s college and the profession was obviously not for him. He was one of those who could not control the class.

He taught a class one day early in the year and his zipper was down. Notes were passed around and giggles filled the room, but he could not understand why the class was acting this way. After class ended, two of the girls went up and told him. The humiliation must have been too much. We never saw Mr. Sauerwald again. Charles Ax replaced him. Mr. Ax (pictured right) was a professional photographer and I believe his studio took the school photos each year. 

Whatever Mr. Ax’s background, he was a good teacher. He made us see the practical side of the subject by taking us on field trips. He took us to Kerr Park and taught us how we could measure the height of the flagpole or the distance across the Brandywine using sticks, shadows and angles. I thought a lot of Mr. Ax. I don’t know why it didn’t take. As I said, though, by then I had come to believe I couldn’t learn math. I also admit I didn’t do my homework.

Ronald had a problem on the field trip to Kerr Park. He was struck by the curse of Mr. Sauerwald. His zipper broke and would not stay up. He was constantly hiding it behind his book. Zipper troubles plagued Ronald throughout his Junior High years. Meanwhile, Helen Burkhart in crossing a stream dropped her book into the water. The red ink of its cover floated in the current like blood.

I mentioned previously that Mr. Ramsey Hipple (pictured left) taught science. He was another tall and thin teacher. The kids called him Cowboy behind his back because he was bowlegged. I don’t really remember his classes. I got a B in science even though it was a subject I was interested in and was considering it still as a career.

I do remember Mr. Clifford Ratcliff (pictured right) , perhaps because of his name beginning with Rat. Naturally kids called him Ratty. He always had a pointer in his hand. It was Geography, he pointed to maps hanging over the blackboard a lot. I finished with a C in Geography and came away with a terribly distorted view of the world. Geography implied most countries of the world simply wouldn’t manage to exist if not for the United States. From the pictures in our text I thought most peoples of the world wore funny looking native clothes, danced a lot and carried everything on their head. The Dutch all wore wooden shoes and Argentines Gaucho Pants. I thought the majority of the world’s population lived in adobes, mud huts and maybe windmills. It wasn’t until satellites and the Internet that I saw what the world was really like. Why, most of the world was as modern as America!

The two main subjects in Eighth Grade were English and History. I honestly can’t remember whom I had that year for English, but the meanest teacher in the world taught history.

EXERPT FROM "PORTRAIT IN THE PARK"

From Currents of the Whiskeyrye and Other Creeks (2003)

***

Saturday was alive. The sky was lavender. The sun glowed like fresh coal. The monument glimmered above the deep-green maple trees. A cool breeze kissed the grass and stirred the cold blue water of the pool.

A great multitude followed the parade through the park to a makeshift platform decorated with flags and crape. The dignitaries left the convertibles that had carried them through the streets and climbed the steps to a row of folding chairs. There was the mayor and police-chief, the reporter and Hattie Darlington (a special guest by accident). Beside her sat the honored guests: the governor, a senator and a congressman. Each smiled at the crowd, warmed by thoughts of association with an important historical event and the votes it meant.

A brass band resplendent in blue and gold uniforms played the National Anthem and each of the luminaries stood to give bubbly speeches about the glorious town, promising it would live eternally in the scared pages of state history, taking its rightful place as a vanguard of freedom.

The speeches and the flashbulbs subsided and in a truck parked nearby a television announcer began to speak. He described the great men of state on the platform. He murmured above the hush that enveloped the crowd, giving a blow-by-blow description of the notables removing their shoes and socks.

The men left the platform and got into the pool. The reporter led them to the base. The governor followed next, carrying a huge wreath of Mountain Laurel to place at the pillar bottom. The police-chief and mayor walked side by side and then the congressman. Last came the senator with the official plaque to hang on the column.

The water rose as this mass entered and cold splashes splattered the people near the edge. The men reached the pillar and stopped. The reporter scrambled onto the base and got close to the faded name.

“It reads…”He wiped it with his jacket sleeve. “It reads...”

The crowd leaned forward. A hiss rose as many shushed others. All waited breathlessly to hear whom the portrait portrayed.

“In Lasting Memory of Willard Toebington.”

There was a release. People looked at each other.

“Who the heck was Willard Toebington?” shouted the senator. The mayor shrugged his shoulders. Each man stood still in the water, oddly shaped kneecaps peeking above the blue.