Burn Baby Burn !

I was a senior in high school. One night my sister Betty called on the telephone and asked my mother to let her talk to me. When I answered she asked me, "Guess what's on fire?" My first thought was that the First Baptist Church was on fire because I used to help my grandpa clean the building and I was always seeing dirty rags in the furnace room and I was afraid they would spontaneously combust and burn down the church building. When I told her I thought it was the church she said "no, it's the high school." My first thought was "Hallelujah, hallelujah, the school is on fire. I hope it completely burns down." It did. It was a two story brick structure with a basement and the fire totally gutted the building. Nothing was salvageable. Fire authorities concluded that the fire had started due to the old furnace exploding and catching the building on fire.

This was great, I thought. No school. No school building. No where to go to school. But wait ... the school board had other ideas. The school burned on Friday and we went back to school on Monday, just like usual. The school board decided to hold all high school grades and classes in the school gymnasium. They had card tables and long tables set up in the gym and even had room for two classes on the stage. The building burned in January so we had 5 months of classes in the gym. It was a hoot. No one learned anything because it was just one big party after another for the rest of the year. People made and threw paper airplanes, wads of paper, balls of paper, spit balls, books, and all sorts of other kinds of shenanigans. If you sat close to the curtain on the stage you could part the curtain a little bit and cause all sorts of distractions to the classes on the gym floor. I don't know how the teachers put up with the situation.

We were assigned seats and had to sit at certain tables. It was total chaos when we changed from class to class. At one of my tables we had a kid that would drink Wildroot Creme Oil (a hair dressing) and he could also fart on command. We were always getting him to take a swig of hair oil and if he drank too much he would always go to the bathroom and puke. Of course we thought that was hilariously funny. It was even funnier to make him fart whenever we wanted to. We would wait until things were pretty quiet and then make him fart. That would crack up everybody and the teachers would lose control and begin yelling for us to restore order.

One time during an episode like the one described above, I didn't know it but the PE teacher was standing directly behind me where I couldn't see him. He was also the football, basketball, and track coach. Well, we made our classmate fart and I began to laugh silently and about to bust a gut. Then I lost it and laughed out loud. Suddenly, I felt a firm hand on my shoulder and a stern voice from coach Coen. He spun me around and told me I had just laughed myself off the track team. He suspended me for the next two track meets. We only had three left, so while I was disappointed, it wasn't as big of a deal to me as it was to him.

The last five months of my senior year in high school was total chaos as far as learning anything. I think all the school did was to meet attendance requirements so they could continue to receive state funds to operate the school. I'm convinced no learning took place.

I think the board of education graduated all seniors whether they had earned the right or not. All students in grades 9-11 were promoted to the next grade at the end of the school year.

During our time in the gym most of us were in trouble most of the time (this included the girls as well). I'm sure our teachers wanted to pull their hair out. I'm sure they were frustrated to the 'nth degree.

I remember on one occasion after school we pulled Johnny Shelby's bicycle up the flag pole. Of course, the school principal was watching us out of his office window. We thought he had gone home but he fooled us. The next day he made the four of us go out to the flagpole and hold on to it for an hour. If we took our hand off the pole he would yell at us from his window.

This wasn't the only trouble I got into but I'll not reveal some of the others. Just junky kid stuff that was probably perceived as "bad behavior" at the time but not really. Only fun lovin things that most any kid would do if they had the opportunity.

As a kid I was fun-lovin-ornery. Only did one thing that was really bad and not acceptable, but I paid the price for doing it. That's a whole different story.

Burn baby burn!