MIDDLE SCHOOL
Somewhere
between childhood and driving your parent’s car is where you find
yourself in middle school. After school one day in the sixth
grade I remember 3 girls pantomiming the words to “My Boy Friend’s
Back” swaying in unison each girl with their hair done and pretty
dresses on and me thinking that they were way ahead of me on the sexual
awareness chart.
By
the time I made it to eighth grade though I was starting to get in the
rhythm of being a teen-ager. That year study hall was introduced
to us as students and I found it to be a curious excuse to take it easy
at school. Imagine a whole hour of the school day devoted to
talking to your friends, passing notes, catching up on forgotten
homework or just staring out the window. My study hall teacher
was Mr. Broussard a strange combination of science teacher, football
coach and frustrated motivator of youth. Frustrated because we
were the youth he was trying to motivate. My graduating class of
1969 was peculiar.
As
we grew older teachers and other parents began to mention to themselves
that the class of 1969 seemed like a group of great
underachievers. It seems teachers and administrators were rating
us against other classes in the school system and our class was falling
fall short in achievements. In other words it was beginning to
get around town by the time our class was about to graduate from Middle
School that we were spoke of as the worst class both intellectually and
athletically to ever go through the school system in Omak. When I first
heard of this I was ashamed and then after some reflection I realized
that what we were doing was a great accomplishment in itself. To
be the worst class in Omak history you had to be bad.
Somewhere
between childhood and driving your parent’s car is where you find yourself in
middle school. After school one day in
the sixth grade I remember 3 girls pantomiming the words to “My Boy Friend’s
Back” swaying in unison each girl with their hair done and pretty dresses on
and me thinking that they were way ahead of me on the sexual awareness chart.
Back
to study hall. I sat in a row that was four chairs deep and next
to the window in Mr. Broussard’s study hall. I sat in the front
row so I could be in the middle of the action and behind me sat in
order Steve Murray, Phillip Quintasket and David Rotter. Phillip
was artistic and played the electric guitar and loved to tell stories
to Steve Murray during study hall. He spoke in a very low voice
and you could hardly hear him but if you listened carefully you could
hear him chatter away with some funny story and Steve would be trying
really hard to not bust our laughing. I believe Steve spent most
of that year with his hand in front of his face. Meanwhile David
Rotter would just sit in the back of the row and mostly just pick his
nose and read quietly. This went on every day for weeks and Mr.
Broussard was beginning to carry a certain amount of rage within
himself for Phillip and Steve. It was difficult to catch them
because Phillip was so cagey but one day I noticed that Mr. Broussard
was beginning to develop a plan of attack for the boys. He sat at
his desk leaning back in his chair and he put his hand on a very long
chalk eraser. He sat there running the eraser back and forth in
the chalk tray for quite some time and then just as Steve was about to
laugh at what Phillip had said Mr. Broussard stood up and threw the
chalk eraser at Phillip’s head. Phillip saw it coming and got out
of the way. David Rotter meanwhile was sitting quietly at his
desk with his finger in his nose and got hit dead on with this eraser
which was overloaded with chalk. Chalk dust exploded in his face
and all over his hand and he started crying “What did I do” and then
ran out of the room.
The
whole class stopped whatever we were doing and then saw a big smile on
Mr. Broussard’s face so we all started to laugh. Discipline at
Omak J.R. High School was not always so funny.
The
school board in Omak still allowed teachers to give spankings to
students who were out of line in the 1960’s. We called them hacks
and all I can remember about the 8th grade was that we had a contest
among the boys that year to see who could get the most hacks in one
year. It’s odd that this is all I remember about 8th grade but as
I sit here I can’t remember anything else other than really enjoying
the girls maturing into hot items right in front of you.
As
I was saying we started this contest to see who could get the most
hacks because this system of discipline was so repressive we had to
have some fun with it. We would get hacks for talking in class,
for being difficult or even for passing notes. One or two swats
out in the hallway and during the course of the week you would often
hear wood meet our young behinds. You couldn’t cry even though
some teachers were swinging away because that meant you were giving in
to this torture. I believe I received 32 hacks in the eighth
grade and came in third in the contest. As you can see we needed
a lot of attention.
We
all accepted this form of discipline and I even think parents enjoyed
the fact that someone else was swatting their kids around and were
trying to teach them some discipline. My parents never spoke
about it and I for sure never told them I was in a contest to see who
could get the most hacks. All of this changed though one day when
another kid named Steve got out of control in the classroom. We
had a substitute teacher for a few weeks and Steve was slowly getting
out of control with discipline. It got to the point where he and
Larry Harvey were spending the entire class time shooting spit wads at
the black board in the room as the poor teacher stood up in front of
the class trying to get us to listen to her lecture. That
afternoon the class was drifting in an out of control with some
students listening and some of us talking to each other and the whole
time Steve and Larry were shooting spit wads at a portrait of
George Washington which was behind the teacher’s desk.
As
this racus behavior was beginning to get quite noisy the acting
principal walked by the open door way and witnessed the mayhem in the
room and saw Steve shooting spit wads at George Washington and he
became enraged. He ran to the back of the room where Steve and
Larry were sitting and grabbed Steve around the shoulders and started
to drag him out of the room. Steve was a tough kid and did not go
easy into the hallway. There was pushing and shoving and knocking
several times into the old steel lockers that lined the walls of the
hallway and much yelling and shouting as they violently made their way
down to the principal’s office. Steve had gotten in a few good
punches to the principals face and the principal had become
incandescent with rage. The principal got another teacher to hold
Steve and then he began to pummel Steve with that giant wooden paddle
that was the principal’s private weapon against us. There was
more yelling and cursing and then it was over. Omak was small and
within a few minutes of the beating Steven’s parents were called and
they a few arrived shortly. They pulled up in the bus circle in
front of school and we could see them running up to the school from
their car.
They
were enraged and more yelling went on and then they carried Steve out
to their car and drove home. After that we lost interest in our
contest and I think the school board began to tone down the giving of
hacks as punishment. I’m sure there was many a teacher who was
worried about how they were going to keep us in line without this
barbaric form of punishment. But life went on and education went
on and students either learned or were left behind.
While
I was in Middle School I still clung to my personal dream of being a
professional baseball player. All I could ever think about during
the spring and summer was baseball. In my neighborhood we played
it all day long during the summer in vacant lots and on yards where
parents would let us tear up the grass. Sometimes we played a
game we called lemon ball using a plastic lemon that lemon juice came
in for the baseball. We would pitch it at a batter and the
plastic lemon would take strange curves getting to the plate and was
very hard to hit. This was a game you could play with just 2 or 3
players and we would set out water hoses behind the pitcher that would
establish if you got a single or double or home run. Hit it past
the first hose without being caught and you got a single and so
on. We were kind of proud for inventing that game and we would
play it almost every day during the summer. Each kid in the
neighborhood would pick a team that was your team and you would
memorize the lineups and the pitchers on that team and then you would
play another kid who had done the same with his team. I was the
Chicago White Sox, Mark Mundinger was the Baltimore Orioles and Steve
MacCracken was the hated New York Yankees. His father went
hunting once with Mel Strottlemeyer who pitched for the Yankees and all
Steve could talk about were the damn Yankees and that’s when my life
long hatred of the Yankees began. We would play Lemon ball for
hours on summer days before we had to get jobs and then even after we
had jobs we still played.
But
the real events of the summer were the larger games of hardball we’d
play and sometimes those games would attract kids from all over
town. We’d play two or three nine inning games in a day with 9
kids on each side and we’d really feel like we were on our way to the
major leagues. There were no grownups in sight and no one told us
how to grip a bat or throw a ball or how to pitch. It was always
just kids.
One
day a kid by the name of Doug Nelson came up to the neighborhood to
play baseball with us. His parents ran a trailer park called
Leisure Village in the south end of Omak and he was in my middle school
class. The yard we were playing in that day was very large
and right next to it was a cow pasture where sometimes the owner of the
cows would butcher a cow while we were playing baseball. That
sort of brought the game to a halt while all the kids stood there with
their mouths wide open while Mr. Hilton carved up one of his
cows. Anyway, this electric fence was strung alongside the yard
we were playing in and acted as the foul ball line for left
field. Doug was playing left field and late in the game he
decided to take a leak while he was still out in the field. He
turned his back to the rest of us and started to pee but he forgot the
fence was electrified and he peed right on it. Immediately he
started to yelp and run around the field holding his penis because the
electric fence had sent an electric charge right up into his penis and
he kept yelling my dick my dick it’s going to fall off. The rest
of us started to laugh so hard we all fell over on the field and began
to roll around.
Doug
later went on to a life of small time crime in high school mostly
stealing auto parts and then straightened out and became the head of
security at a prestigious private college.
Somewhere
in the course of middle school I started to underachieve as a
student. I don’t know the cause of this decline. Part of
the decline was in response to being the middle child in between two
very good students and part of the decline was probably brought on by
the fact that scholarship was not seen as important by most of my
peers. I was struggling as all kids do to fit in with the group
and being a good student didn’t seem to help with your social status I
guess.
My
class blundered along through the course of the eighth grade year and
then the final week of school came and we started to practice for our
graduation. We were all excited about being in high school the
following year and moving on. The entire class was assembled in
the gym the day of graduation and after practicing our walk to receive
our diplomas we sat in the bleachers and we were going to be addressed
by the High School Principal.
Mike Rowe strode into the auditorium with authority and went straight to the podium.
He
wasted no time delivering to us the official response from his office
about our class entering his high school. “You are the worst
class ever to move through the grades of the Omak School system,” he
announced. “We take pride at Omak High School in developing
students who can perform intellectually and athletically and I will not
allow this class to make a mockery of that tradition.” He then
called the names of five (5) boys in our class and had them stand
up. I was not one of them. “You five people will never
graduate from my high school and I want you to know I will be watching
you closely.”
“The
rest of you had better improve your skills dramatically because you are
going nowhere in this life. You all need to learn to contribute
to the traditions of Omak High School.”
The
principal had wasted no time destroying our confidence and that night
after graduation I sat on a hillside looking over the school and drank
my first beer just to get the bitter taste out of my mouth.