Cat fighting and fund raising. Small schools have little money so they sometimes need to have money raising events. One way they do this is to hold carnival like events with games that offer small prizes that cost very little. They can charge to play the game and make money. Things like throwing baseballs at pins or darts at balloons are good games that are safe and are an easy way to raise cash for school needs. Once when the Witts Springs School was planning such an event they ask the high schools students for input in to the events which could raise money. Some of the boys came up with the idea of having cat fights. With some persuading they were able to talk the teacher sponsors of the event to proceed with the cat fights. This meant that they had to scour the neighborhoods and farm to find cats that could be used. Most farms have more cats than they need so it was not to difficult to come with a stash of cats. These were put in cages and fed and watered until the event of the carnival. Two tame house cats don’t just natural fight if you put them in a cage together. You need to do something to encourage the combatants. The boys found out if you strung a wire line across the room and tied the tails of the cats together and draped them on the wire the cats would fight each other. They used one of the school rooms and cleared the desks out of the way and charged admission for people to come into the room and watch the fight. It was both a success and a failure. It was a success since it did raise money without costing anything but the work of volunteers. The failure was what they did not take into account. When cats are mad, scared and fighting they urinate. They urinated not a little but a lot. The stench in the room was a major problem. The room was washed, disinfected, scrubbed and rescrubbed with little affect on relieving the smell. The room had to be vacated by the teacher and class and had to be aired out for many weeks before the smell abated enough to be used again. So the first and only cat fight event came and went into the annuals of history at Witts Spring School. 

A long switch and cheating at spelling. Our class room had three grades in one room. This resulted in hearing oral teaching three times. You heard it in the fourth grade. You heard it all over again in the fifth grade and again in the sixth. This sets up the thing that happened in a spelling exercise that was going on in front of the class room. One grade was line up in front of the room and the teacher was giving spelling test in turn to each student. The teacher was named Jo Wasson. She was single and pretty and I loved her and had plans to marry her when I grew up. She kept close discipline when she taught. To help her in the task of discipline she had a long switch which was green and pliable. As she was giving out the words for the students to spell my cousin J. D. Watts was setting on the front row. He decided to help the slower students by mouthing the letters for the students. Jo caught him doing this and gave him a warning to stop doing it. He tried to be more subtle and continued. She caught him a second time and gave him a stronger warning. He keep it up and the next time she caught him she said nothing but turn to him with the long switch in her hand and administered a cut across the neck and the top of his shoulder with the full force of her power. He stopped mouthing words after that. But he made another error in judgment.  He went home and told his daddy what the teacher did to him. For this he received a very hard thrashing from his father.  There was a time when parents expected their children to obey their teachers.

Best friend and fighting siblings. Cranfield McGovern was born December 23, 1936. I was born October 26, 1936 so I was just about two months older than he. We were in the same grade and were great friends. We sometimes got into scuffles but quickly made up. We sometimes would walk with our arms around each other’s neck like little girls might do. My brother Leroy and my sister Wanda would fight with his brother Bruce and his sister Debora. They were older than Cranfield and me. This fighting was often after school on the way home. If I missed a fight he would tell me and I would tell him about the fight he missed. The fact that our brothers and sisters fought did not affect our friendship. One Friday, Cranfield woke up in the middle of the night and asked his older brother for a drink of water. His brother went to get the water and the bucket was empty so his brother went to the spring and got a bucket of water to give him a drink. He went back to sleep and woke up in Heaven. That was on February 9, 1946. He had not been sick so it was not known what caused his death. That was the first time that death touched me up close and personally. Sixty-seven years later I can still remember seeing his freckled face lying in his coffin. 

School stories

            Love and passing notes. When I was in my first years in school I fell in love with a most beautiful girl. I really do no remember if this was in the first, second or third grades. I do know it was the real deal. Her name was Jerri Aday. We had a wonderful letter writing romance that lasted until her parents moved away from our community. The sum total of those deep love words consisted of the words, “I love you. Do you love me?” I have no recollection of any other words that were written but we wrote those words over and over.