A change of venue

            In 1955 I graduated from Witts Springs High School with no idea on what my future would be like. I had planned on joining the Air Force when I graduated but changed my mind several months prior to finishing school. My high school coach told me he could get me a full basketball scholarship to attend a small college in Clinton, Arkansas. I had no plans whatsoever to attend college. I was tired of book studies. The principal of the high school wanted me to go into business with him. He would put up the funds to build a store in Witts Springs and I would run the store. It would be a blind partnership. This fell through when another local man opened a store. The principal did not believe the community could support two stores. So what was I going to do?

            My best friend at the time was Sammy Judd and I was also dating his sister who was too young to even consider marriage. Their folks were heading to California to work for the summer months. So I decided to hitch a ride to California. I would live with my older sister and get a job in the Los Angeles area till I could make up my mind as to what I wanted to do with my life.

            I arrived in Compton Ca. sometime in May or June, I don’t remember the exact date. I had no money, no job and no automobile. I began looking for a job in walking distance from where my sister lived. I found a job rather soon after my arrival working for a company that manufactured back yard swing sets. It did not pay very much but boarding at my sister’s home was not very costly. After a few weeks of work I had enough money to buy a used auto.

For fifty dollars I bought a 1939 four door Chevrolet. It was one of my better decisions. It was clean, mechanically sound but needed a paint job. I kept the car for over three years and other than tires, brakes and a carburetor overhaul I had no problems with it. I did the brake job and the carburetor overhaul myself so it was just a matter of buying the parts. Car gas was rather cheap, 17 and 19 cents per gallon.

            After a few months my brother-in law got me a job working for Trojan Battery Co. He had worked for the company for several years and was well thought of by the management. The neighbor who lived across the street also worked at the same place so we car pooled. I drove my car and they paid for my gas. 

A Wagon on the School House

            The Witts Spring School House was built by the WPA in 1935. This may have been the most exciting thing that had happened in our community up to that point. Of course in October of 1936 I was born and for me that was the most exciting thing ever to take place in our community, according to me, myself and I.

            The building was built of native stones. It was a rectangular building, which at first housed first grade through 12^th grade. It also had a gym for basketball with a too short court and a much too low ceiling. There was a crawl space under the whole building which was not tall enough to stand up in, but could house a bunch of things, including benches to be used for seating in the gym for graduation, drama presentations, etc.

            How do you drive a wagon on a building of this height? The answer is you don’t drive the wagon. You wait until Halloween night and get a bunch of country boys who are looking for mischief to perform on their community. They found one of the neighbors who had a rubber tire wagon and after failing at killing themselves by riding it down a curvy hill they came up with the idea to put the wagon on the school house. They roll it up to the school and disassemble it and using ropes they haul it piece by piece to the top. They reassemble it on top of the school. They accessed the roof by finding a window that they could go through into a class room. There was a small room on the stage side of the gym that had a ladder into the ceiling and a trap door onto the roof itself. I don’t know how they got it down. I was not present to witness that event. I assume that adults are as smart as boys and that they reversed the process the boys used to put the wagon there in the first place.

School Dramas

            One bad thing about attending a small school is all the things you miss out on. One good thing about attending a small school is all the great things you get to participate in. I got a part in a school play when I was in the 8^th grade. There were not enough high school boys interested in getting up before a live audience and acting or they did not want to take the time to memorize a three act play. But their slackness became my opportunity.

             The school put on two plays, one in the fall of the year and one in the spring. I  performed in every play for the rest of my years in public school. Back in those days I could memorize my part in a three act play from the time I was given the part on a Friday evening and came to school on Monday morning. My first parts were very small parts with very little dialogue. But by the time I entered high school I had a major role and most times one of the lead roles. Some of the plays were about country hicks so I had no trouble being in character. All I had to do was memorize the words and then just talk naturally. Most of the dramas we did were more laughs than serious stuff.

            We always played to a packed audience. There was not much competition in the way of entertainment in a small community, no television, no Movie Theater, etc. The money we raised paid for the books and the fee that the company who published the plays charged; and the rest, which was most of the funds, went to the school.

Death and funerals

            One thing about living in a small community is that you know everyone who lives there.Therefore when there is a death the whole school can go to the funeral. They are not required to attend but most did. This meant that I went to a good many funerals between first and twelfth grades. Most of them were for old people, some were infants. But the one which affected me the most was when my best friend died unexpectedly.

            His name was Crandfiel D. McGovern. He lacked 3 days being exactly two months younger than myself. He was 9 years, one month and 17 days old when he died. He was on school on Friday and sometime Saturday morning he died. He woke up during the night and told one of his older brothers he was thirsty. His brother got up and went to get him a drink of water. The water bucket was empty so his brother went out of the house to the spring and got a fresh bucket of water and gave him a drink. When morning came, they went to wake him, they found him dead. They never did not know what the cause of his death was.

            My dad went to town on Saturday morning and came home and told my mother that he had died during the night. I overheard him talking with my mother and went and told my older sister and brother that he had died and they accused me of telling a lie.

            At his funeral I looked on my best friend lying in his coffin and seeing the freckles on the bridge of his nose and on his cheeks and thought what a good looking boy he was. His death was a hard thing for me to deal with. This was the first time that I had felt a personal loss at a funeral.

Party games and not dances, closed door and corner kissing, musicals, cross questions and crooked answers

            In the hill country where I grew up there were not a lot of things that were acceptable to the mores of hill people. This was in pre-television days and there was not a lot that a boy and girl could do that would not be censored. The big no-no was dancing. This was a sin that the people looked down on, however it was ok to play games. One game I witnessed was one in which the boys and the girls would stand in a circle and when the music would begin the game would begin. I had never been to a dance of any kind so I did not know what a dance looked like. But since television I have witnessed square dancing so that was what they were doing but it was ok because after all it was just a game set to music.

            Another acceptable game we liked to play was for the girls to go into a room and line up behind the door. The boys would line up outside the door and knock on the door. The girl on the inside did not know who was knocking and the boy knocking did not know what girl was behind the door. The girl would open the door and the boy and girl would lock arms and go outside of the building and walk around the building kissing at every corner. This game was played at night preferable in the school house since it was the largest building in the area. I don’t know if every boy and girl kissed because you would sometimes get paired with someone you did not like. I never did get paired with anyone who did not kiss me. The value of this game is that it gave opportunity to shy girls or shy boys to get to kiss and begin to get to know someone of the opposite sex.

            The most boring thing for me was the musicals. The people who could play an instrument or sing could participate; that left those of us who did neither to just sit and listen. When I could choose I chose to stay home.

            A fun game we played was cross questions and crooked answers. You divided up with girls on one team and boys on the other. You then separated and someone would give the boys the questions and someone else would give the girls the answers. You came back together and stood in line facing each other and the boy would ask the question and the girl would answer. You had to ask and answer the question three times without laughing. An example would be: Boy’s question. Does your mother let you kiss boys? The girl’s answer. I get the hiccups when I laugh a lot. Since the person making up the questions and the person making up the answers do not know what the other person is doing you can get some pretty funny answers to the questions. Then you would switch off and let the girls ask the questions and the boys answer. 

Playing marbles

            As a kid marbles was one of the games I loved to play. In fact my knuckles were always rusty from having my sweaty hands in the dirt so much during the time when it was warm enough to play the game of marbles.

            There were two games that we played. One was to draw a round circle in the dirt and place a large marble in the center of the circle. Standard size marbles were placed at intervals around the circle line. The placement depended on the number of marbles one had to play with. If you had a lot of marbles they were placed closer together. If fewer marbles were available the marbles were not placed as close together. Each person had a “taw.” This taw is a marble that you used to shoot with. Everyone had their favorite taw. Some people would use a steel bearing that was the size of a standard marble. Others would not play with you using their marbles if you were using a steel marble because the steel would sometimes break or chip a glass marble.

                   To start the game you would draw a straight line in the dirt about six feet from the center of the circle. Each person playing stood behind the line and tossed their taw toward the center line. The person whose taw was closest to the center of the circle began to shoot first and the next closest shot and so on down the list of players. The first player then shot his taw from where it laid toward a marble on the circle line and tried to knock it out of the circle. If you succeeded you kept shooting until you failed to knock a marble out of the circle. When you failed, the next person began to shoot and so on. When all the marbles in the circle were knocked out of the circle you shot to knock the large center marble out of the circle. If you agreed before the game began that the one who knocked the large marble out of the circle was to be called the winner then that is how you won the game. If you did not make that the rule then you counted the number of marbles each person knocked out and the one with the most was the winner.

            There are two ways to shoot the taw. The standard way is to pick up the taw then place your hand on the ground where the taw was. Close your fist up like you are going to punch someone then you place the taw in the crook of the pointing finger with the thumb behind the taw and flip the taw with the thumb while your hand remains in contact with the ground. The hand must not move toward the target when you flip your taw. To move your hand toward the target marble is called fudging. Another way I have seen people shoot the taw is to balance the taw between the pointing finger and the third finger using the middle finger as the flipping finger and the thumb to hold the marble in place between the first and third finger. You must still not move your hand toward the target marble. You must still have some part of your hand in contact with the dirt. The favorite way most of these kinds of shots are taken is to put the small finger on the dirt and the rest of the hand is above the dirt. I have shot both ways but was much more accurate using my thumb as the finger to launch my taw.

            The other marble game is a gambling game. For this game you draw a cat’s eye in the dirt. It is about two feet from corner to corner of the cat’s eye. You put a line in the center about a foot long. You line the marbles up on the center evenly spaced. Each person puts the same amount of marbles from his own stash of marbles on the line. They agree as to how many marbles they want to bet. You proceed as in the other game except you keep the marbles you knock out of the cat’s eye. Thus you use marbles to gamble with. Some boys ended up with a lot of marbles playing for keeps. My folks would not let us play for keeps.

The day the Sheriff came to school

             Boys will be boys, they say, but that’s not an excuse. I never did get the full story. I don’t know how it got started or who started it. It must have been really popular because only 4 boys did not get called out the day the sheriff and his deputies came to our school.

            They took the boys outside and positioned them a good distance from each other. They were far enough apart that they could not hear what each was saying to the sheriff and his deputies. They would talk to one boy for a while then go to the next one It was around and around but not a merry-go-round. Someone broke and told the sheriff what he needed to know.

Eventually they all confessed. So they carted them all off to jail.

            Of the 4 boys who did not get called out, the sheriff and his men did not even question them. Up front they knew all who were involved because every boy who was called out went to jail. The sheriff was not on a fact finding tour. He knew up front who he was after; it was just a matter of getting confessions. Someone had been watching and knew who the guilty parties were and passed the information on to the sheriff. Who was this person? I never found out.

            They had been stealing gas from the High School supplies. I don’t know if stealing candy from the school’s candy store was a part of the equation or not. I do know that that was also happening because I was offered candy that had been stolen. The boy who offered it to me told me he had taken it from the store. He had broken into the store on the weekend and had taken boxes of candy, but since he told me it was stolen I refused it. I felt it was wrong to eat stolen candy; but I did not think I was obligated to turn him in. That is how we Christians sometimes get our ethics all mixed up.

            None of them went into a life of crime. They, as group, were basically good boys who thought they were being cool. My guess is that some of them did not want to steal but did not want to be seen by their peers as “not cool”’