JimBlackBooks.com
1950 - 1959 (Cont'd)
MISS HAWKINS
Miss Ida Hawkins was the epitome of the “old maid schoolteacher.” She was also something of an institution in our town. She had taught my daddy in the seventh grade, the last year of his formal education. (I am not quite sure what part, if any, she played in that fact, but I have always suspected there was some connection.) For several years leading up to my attaining the seventh grade level, I had looked forward to being in her class with a feeling of reverence coupled with dread. Miss Hawkins was “hard”; seventh grad was “hard”; and I, who had always made good grades in school, had dire premonitions of disgracing my family and humiliating myself by making the lowest grades on record in the history of the Archer City, Texas, Independent School District.
It seems strange that the one who inspired all that awe was a small, gray-haired lady of quite ordinary aspect. She had no horns protruding through her silver hair. She was, in fact, very prim and proper. I never once saw her breath fire; indeed, I do not recall ever hering her even raise her voice. What, then, is the explanation for the longstanding veneration she enjoyed during her tenure as seventh grade teacher? One factor, I think, was simply her age. From my first recollection of her, she was old. She had taught practically every adult in town by the time I came along, and not one of them ever quite got over his awe of her. I ad the feeling that she had either been born old, or that she simply had been teaching school forever, and had never been born at all. She was also old-fashioned. There was none of that “let the students run the class” philosophy about her. She was the teacher; she knew the material. We were the students; we didn’t know the material. It was her job to teach. It was our job to learn.She was strait-laced. I rarely saw her smile, but she was not unpleasant. Hers was a strictly no-nonsense approach to education. She would brook no interference or interruptions. I still quail at the recollection of the day I interrupted class with an irrelevant remark instigated by the fact that I had been wool-gathering, rather than paying attention. She advised me that my observation was ill-timed, and consequently unnecessary. There were no threats, no shouting; but I took pains from that time forward not to make that mistake again. I recall no discipline problems in her class. I think she would have been astonished if anyone had had the temerity to deliberately disrupt class or misbehave in any way. Those were the days of the self-contained classroom in junior high school; therefore, Miss Hawkins taught every subject. She taught everything well, but she incited an unusually high degree of zeal among her students in the areas of history and geography. Her favorite aphorism, “I think that’s interesting, don’t you?” was one we gleefully quoted in a mockery of her decorous tone; nevertheless, her innocent delight in discovery was apparently contagious, for we often did find more and more things that interested us.The culminating activity of my seventh grade year was a class trip to the Lawton, Oklahoma, area. We visited the museum at Fort Sill, the Easter Pagent grounds, and Craterville Park. We had a wonderful time, and Miss Hawkins had as much fun as any of us, I think. She found a myriad of things “interesting, don’t you?” We youngsters saw her as a human being for the first time that day, and our day’s experiences drew us closer to her and to each other than anything else had up to that point. Miss Hawkins retired from teaching at about the same time I graduated from high school. She lived quietly in her home for several years. Then, a good many years ago, she had the great good sense and practicality to realize that she would need someone to look after her, so she sold her house and moved into the Archer Nursing Home. She lived there, apparently quite content, until her death a few years later. I visited her in the nursing home whenever I could, and even though she usually didn’t remember me, I always found her much like the teacher I had known—orderly, serene, and self-contained. I felt a pang of sadness when I read of her death in the Archer County News. Miss Hawkins enriched my childhood, and thereby enriched my life. I think that could be said of everyone she ever taught. I maintain that each of us has a sphere of influence that reaches far beyond anything we can imagine. I touch someone’s life, for better or for worse, and that person, under my influence, touches the lives of others, and on and on. If my theory is correct, then Miss Hawkins, though she had been gone for many years, is still imparting her values to her former students and to their descendants.That’s not such a bad legacy for one little, old maid schoolteacher, is it?Archer City, Texas is my hometown. Except for a couple of years in Vancouver, Washington, when I was a small child, I lived in—and loved—Archer until I was nineteen years old. Life has taken me far afield since then, but it hasn’t diminished my love for the place of my birth.
Eight or nine years ago Mary Slack Webb, then jolly old innkeeper at the Lonesome Dove Inn,
hosted a reunion for the group of our childhood friends Fran Harvey Russell, Sue Peyton Metzger, Lenn Young Tucker, Ann Horany Risk, Mary Slack Webb, and me. (We now call ourselves the Archer City Girls, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s a title of honor.) The theme for that particular reunion was “You Can Go Home Again.”
In a way, I guess Thomas Wolfe was right when he said you can’t go home again—in the same sense that Louis L’Amour said no man steps into the same river twice; but in another sense, home is always with us. It’s in our skin, in our way of walking and talking and thinking and dreaming. The Archer City I left so long ago isn’t the Archer City of 2015, but it’s still with me…and very real. In my skin and in my way of walking and talking and thinking and dreaming. So, along with a lot of other people, I’d like to share my Archer City with you.
The Archer City Girls, my best friends, Lenn Young, Mary Slack, Ann Horany, Sue Ann Peyton, and Frances Ann Harvey, and I, along with several of our boy buddies, would have after-church sessions on Sunday nights at the corner of Silk Stocking Avenue (aka South Ash St.) and South, where Ann’s house was. We’d string six or eight or more extension cords together, plug them into a socket in the Horany living room, set up a portable record player, play records, and square dance under the streetlights. For the life of me, I can’t remember who we got to call the dances; about the only thing I can figure out is that the callers were “built in” on the records. It was great fun! Think of it! A bunch of high schoolers dancing in the streets on Sunday nights!
Now this same group of girls, I’m sorry to say, dipped into heathenism from time to time. They were (and still are, of course!) significantly older than I, but thank goodness I wasn’t too susceptible to their wicked blandishments….most of the time, anyway. During their junior year, there was much discussion among them (Okay. Among us.) about the plausibility of playing hooky for a day sometime near the end of their senior year. All kinds of plans were floated. They mostly revolved around going to Wichita Falls and seeing a movie. Everyone thought that was a cool idea—except yours truly. One of my outstanding character traits is unalloyed cowardice, and I had a big picture of facing my parents’ wrath, not to mention disappointment, and spending the rest of my life grounded and maybe being expelled from school. But I was also too cowardly to voice any objections to my friends’ devious plots. Much to my relief, however, I guess everyone sort of lost their enthusiasm, so it never happened.
My sophomore year we had a new band director. Fresh out of college, I think, and very determined to make good, he came into Archer City High School like gangbusters. In retrospect after a thirty-one year stint teaching high schools kids myself, I’m sure he was probably a very nice young man who was just trying to do his job well. Unfortunately for him, we band members at ACHS were capable of being know-it-all horses’ patoots at times. (And incidentally, I was the president of that club!) Also unfortunately for him, he adopted a kind of adversarial stance with us at the beginning of the year. So we were horrible to him. I mean we were real stinkers.
Mr. Seaman, I imagine, discovered that he was out of his depth fairly early on, but he was stuck with us, so about all he could do was try to get a bunch of recalcitrant teenagers to produce some kind of music and march the length of a football field at the same time without falling down. Some of the boys, I think, came up with the idea of calling him “Seaboy,” a sobriquet the rest of us gleefully adopted. So from then on, whenever he wasn’t around, he was called Seaboy.
Actually, I’m too ashamed of our behavior to relate any specifics, but as I recall, Mr. Seaman lasted only a year with us…maybe less. So let’s fast-forward three or four years. I’d graduated from high school and was attending Midwestern University. One day I walked into the UC and almost collided with Mr. Seaman. I expect he wasn’t especially thrilled to encounter me, but we were both cordial enough as we exchanged a few pleasantries. All the while we chatted, my inner voice was saying Do not call him Mr. Seaboy. DO NOT CALL HIM MR. SEABOY! So as we took our leave of each other, I said, “It was nice to see you, Mr. Seaboy.” Arrrrgggh!
Nell Trent was my fifth grade teacher. Benjamin Buerger sat behind me in class. One day Ben was up to his usual tricks—bugging the stuffings out of me…I don’t know, dipping my pigtail into ink or something along those lines. Finally, I’d had enough. I grabbed my ruler and turned around and started beating him over the head with it. I can still see him holding his arms up trying to fend off my assault. I stopped when the ruler broke. All I remember about Mrs. Trent’s reaction was that she just stood there regarding me with a look of mild astonishment. I don’t remember that she even said anything to either of us. I suppose she thought Ben had been punished enough, and I’m sure she realized that I would never have attacked him without provocation….
Then there was the time in Nell’s class that we were having a discussion—presumably about something gory. Maybe we were describing injuries we’d sustained along the road of life at that point. Anyway, someone mentioned blood, and the next thing I or anyone else in the room knew, I was face down in the floor beside my desk. Fainted dead away; however, I seem to have recovered pretty quickly. Again, Nell Trent looked at me with mild astonishment; then I got back up into my desk and we continued with class. As far as I know, she didn’t call my parents to report the incident; I think I told them about it at the supper table that night. And we all just went on eating….
I’m not sure whether this was junior high or upper elementary, but there was a kid in the class below me who was a bit on the chubby side. His nickname around school was “Snack Bar.” That may have been his real name; I don’t know. I never heard him called anything else…except the day we were in line in front of the building on some occasion. Maybe we were going in after lunch or something. Mr. Gerron, our superintendent, was out amongst us and for some reason chose to speak to this boy. He knew the nickname had to do with food, but he didn’t get it quite right. Mr. Gerron called the lad “Lunch Counter.” Oh, well. Not that much difference.
Mary Slack and Lenn Young were making sand tarts in home ec class. According to the story they tell, someone put two cups of baking powder into the mixture instead of two cups of flour. Everything was already mixed in, and they didn’t dare tell the teacher they’d wasted a cup or two of chopped pecans. So they solved the problem pretty creatively: They disassembled the dough and washed the pecans, then remade the cookies!
Home ec was one of my favorite subjects in high school. Our teacher would divide us into groups of five or six girls to work together when we cooked. On this particular day we were making cakes. I was the designated stirrer for this project, and we were doing all this by hand. No electric mixers for us, no sirree. So I was standing over the bowl of cake batter with a wad of Dentyne in my mouth and a big spoon in my hand. Although it was foreign to my nature as a rule, on this occasion I happened to be talking and chonking on that Dentyne, when the gum fell into the batter. I was never one to let a little thing like that slow me down, so I just fished it out of the bowl, stuck it back into my mouth, and kept on stirring. A couple of the others in the group recoiled in horror, but there were no fatalities—that I know of.
We were always very proud of the Archer City Wildcat football teams, and through the years we had some mighty fine players. Way too many to mention here. But a couple of them have interesting sidelines to their stories, and I’d like to relate them here. Warren Robertson must have graduated from ACHS in the early fifties. Whether or not he ever played high school football, I can’t remember. He graduated from the University of Texas, where the closest he ever came to a college football game was, to quote him “Row 28 of Section E in the bleachers.” After finishing college, he fulfilled his duty to his country with a two-year stint in the U.S. Army. Because of an Army snafu while he was in basic training, he was mistakenly identified as George Robinson, who had been a halfback for UT. The upshot was that Warren spent two years in Japan playing on a leading Far East Army football team. He wrote a delightful account of this unlikely adventure in an article entitled “Ten Football Stars and Yours Truly” for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED in the early sixties. READER’S DIGEST picked it up and included it in their anthology FUN AND LAUGHTER: A TREASURE HOUSE OF HUMOR, published in 1967.
Another Wildcat player who has a most interesting story is Joe Douglas. Joe was maybe five foot two, and the fastest thing on two feet. If you looked away for ten seconds, you’d miss him. The coach would set up a single wing offence, somebody would throw him the ball, and all you’d see would be a black-and-gold streak flashing down the field. It was a beautiful thing to behold, if you could look that fast. Joe’s athletic career continued after high school, not as a football player, but as an outstanding track star. In 1972, Joe founded the Santa Monica Track Club, where he is still producing Olympians. He’s kind of lost count of just how many. He said that he doesn’t seek out athletes; they come to him, in spite of the fact that he’s “a dictator,” by his own description. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Joe worked as Carl Lewis’s coach/manager and took him to the Olympics, where Lewis won nine Olympic gold medals and one silver during the years Joe was coaching him.
This is a very special memory for me—maybe not for anyone else. My daddy became seriously ill sometime during my later years of high school. By the time I graduated, he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I was to give the valedictory speech at my commencement exercise. Somehow, someone in town, possibly Dr. Harold Smitson, helped Mother arrange for him to be transported in an ambulance to the high school auditorium for the occasion. His gurney was placed in the aisle about halfway down to my right as I faced the audience. Everyone was so kind and solicitous to us during those sad and difficult days; it meant more to me than I could ever say. So my daddy got to hear my valedictory address. Then when football season started the next fall, he got to sit (recline, really) on that same gurney on the sidelines at the end of the Wildcats’ bench at one or two home games before his illness became so debilitating that he wasn’t able to attend. Of course, the players would get very involved in the game and would stand up and move up and down the sidelines to keep up with the action, sometimes obscuring his view of the field. But when any one of them noticed, he’d nudge the others and they’d clear a way for Daddy to watch the game. How does anyone even begin to calculate that type of kindness? I think it was typical of my hometown, and is probably one of the reasons I love Archer City as much as I do.
During the mid-fifties, an exemption plan was implemented in ACHS. The guidelines were as follows: In order to be exempt from mid-term and finals exams, students could have two excused absences if their average was at least 90. A student with an average of 80 or more could be exempt with no more than one excused absence. Astonishingly, a kid with a 70 could still be exempt if he or she had no absences. It may or may not have been especially good educational theory, but we kids loved it! And I wouldn’t be surprised if the teachers were pretty fond of it themselves!
The elementary playground of my halcyon days contained some wonderful items! There was a merry-go-round, a gizmo we called “traveling rings,” see-saws, monkey bars, johnny-strides, and a couple of slides. Back then, store-bought bread came wrapped in some kind of waxed paper. The paper wrappers were invaluable to us when a slide became sticky and pretty painful to go down. One day I was dispatched to the cafeteria to beseech the lunchroom ladies for a bread wrapper or two so we could “slick up the slide.” They kindly granted my request; as I left the confines of the cafeteria, I heard a couple of them giggling at my terminology “slick up the slide.”
I don’t remember eating lunch in the cafeteria very many times as an elementary student, though I suppose I ate there just about every day. And every day, it seemed to me, one of the menu items was hominy. Never mind how old I am now, but I’m just now getting to the point of being able to eat hominy without gagging. And I’ve talked with a few people who still can’t eat the stuff!
Looking back, it now seems to me that we Archer City kids were extraordinarily blessed in the teachers we had during the twelve years of my attendance. Of course, not all of them were wonderful, but an amazing lot of them were. Here are a few of the ones I remember with special fondness. Mrs. Wilma Lasater was my first grade teacher; she provided a really good educational foundation for no-telling- how many generations of children. One of her requirements was that each of us write the numerals 1 through 1,000, in order to pass her class. I guess she had special mercy on me—or she couldn’t bear the thought of having me in her class for another year, or I misunderstood her about this assignment’s being life-or-death, but I never managed to get that done! I’d get started, then lose the sheets I’d written them on—or something. I honestly don’t know how many times I tried to write those dadgummed numbers, but it never happened. I was a nervous wreck for about half of that year, terrified that I was going to fail first grade because I hadn’t turned in my work.
Mrs. Otis Moore was the elementary school music teacher. I credit her with being the one who instilled in me—and, I hope, in many other of her students, an appreciation for classical music. Under her tutelage we listened to things like Peter and the Wolf, The Nutcracker Suite, and Tales of Vienna Woods. We learned to harmonize and to read music (at least to some degree). And she had endless patience and a great sense of humor. Many years later I tried to locate Mrs. Moore so that I could tell her how much her teaching enriched my life, but I was never able to find her.
John English came to Archer as a first-year teacher, and my sixth grade class got to break him into the education game. He was a wonderful teacher, enthusiastic and fun, and we loved him! It didn’t hurt anything that he was also drop-dead gorgeous. We had just entered that delicious stage of life where we were beginning to discover that boys and girls were different. We weren’t quite sure about the particulars, but we were plenty happy about what we did understand! Junior high football was a big deal for us, partly, I am sure, because Mr. English was a junior high coach. I remember that year as a time of rollicking fun, and Mr. English played a huge part in that!
He later told me that he considered his school day a success if he could figure out a way to keep Junior Bitner out of music class. Junior would beg and plead and offer to do anything: clean blackboards, dust erasers, anything if only Mr. English would get him excused from music!
I remember a daily test we took one time. I’m pretty sure it the subject was science. We’d asked at the beginning if he was going to count off for spelling. He said he wouldn’t. Well, on one particular fill-in-the-blank question, I had no idea what the correct answer was, but I was pretty sure it started with e and ended with s. So I just wrote a long, made-up word that started and ended with the required letters. Turned out that the answer was supposed to be “esophagus.” Neither he nor I can remember whether or not he gave me credit, but we’ve certainly had a lot of fun down all the years recalling the incident!
Virgil Wilson was another great teacher. The eighth grade was his bailiwick. I have no idea why I remember this, but his favorite expression was, “The fact of the matter is….” Helen Taylor recalls that one of her pastimes was constructing paper airplanes, a forbidden activity in Mr. Wilson’s class. On one particular day she’d just completed her magnum opus, her masterpiece, the best paper airplane she’d ever made, and had launched it from her desk. It flew right out the window. However, there was a slight hitch: The takeoff occurred just as Mr. Wilson walked into the room. Her punishment was to write “I will not throw paper airplanes in class” one hundred times. She didn’t especially enjoy the experience, but I guess “the fact of the matter” was that Mr. Wilson didn’t like paper airplanes flying around his room.
Mary Lee Crowley came onboard the second semester of my senior year as a replacement for our senior English teacher who didn’t complete the year. Mrs. Crowley must have had nerves of steel to tackle a bunch of second-semester seniors. But she did her job with a lively spirit and a great good humor. One of the main projects for that term was the research paper. I don’t know how she managed it, but she made even that at least bearable, if not fun. I had a chance to visit with Mary Lee at a class reunion a few years ago, and she told me one memorable moment she had with me as a student was the time I corrected her pronunciation of some word. Unfortunately, she can’t remember what the word was. I was and still am horrified! I apologized profusely and repeatedly! At first it was hard for me to believe I could have done such a thing. But then I reflected on what an insufferable little smarty britches I was; and even though I have no recollection of this incident, it sounds just like something I would have done. I hope that it will be of some comfort to my former teachers, wherever they may be, that when I became a teacher, I got everything back in spades! The saying really is true: What goes around comes around.
It appears to have been another tradition in the Archer City school system to indulge in what was called “initiation,” but is now called “hazing” for various segments of the student body when the occasion seemed to call for it. One of those occasions was eighth grade graduation. T.J. Taylor remembers that when he graduated from eighth grade, he was hauled off to the country about fifteen miles out of town and had to walk back—in the middle of the night. And I’ve heard from others that sometimes these poor kids would be allowed to walk most of the way back to town, and then be captured again and taken back to the location where they were put out in the first place and forced to start over.
Now every town has its share of kids who for some reason or another don’t seem to catch on as quickly as everyone else. We certainly had a few of those when I was growing up in Archer. The following episode features one of them in a starring role. I’m just going to call this guy “Bubba,” just in case he or some of his kith and kin should read this and take offense. I’m not clear on the details, so please bear with me. On this particular night, Bubba, and, I suppose, some of his cohorts, decided it was their turn to perform the initiation rite of passage for the soon-to-be-freshman boys. It’s something of a mystery as to why Bubba felt a need to participate, since he’d completed his formal education in about the third or fourth grade, as I recall. Nonetheless, he was onsite at the end of the eighth grade graduation ceremony that year. There’s some speculation that perhaps the initiators had been partaking of something a bit stronger than lemonade; I have no idea about this. Bubba was on the roof of the high school auditorium for whatever reason. Anyway, sometime during the evening something apparently spooked him, because he started running. You’ve probably seen some of those Roadrunner cartoons or something of that sort where a character runs off the edge of a cliff and doesn’t fall immediately, but keeps running for a second or two before he realized he’s no longer in contact with the ground. I wasn’t a witness to the drama that occurred at this point, but that’s how I picture Bubba’s Big Moment. In any event, he just ran off the top of the building. Broke a leg, I’ve heard, and spent some time, I would imagine, in the hospital. I have no idea what happened to him after that. Maybe he moved away, or maybe he just stayed around town and became one of those beloved old town coots like you see in the movies.
Another teacher in the annals of ACHS history wasn’t one of the very successful ones. I believe she came in as the music teacher after Mrs. Moore left. Her name was Miss Chloe Byers, and bless her heart. There must have been a high school choral club in those days, because Mary Slack and I decided to join something that involved singing by high school students and was led by the music teacher. At the first meeting, Miss Byers sent around a sign-up sheet. There were a few upper-class boys (And I use that term only in the context of the grade they were in; they certainly displayed no other kind of class!) who apparently had come in with the sole purpose of seeing how much devilment they could get into; as far as I know none of them could carry a tune in a bucket! Herby Neas, who must have considered himself a devastating wit, signed the sheet “Eddie Fisher.” Poor Miss Byers called out the name Eddie Fisher several times while the boys went into paroxysms of laughter. How childish! Mary and I, on the other hand, took our responsibilities as musicians very seriously. Experts that we were, we decided that Miss Byers had a tin ear, and we’d take advantage of that. So we made it our mission to sing just slightly off key, which, as Mary recently pointed out, is harder than you might think. Harder by a long shot than singing on key. Well, that may not be exactly true; singing off key for me these days is alarmingly easy and singing on key next to impossible.
Lonnie Wilson recalls one of the stunts he and his partners-in-crime pulled. They inserted a potato into the exhaust pipe of Mr. Wilson’s car, then took cover someplace where they could enjoy watching the coughing and sputtering this feat produced. Mr. Wilson did not take this in the spirit of good fun, as I’m sure it was intended. And apparently he intuited that one of the perpetrators was Lonnie, but he couldn’t pin anything on him. Well, never mind. He bided his time until a week or so later when he was having his eighth graders read aloud in class. Lonnie was in his customary condition—several thousand miles away in dreamland. Mr. Wilson called on him to read, and he had no idea where the person before him had left off.
So down to the office they went. Lonnie remembers the licks Mr. Wilson administered that day as fifteen of the juiciest he ever received—in a longish career of getting licks from just about every teacher who was unfortunate enough to have him in class.
Years later, when I was teaching sophomore English at Abernathy High School in Abernathy, Texas. I told my sophs the potato-in-the-tailpipe story just because I’ve always thought it was funny. I always went home for lunch in those days. A couple of days after I’d told my students this story, I discovered a potato in my exhaust pipe when I got ready to return to school after lunch. And a bunch of my sophomore boys were packed into a car across the street, hooting and catcalling. Laughing, I shook my fist at them, removed the potato, then drove back to school and resumed business as usual. And nobody got any licks for that.
My class, the ACHS Class of ’58, had what may have been a unique distinction: Over the years, and not all at the same time, we had four sets of brothers and sisters among us. They were JoAnn and Wayne Dugan, Bennie Marie and John Downing, Virginia and Gary Lyles, and Martha Jean and Clyde Worley. The Worleys were the only intact pair that graduated with us.
John English had a theory that in most cases the boys started out at least a year ahead of their sisters, but the vicissitudes of their educational experience caused them to, shall we say, “slow down” in their progress, so their sisters caught up with them.
Malena Martin Gough – Class of 1958
