Thursday, February 8, 2024
What is your favorite memory from your school days?
While I loved learning, I greatly disliked doing homework. I believed then and I still believe, that when a kid is done school (or work for that matter) they should be able to go home and not have to worry about school. And lets face it, I was not popular and had few friends in school. The friends I did have we outsiders like I was. All that is to say that I have few good memories from school and the few I do have, were usually where I was able to pull off a triumph against the popular kids. Here are a few:
1) Our schools were not like those in San Diego. They were large enclosed building where you never had to go outside from when you arrived in the morning until you left at night. Our lockers lined all the hallways and between classes the hallways were filled with kids talking and opening and closing their lockers.
During class I excused myself and put a substantial amount of touch power in Jeff Gregsons locker. After class, during the noise and commotion, Jeff opened his locker and tossed his text book into the top of his locker. The resulting shock wave reverberated throughout the hallway echoing off the metal lockers lining the hallway. The hallway went from a din of noise to dead silence with the ringing quickly fading away. In that silence Jeff exclaimed in a shocked voice, “Holy Sh*t”.
2) All the cool boys took automechanics because the tough guys can work on their cars. I first realized that these “cool boys” weren’t all that smart, when the teacher (Mr Leavitt) asked the class how a fuel pump “knew” to quit pumping gas. By this time I had learned not to immediatley raise my hand to answer every question but when no one else answered, I explained that the needle valve in the carburetor stopped the flow of gas which held the spring loaded diaphram in the fuel pump in the raised position so that it couldn’t touch the cam. It would stay that way until the needle valve opened and allowed the spring to push the diaphram down at which point it would reengage the cam.
This gap between me and the rest of the class became more apparent when we were arranged into groups to rebuild engines. Everyone else was in three person groups and I ended up with Keith Webster, another social outcast, who was also a smart kid. Keith was strange but he was smart and we had our engine stripped down and rebuilt before anyone else had fulled stripped their engines down.
Years later while living in Rosemary I learned from Stirling Martin that the rest of the class was so mad at us that they filled our cylinders with oil so that we wouldn’t be able to get our motor started. I do remember the engine being hard to start, but it didn’t delay us much.
I quickly became the teachers pet in this class as well.
I finished every assignment in class so quickly that the teacher let me work on anything I wanted to for the rest of the year.
3) I completely forgot about this event until Tom Crooks reminded me when we got the chance to visit a couple of years back at Kira’s house in Calgary.
We nade a trip to an old abandoned house out on someones farm near Aetna. We climbed into the attic and would shine flashlights in the eyes of sparrows roosting there. The sparrows were transfixed allowing us to grab them and shove them into gunny sacks. We then took the birds to the high school late at night and while avoiding the janitors, released them all into the gymnasium. We had birds in the gymn rafters for weeks.
Were you ever called into the principals office? Why?
In third grade while in Mrs. Grants class (the mean teacher who held a grudge against me, all because I gave her a snake) we were all asked to sit quietly while a younger kid walked up and down the rows intently staring at us. He eventually picked out me and Lance Bevans who were then promptly sent to the principals office.
Apparantly this kid had been beat up by some older kids and had identified me and Lance as the culprits. We were able to convince the principal that it wasn’t us.
The only other time I drew the attention of the principal, is when in eight grade (I think it was eight grade) Mr Alma Sommerfeldt (that would be Fara’s father in law) singled out four or five of us kids as being math prodigies and held special advanced alegebra classes with us. I have always given Mr Sommerfeldt credit for Algebra always being easy for me.
Did you ever receive detention or other school punishments?
Never
How did you travel to and from school?
While in elementary school I rode my bike to school but starting in middle school I walked. I never got to ride or drive a car. It was about a mile to the High School.
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All people with blue eyes are decended from one person who lived thousands of years ago.
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