My first 8 years of school

First Grade - mrs. shelton.
Being 6 at the time, I don't remember much about first grade, but i do remember getting whipped by her one time. She used a "bolo paddle", you know, the thing with the rubber ball and elastic band stapled to the paddle. Of course you had to spice up the story to your friends by saying that the "staple was still in it". Speaking of bolo paddles, once I bought one to take on a long distance gas balloon flight so me and Brian would have something to kill the boredom. My mom said "Give me that thing and I'll show you how it works". well, at 75 years old, I had my reservations about my mother's ability to control a ball flying around in the air, but in no time flat she had that ball rapping away against the paddle. She had this weird stance with her right hand doing the paddle work and her left hand firmly on her hip, kinda with her hip kicked out a bit. "you have to have your hips just right to make it work" she told me. My mom inched up a few notches on my "cool people" list after this demonstration.

Second Grade - Mrs. Gunn
She was a nice enough lady, but she had two rather annoying habits.
1. When it was your birthday, she would put on a really heavy coat of bright red lipstick and give you a huge kiss on your forehead. we all hated that.
2. If you misbehaved in class, watch out. she'd roll up one of your pants legs and go to work on your calf with a ruler. This hurts a LOT more than you think. give it a try.

Third Grade - mrs. i cant remember.
This was a rather unmemorable class except for the time that Douglas Kirk threw up in class. The whole class ran to the back of the room in horror. "You kids are horrible" she yelled. "You run away like wild cattle".
We used to throw sewing pins in the back of her dress when she was at the board.

Fourth grade - Mrs. starnes.
Mrs. starnes was nuts, and my so my dad sent me to another school for this year only.
One time i was talking during class and the teacher made me write 500 lines of "I will not talk in class". Another time I had to go up to the board and stick my nose in a circle she drew on the board. I had to stay there a long time.

Fifth grade - Mrs. Blount.
I had a crush on Mrs. Blount.

Sixth Grade - Mrs. Clark
Mrs. Clark was a great teacher, but had a rather substantial sweating problem.

Seventh Grade - Mr. "Asshole" Steward
I posted in another chapter ("Cruel People") about Mr. Stewart. A small gay man (of course we did not realize his sexual preference until a couple of decades later), that seemed friendly, but would whip the living shit out of us for minor infractions. Another rather annoying habit of his was to humiliate anybody that was caught reading a book during class instead of listening to the lecture. When he saw somebody engrossed in a book, he would stop talking and very quietly have everybody slowly gather around this person. Now, you might think that the victim would notice the lack of talking and movement around them, but trust me, when you are consumed in a book, you don't know the rest of the world exists. So anyway, everybody would stand around this person until they finally woke up and looked around. At this point everybody would laugh at them, led by Mr. Asshole.

Eighth Grade - Mrs. Hyde
Mrs. Hyde was a big ol' woman, but reasonably pleasant. She was probably 6'3". She was also an alcoholic and heavy smoker. Once while lecturing, she tried to take a drag off her chalk stick. This was totally cool to us. We talked about that for a week. She used to disappear several times during the day, for reasons not understood to us at that time, but later we realized that it was for smoking and sneaking a shot of Jim Beam. I think Eighth grade might have been the last year of the "Ditto Machine". Any of you over 45 will remember the sweet smell of the purple ink produced on the pages run through the copy machine of that era. That stuff smelled great, and I bet you dollars to donuts it gave us a great buzz that we did not even realize. It was in this grade that my best friend Randall and I achieved the record for wearing the most number of safety glasses at once; 14. You don't think much of that? Ok, butthead, you try to put on 14 pairs of glasses at once.