When we moved back to Forest Hill, for a change dad was with us, so we rented a house just south of town. It was nothing spectacular, but it gave Richard, my bother, and me access to woods filled with pine trees. Sometimes we would each climb a different supple, young tree in front of the house until they bent over and touched. Then we would swap trees. Not exactly the thing Tarzan would do, but for us it was close enough. Of course, now that I have safety officer experience, I would be aghast if my kids or grandkids had tried that.
That Christmas both Richard and I got bicycles. Richard’s had pedals on the front wheels. I don’t think I could ever get the hang of riding it, but he did right away.
Shortly after we got the bikes, we had an ice storm – a rare phenomenon in Louisiana. I made the mistake of trying to ride my bike on an ice covered road. I headed up a hill that my memory says was steep (but driving through the area more recently I found nothing resembling the slope I remember). However steep it was, I tried to show Richard how you ride up an ice covered dirt road. The back wheel slipped and down I went. After I landed on a road that was hard as a rock, Richard decided not to try what his show-off big brother had done.
Later I had another accident with that bike. Riding home from the store, I followed the foot path I normally walked to get home. At one point the path crossed a gully by way of a bridge that consisted of a single 2×12 plank. I tried to ride across the plank. Have you ever noticed how you tend to steer toward what you look at? I looked at the edge of the plank until I rode off the edge. I ended up on my back in the gully with the bicycle on top of me. I am eternally grateful that I didn’t break my spine.
I told about this event in a speech many years back so I don’t see a lot of point in writing it from scratch. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty.
The sheriff was standing there with his hands on his hips glaring at us with a look that said, “You’re in a heap o’ trouble, boys.” Besides the sheriff, half the town had turned out with him. We’d been caught red-handed. I swallowed hard and stuck one leg and then the other out the open window so I could drop to the ground and face the music. My partner in crime, Billy, followed me, and we stood there trembling. The sheriff beckoned us over. He didn’t look happy.
I think this happened between the third and fourth grade. Billy and I spent a lot of time together. This time we were both bored with summer vacation and were looking for something different to do. We decided it would be fun to check out the school to see what had been left behind for the summer. We did this in broad daylight. Back in those days schools weren’t very secure; in fact, ours was rarely locked. There was no reason to.
Whether we weren’t very smart or just weren’t concerned, we walked casually down the dirt road as if we were going to my house. When we got to the school we took a “short cut” through the schoolyard. When we reached the scraggly hedge under the windows, we took a quick look around to see if anybody was watching. We ducked into the hedge to keep mostly out of sight, smugly believing we couldn’t be seen. After all, the school was on the edge of town with a dirt road, an open field, a railroad track, and a highway between it and the nearest building that had any kind of view of it.
We found an open window. Checking to see that the coast was clear, we climbed into what turned out to be one of the fourth grade rooms. The overhead lights were off, but several large windows filled the room with plenty of light. The room had the old wooden desks with lids that were hinged in front so you could access the storage underneath. I looked in one of the desks. Jackpot!
Kids had left everything from erasers to pencils to fountain pens. Billy looked in another: more treasures of the past school year. Each desk we checked seemed to have something of value. We rummaged through several of the classrooms, finding more loot in each. In fact, there was so much we had to start being selective. I don’t know how much time actually passed. It seemed like only a few minutes, but it was probably half an hour. When we had both collected a bundle of plunder, we went back to the room where we had started. Outside, standing on the school lawn right in front of the window, the sheriff and a group of townspeople had gathered. I don’t know who snitched, but we’d been had.
They looked at us and we looked at them. No one said anything. It was a face off. I knew there was no use in trying to hide. They’d seen both of us and knew who we were. Heck, two years before I had lived next door to the sheriff. Reluctantly we climbed out the window leaving our treasures on the desks.
When we had made it through the hedge, we approached the sheriff. He was an imposing man by nature, standing over six feet tall and weighing close to two hundred and fifty pounds, and for two frightened nine year olds he seemed like the wrath of God embodied. He looked down at us and demanded, “What exactly did you boys think you were doing?”
Billy answered first, “It was open so we went in to look around.”
“Did you take anything?” The tone of his voice said that any answer that wasn’t the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth would call down lightning and thunder.
“We were going to,” I whispered.
“What did you say?” The same tone of voice.
“We were going to, but when we saw you, we left it inside.”
“You know that would be stealing, don’t you?”
I thought, “No Sir. It was just stuff that was left behind. During the school year I could take it home any day after school.” Fortunately, I wasn’t stupid enough to say that. We both said, “Yes Sir!”
It would have been so tempting to make an excuse, the same excuse we had used to justify climbing into the school in the first place: it was open and we didn’t plan to take anything that belonged to anybody. But I suspect that would have gotten us into more trouble. By owning up to what we did, we convinced the sheriff that we weren’t really bad boys. Fortunately, we hadn’t really caused any harm, so he let us off with a scolding and a talk with our parents.
I learned a lot from that episode. First, don’t make excuses. They can get you in a heap of trouble. Second, tell the truth. As Mark Twain said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” But perhaps the most important, if you’re going to do something you won’t be proud of, don’t do it in broad daylight.
One final note about my childhood in Louisiana and we’ll leave the bayou country. We may return as other memories surface, but for now let’s look at the event in the spring of 1948 that changed history.
Dad went out that morning to hunt for quail. He went east, and I went north to stay out of the way. The forest was thick enough that we lost sight of each other almost immediately, but I could still hear dad whistling the come-hither call of the Bob White. I was almost ten so I didn’t have a gun, but I wondered if I could attract a quail. When dad got far enough away that I could no longer hear him, I tried to emulate dad’s quail call as I walked along. I got a response. I eased my way toward the source, calling as I went, and the quail kept responding. Neat, right? Well, not quite. I came to a clearing. As I was looking around, dad showed up on the other side, shotgun at the ready. He had been responding to my call.
I got a lecture on the dangers of luring a hunter, but that was it. I don’t know why, but when he was through, a pile of trash pile of trash in the clearing caught my attention. I checked it out. I found that a large part of the pile consisted of leaflets advertising for construction workers needed on Guam.
Dad was looking for a fresh job so he filled out the included application and mailed it. He was hired and headed off to Guam. The following September the rest of us followed. I’ll save that for the next post.