CHAPTER 71
My best subject was Driver’s Education, a required subject, but I
hadn’t waited to take this course before getting my driver license. I had passed my driver’s test by early July and had two months of legal solo driving under my belt by the time my classes started. Driver’s Ed was a full year subject, too. Considering myself already an experienced driver, both legally and illegally, I probably should have been bored silly, but I liked Mr. Alvin Alderfer, the instructor (right). Oddly enough I got an F in my midterm exam, but I finished the course with a B. It probably helped that I already had my license. It took the pressure off.
The course was kind of fun. We had these simulators in the classroom, which were like precursors to video games. You sat in this big box with a steering wheel and foot pedals while a film ran before you. Kids chasing balls into the street, others on bicycles would pop out from between parked cars, an errant dog would dart across your path, and many more sudden obstacles. Everything but the town drunk staggered into the view. The object was not to run over anyone or anything.
As strange as it may seem, Plane Geometry proved to be my next
best subject, it and health, but I’ll deal with health a little later. I got a C in geometry much to my surprise. I had given up on math the year before. I just couldn’t do math and Geometry sure wasn’t my favorite thing. I couldn’t seem to get any angle on how to do it.
I didn’t like Mrs. Shinehouse, nobody did. We kidded that when they build the school in 1912 she was already there and they put it up around her. She was an elder women with gray hair pulled back in a bun, the very stereotype of the old-fashioned school marm. She was very tough. Nobody acted out in her classes. She forced us to do a lot of board work. You stood there with a chalk in your fingers and sweat rolling down your face. Until you solved the problem you couldn’t sit down. Sometimes she would whack you with her pointer just to make you focus. Often she kept pupils working after the bell. She didn’t care if you were late for your next class or not. That was incentive to come to class prepared.
My assessment of Mrs. Shinehouse is she was a dedicated teacher who truly cared about her students. She wanted you to learn. It didn’t matter to her whether you liked her or hated her. Popularity was not her purpose for being there. Her purpose was to drum those degrees, angles and shapes into your obtuse brain. She even succeeded in making me an average math pupil, as uncomfortable as I was when called to the board. I say we need more Mrs. Shinehouses in this world.
The rest of my classes were Ds with a lot of Fs mixed in along the way. I had a lot of insane teachers giving me those marks.
In English I had Mr. Pidus. I had him every day at 11:00 and I was
always fighting sleep by that period. This was a class where I floated into my out of body experiences, rising up above it all.
We had to give speeches in his class. In Junior High my one great strength was giving little classroom speeches, in
Mr. Pidus’ English I gave one of the most boring speeches ever heard anywhere on how television worked. It was technically correct, but dull as dishwater. I did learn from it and my speeches the rest of the year at least held the attention of my fellow classmates.
I would have done better in English if I had
been a different sex. The girls made a beeline for the front row of his class. It was the best place for cute little lambs to entice the wolf. A little hitching up of the skirt worked wonders on hiking your grade level if you were female. A little lifting of my pant leg did nothing for me at all. Pidus lit up around any young lady passing through his sightline. His name was Pidus but he sure wasn’t pious.
I came into Chemistry with great expectations. I had been very interested in this subject, in sciences in general, ever since grade school, even considering chemistry as a possible career path. I had anticipated having the subject for years.
It proved one of the biggest
disappointments of my young life and by year-end I had crossed it off my list of interests. D. Marlin Horne was the teacher and I think we were his first class out of college. Look at his photo. Does that look like a happy man? He was very short, but with this incredible booming voice. Dull. Marlin “Foghorn” should have been his name. You would have expected with such a deep voice he would easily command attention, yet he had no ability at controlling the class and he made Chemistry the dullest subject on earth.
NORCO did little to help. We didn’t even have a lab. We met in a regular classroom. Every day we came to class and Horne stood (if he sat we wouldn’t have seen him) and bellowed out formulae. He would have an overhead projector and show sheet after sheet of these formulae. It might have helped if we could have seen the formulae applied to an experiment in a test tube or two, but we didn’t. Horne dissolved my interest in Chemistry faster than hydrofluoric acid dissolves silicon dioxide.
I did not have the good fortune to inherit Mr. Elliott for French II. I
had Joan Grim, and she was grim and my whole year proved grim. I took a dislike to her during the first class. I had trouble ever working for any teacher I disliked. Add to that my hearing problem with similar sounds and this was not going to be une annee tres bonne. I had five Ds and five Fs and somehow finished with a D, allowing me to pass.
In Mr. Elliot’s 10 grade French class I had had Bs.
There was something totally weird about our World History teacher. I swear he was crazy. His name was Sigmund Knies (pronounced: Kaa-neice) and he swear made up half the history he taught. He also brought in movies to show, but these might be a John Wayne epic with no relationship to World History, nor to real American history either.. He took a dislike toward me, which usually teachers didn’t do. They might complain about my grades, but they normally were pleasant to me because I
didn’t give them grief. Mr. Knies seemed to find nothing but fault with me. He is my only high school teacher to give me unsatisfactory marks in the deportment side of the card. He was very liberal with these, too. I got unsatisfactory in Cooperation, Responsibility, Seriousness of Purpose, Industry and Self-reliance. Think what he would have given me if I talked during his Wayne films.
Mr. Buckwalter, the former Marine DI, taught Eleventh Grade Health as well as Physical Education. I got a satisfactory in gym, by the way. Health I got a C.
Health was yearlong in Eleventh Grade. Boys and girls had separate Health classes. This was so the instructor could talk about s-e-x. Yes, by Eleventh Grade the powers that be decided maybe we should know about the birds and the bees. They did not delve deeply into the subject however.
I will summarize our sex education. A male has a penis. When a
male marries and wants to have a baby, the male inserts his Penis (A) into the Female Socket (B). Sperm will magically swim from his penis and possibly penetrate the female egg. Yes, the female has an egg like a chicken. It must be why we call them “chicks”. If Mister Sperm gets lucky, the chick will have a baby.
Apparently all it took was for me to place my Penis somewhere inside a woman for a baby to happen. Although they described our penis to us in some graphic detail, as if we guys had never looked down and seen it, the Female Socket was not described. It remained just a socket and we were basically told not to plug our penises into it. The most important point stressed in our sex education was don’t do it until you are married.
Mr. Buckwalter explained how we boys should behave. “You might find yourself alone with some girl you like.” He began. You may be in a car kissing. Remember your emotions are high at your age. You may experience some urges. You have to control them. If you ever feel such urges you need to go out behind the barn and take care of it yourself.”
In other words, if you are getting aroused, you need to go somewhere private and masturbate to dissipate the heat. He didn’t mean you took the girl out behind the barn. Actually it was surprising he recommended masturbation. Many people still considered masturbation something of a perversion. Remember Dr, Kellogg and his circumcision as a cure and punishment for masturbation? If circumcision is a punishment, then I am happy to have been so punished.
People claimed if you masterbated you would grow hair in your
palms or worse go blind. (I use to check my palms a lot.) Mr. Buckwalter’s more important advice was not to let things get to such a boiling point. Mr. Buckwalter recommended a lot of cold showers. Meanwhile, I experienced a lot of boiling points.
There was no mention of positions. There was no hint of oral or anal sex. No one uttered the word homosexuality in the room. Most of the discussion was not on the how and why of sex, but on all the bad things it could lead to. Pregnancy was a serious consequence of letting your hormones run away with you. No proper young man wanted to get a girl pregnant and ruin her life. I finally learned what my dad had told me, don’t get a girl in trouble.
There were even worst things called “Social Diseases”. We had a
film showing the devastation of such things as syphilis, pictures of destroyed faces and warped brains. Health class was enough to give you nightmares and take a vow of celibacy.
Early in the summer, after eleventh
grade, Richard, Tommy and Suzy paid a visit. It was a languid day. We were lounging about behind my house. It was hot and we boys had our shirts off. My father had strung a hammock between two trees and Suzy and I were sitting on this hammock, gently swinging. We got slightly off balance and the hammock dumped us to the ground. I landed first and Suzy fell atop me. Her bottom came down on my face and my one lens shattered from the impact. She rolled off and I turned over carefully brushing away the broken glass before any got in my eye.
“What’s that rash under your arm?” Tommy asked.
I looked down and saw a red circle around my armpit. I didn’t
know what it was. I put on my shirt to hide it. I was concerned about my broken glasses and what mom would say when I told her, so I wasn’t going to worry about a rash.
Except I did worry about the rash, that was how naïve I was. I remembered all the stuff about “Social Diseases” we had been taught. Oh my gosh, I’ve gotten a venereal disease, I thought. I was now afraid to tell anyone I had this horrible, disgraceful thing. How this could have happened didn’t cross my mind. After all, I had not had sex with anyone. I had barely even kissed anyone at this point of my life. And if I did have a venereal disease, what kind of sex would I have been having that I caught it in my armpit?
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