Drive - A Memoir 43nd Installment
year
every other year was thwarted.
Reese
was the principal and the seventh grade and eighth grade teacher. He
changed my life, and the lives of everyone he taught. Because he was
there so long (41 years) and in a small community, he would say
things like “Your father would have answered the same way,” to a
student or “I remember teaching your grandfather,” to a new first
grader. Reese had nicknames for most of his students. When Russ and I
were in eighth grade and seventh grade he called us Cussell and Racey
(Russell and Casey) or the year before, he called Russell,
Rustynails, and when I was in eighth grade, I was Case–o–beer
which stuck with some friends and became my new nick name instead of
Casey. His greater gift to me was the huge head start in high school.
For the students that were willing to work hard, he would make a deal
to teach both the seventh grade and eighth grade curriculum together
when we were in the seventh grade, then teach as much high school
level curriculum as we could absorb in the eighth grade. He also
taught penmanship, real beautiful cursive handwriting, with enough
practicing ‘push–pulls’ and ‘spiraling circles’ that even
the boys wrote in a big round hand. In eighth grade he taught
English, including sentence diagramming, algebra, geometry, US
history, earth science, and physics with a bit of chemistry.
Chapter
10
“Which
one of you dumb heads forgot to take the hose off the hydrant?”
Vernon interrogated me first, then Russell. Blaming me first was the
usual pecking order and often a wise conclusion; I did more things,
and therefore, just by the numbers, I made more mistakes. This time,
though, I hadn’t done it and Russ hadn’t either. Linda? Ted, the
neighbor? Vernon always blamed Ted every time he lost something or
couldn’t figure what happened to something. He’d say, “That god
damned Ted has it!” The truth was Ted basically never borrowed
anything.
“The
hydrant is frozen and you guys will have to carry water until I can
thaw it out,” he laid down the law. There were about forty cattle
at that trough, and we’d have to carry a fifty gallon drum of water
every day, but there was nothing to do but get at it, and after
filling the cattle trough, we had to help with the frozen hydrant.
First,
we carried boiling water and poured it over the hydrant. The
temperature that day was about ten below zero, and we just made it
real icy under foot. Then Vernon hooked his AC welder to the iron
pipe, the stinger cable on top and the negative cable at ground
level, and poured on the amperes. This heated the pipe quickly, and
soon there was steam blowing out the spigot. “This isn’t going to
work. It’s frozen too deep underground, we’re only boiling the
water above ground,” he said gruffily,
500 more words tomorrow
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