I figure if I had been born 25 or 30 years later, I could own a high school and whatever assets a few of my teachers had. Although, I guess the teachers in question wouldn’t even try to discipline their students the same way they did back then. By the way, those teachers in question were some of the best teachers I ever had, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.
It was sometime around the 4th grade when I began my first vice. Please don’t laugh when I tell you that I had a habit of chewing on the collars of my shirts. I don’t know why I did it. It was there and I was 10.
My mother certainly didn’t approve of it, but she could only stop me while I was at home.
The teachers also failed to find humor in my habit, and one of them did something about it. One morning when she caught me gnawing away on my collar, she tied a string around a piece of white construction paper, on which she had written the words “Baby Kyle Chews on Collar.” I was forced to wear the sign around my neck, even at recess, my favorite class of the day.
The humiliation was enormous as I sat in the stands, pouting in shame and refusing to play whatever sport it was we played that day.
Then there was a 9th grade shop teacher who got physical, you may say, with his students. We had long tables sitting horizontally to Mr. Bean and the blackboard. He was Peyton Manning with an eraser. If you were being disruptive in any way, he was known to hurl the erase at you. It was amazing to see his accuracy with the eraser. Manning would be proud.
I never got a direct hit, only chalky shrapnel following explosions on nearby classmates. If I had a nickel for every time I would be walking into class and I saw a guy with the outline of an eraser on the side of his face or shirt…
And that was if you were lucky.
When he would catch someone talking or cutting up, the shop teacher would just keep teaching, moving slowly but surely around the room until he was right behind the guilty party. He had a way to flick his middle finger that would feel as if he had cracked your skull.
The result of having those aforementioned teachers? I have never chewed on a collar since the placard was placed around my neck, and while I talked in many a class during my school days, the fear of a cracked cranium made sure that my 9th grade shop class was not one of them.
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I’ve complained loud and long about Northwest Arkansas pedestrians walking in the street within just a few feet of a perfectly good sidewalk. Now, for my first complaint of Little Rock…
It seems drivers around the city are taking football’s “Plus One” idea to the streets. I’ve learned that when a light turns green for me, chances are at least one more vehicle is coming through its red light.
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What’s in a name? I want to share a story I once wrote about a man that played in the 1934 Rose Bowl for Alabama against Stanford.
It was long before hardly anyone from outside of your own league knew of any other team’s stars. ESPN was almost a half-century from being launched. So, when the starting lineups were announced before the game, Stanford students erupted in laughter when they heard that one of the country boys from Alabama was a young boozer. The player’s name was actually Young Boozer, Jr. And no, his father was not Old Boozer.
Ironically, a player on Stanford’s roster that day was named Tom Collins.
Pine Bluff’s Don Hutson caught six passes that day for 164 yards and two touchdowns as Alabama beat Stanford, 29-13. The “other” end on that Tide team was another Arkansas native, this one named Paul “Bear” Bryant (Fordyce High School Class of 1932).