Way Back When

Back on the farm in 1939 nobody had any money. We got by on our good looks.
Us kids attended a little one-room schoolhouse, which we reached by walking a mile and a half. We wore out a lot of shoe leather. We didn’t have a lot of excitement going on. Until one day my older brother decided to defy the teacher by not coming in from recess when she rang the bell. He and his friend just stood out there looking stupid until she went out and spoke rather harshly to them. The little brats finally waltzed in with big chips on their shoulders and when she decided to punish them by making them sit in one of the corners, they sassed her.

That kind of action called for a butt whooping. She proceeded to perform the necessary punishment, but they soon over-powered her and took off out the door. School went on as usual, but I was highly intrigued by the thought of what was waiting for my brother when he got home. If he thought Mrs. Moser was going to whip his butt, I wonder just what he thought our daddy was going to do when he found out. I couldn’t wait to get home that night to see what happened because I was going to be the carrier of the glad tidings in case he had not heard. My brother and I were not the best of friends and I thought he had it coming.

I guess the thought of what was going to happen to him had crossed his mind as well because he didn’t go home. It seems that they had decided to live on their own. Yep, they were going to live on their own. Summer was coming and they could just live in the creeks and have fun all day and when they got hungry they could raid somebody’s garden. They reckoned they could live that way all summer. Daddy had the sheriff and all the neighbors on the lookout for them.

They pulled it off pretty well for about three days. They would be in a field traveling farther away and when they saw a car on the road they would hide on the ground. About the third day they were so hungry for some real food they couldn’t stand it any more and turned themselves in at a farmhouse. The farmer gave them something to eat and called the sheriff.

Thank God, teachers are no longer expected to use that kind of punishment on a kid. And from some of the stories I’ve heard, some teacher’s went overboard with the punishment. It’s a good thing it was stopped. Look what happened to this student in China.