Schools I Have Known

This was my seventh grade year. By this point, I was starting to get an impressive resume of schools.

Resume order:

Grade, Town, Teacher, Reason for leaving.

Kindergarten, East Globe, Esther Preston, Globe, AZ, school district changed.

First Grade, Central Elementary, Virginia Dolan, Miami AZ, moved to seminary,

Second Grade, Bienville School, generic second grade teacher, New Orleans, LA, moved to better housing.

Second Grade, W.C.C. Clairborne Elementary, Ms. Grant, New Orleans, LA, same school. I tell the amusing story of The Second Grade here:

https://laughingatsid.wordpress.com/2013/05/18/discipline/

Third Grade, W.C.C. Clairborne Elementary, Ms. Danton, New Orleans, LA, same school.

Fourth Grade, W.C.C Clairborne Elementary, generic fourth grade teacher, New Orleans, left for a private school (lasted one day).

Fourth Grade, Clifton Ganus, generic fourth grade teacher, New Orleans, LA, moved to church field.

Fourth Grade, Valley Forge North, Diane Something, Kentwood, LA same school.

Fifth Grade, Valley Forge North, Daniel Carroll, Kentwood LA, moved to a better school.

Sixth Grade, Valley Forge Central, Anne Elzey, Amite LA, changed churches.

Seventh Grade, Southwest Mississippi Christian Academy, assorted teachers, Ruth, NS, left church.

Eight years, eight schools, are you starting to see a pattern?

To continue:

Eighth Grade, Mississippi Baptist Academy, assorted teachers, Dad took a church in Oak Ridge, TN.

Eighth Grade, Jefferson Jr. High, assorted teachers, same school.

Ninth Grade, Jefferson Jr. High, assorted teachers, changed school district.

Ninth Grade, Norwood Middle School, assorted teachers. It was a  tough school, and I kept getting in trouble.

Ninth Grade, homeschooled, my mammer, went to a Christian school.

Tenth Grade, Mt. Pisgah Christian Academy, my mammer again, Dad started a school.

Eleventh Grade, Hagen School of Kentwood, my mammer again, same school.

Twelfth Grade, Hagen School of Kentwood, my mammer again, graduated finally!

I really hesitate to post this blog because it sounds like me whining. These are fairly impressive statistics. I made fourteen schools in thirteen years. Military brats think my schooling was unstable. I met a girl once whose father managed hotels, and they lived on site who had twenty schools. I wasn’t worthy.

As a funny irony, Dad and Mom settled down in the same area and never moved again. Forty years later, after Mom passed, and Dad’s health was failing, he still would not move! It worked out fine, but I often thought that of all the times we moved, he owed me one move at my request. Alas, I could never outstubborn Dad.

To be fair to mom and Dad, they cared deeply about my education. In some of the changes, they spent a lot of money trying to give me the best education they could possibly give me. Often, they couldn’t help the situation. Three times, they had to leave a ministry suddenly without having that much of a choice. The really bad side of a quick move is that we had to move into something  temporary while they sorted out what their next move was in life. This usually turned three new schools into six.

Before you relegate my blog to the “Grumpy Old Man” file of perpetual whiners, I plan to discuss how the circumstances turned my life into the rich tapestry of experiences my life became. It was both painful and good for me.

The next stop, “Southwest Mississippi Christian Academy.

Summit Mississippi

Dad grew restless. Southern Baptists have networks called associations that are usually two or three counties or parishes large in the Deep South. I am spotty on the details, but I think Dad networked around and found Fellowship Baptist Church in Summit Mississippi.

Summit, true to its name, was a high point on the Illinois Central Railroad. McComb five miles south had a big railroad shop. Summit was at the crossroads of three big industries in the pine belt: the railroad, the paper industry, and the oil fields. There was a big railroad siding where pulpwood trucks would bring a load of four to twelve inch logs eight feet long stacked six feet high to be loaded on the train to the pulpwood mill. If I hadn’t wasted so much time on education, I could be a good pulpwood hauler to this day. I joke, but those people did hard, intense work and were good people.

Summit sat on its own little mound of crude oil in that region. It wasn’t like the fields of West Texas where an army of mechanical dinosaurs lazily pumped black gold from the unknown depths. It had its occasional pump hidden in the pines, and every once in a while a new derrick would punch the surface for another lucky strike. Sadly, one of our locals opened a valve too quickly and was cut in half with the pressure. Some of our church members worked in oil. I had a comical fun neighbor, Ralph Smith, who spent his last working years flying all over the world as a drilling supervisor. It still amazes me that a man from humble beginnings was sought by drilling companies worldwide for his prowess in his trade.

Jerry Clower, the famous country comedian, was from a town about eleven miles southwest of there. He yells a story about my literal next-door neighbor there named Cutworm Smith. Cutworm earned his nickname brandishing a pocket knife, threatening to emasculate you. The other story was that he cut across the bases in baseball. He was nice, but his pocket knife was sufficient to make me never want to cross him.

We went to the most bizarre school of my resume of fourteen years. Stay tuned for Southwest Mississippi Christian Academy in a future post.

Summit and Fellowship Baptist Church had its honeymoon. Our little road had a few nice kids on it, and I really liked my new friends. The church helped us with our move and painted the inside of our parsonage. Once again, we were in the country with miles of forests and fields we could explore. We fought in plowed gardens with huge dirt clods. I have a particular fond memory of my brother Tim getting hit in the face with a dirt clod as big as his head and crying little rivers of mud. I have another great memory of the neighbors digging a dug fort in the woods and us realizing it wasn’t smart to build a fire in a hole. There was also that fun memory of me trying to bust through a cardboard box on my bicycle only to discover it was possible to fly over the handlebars like Superman.

It was fun for about a year. In my innocence, I had no idea there was a storm coming.