Southwest Mississippi Christian Academy: The Stories

In my previous post:

https://laughingatsid.wordpress.com/2024/02/05/southwest-mississippi-christian-academy-the-school/

I discuss the history and the physical plant of Southwest Mississippi Christian Academy. The school is stereotypical of several private schools in my resume of schools such as Clifton Ganus, Valley Forge North, Valley Forge Central, and Mississippi Baptist. The school was unique in that it was the mostest redneckest of the bunch. I still chuckle at the memory of it and myself, and I hope you do as well.

This was the year I learned that it is easier to make friends with the bad kids in the class. This was probably the high point of my growing prowess as the class clown. I will probably discuss my coping mechanisms for the “New Kid Syndrome,” but for now, I just want to tell some funny stories.

General Assembly:

We had a general assembly once a week. Each week, a class did the program. I don’t recall we ever had a chapel meeting even though we were a Christian school. Somehow, they all began to devolve into lip-synching popular songs. I laugh at the girls rushing the stage when Robbie Stinson did a perfect, “Hunk a hunk of burning love.” Old Elvis gets the chicks every time. My claim to fame was doing “Last Kiss” by J. Frank in the Cavaliers. Pearl Jam later did a cover of it, and I think they were such lightweights compared to me. I nailed it! I was later told they were afraid the chicks would rush the stage, and they closed the curtains quickly. Once again, I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory!

Lest you think I am really old, the song was old when I nailed it.

A bad deal:

This was in the 3″B”‘s of education era; “Bust their Butts with a Board.” Teachers in that time had dungeons with whips, and chains, and handcuffs hanging all over them. Cross them, and they would cross your eyes with pain. Occasionally, I see some Facebook posts where someone is reminiscent of these good old days. They obviously didn’t have the same pain tolerance I had. I don’t have any fond memories of that pain.

Teachers had wooden paddles that were a 1 X  big enough to hurt. In a special combination of physics, sadism and a perverse need to mark their territory they would drill their names in holes in their paddle. This had the combined effect of better aerodynamics and more detailed scaring on both your posterior and your psyche. Your reward for enduring that moment of crippling pain was that you got to sign the paddle.

Coach Felder, who was both a coach and a math teacher, and not particularly very good at either, sauntered into class with a new paddle  with “FELDER” just glaring right at you. He announced the caveat that you got the right to sign the paddle if he signed your butt with said paddle. Being one with a compulsive need to make a scene, far outweighing my small brains ability to think with a twinge of common sense, jumped right up to snatch immortality in exchange for a concave buttocks. Two other of my dumbest and morally depraved fellow classmates popped up like lambs to the slaughter.

Surely, I had wingmen, and the confidence that he wouldn’t hit that hard since it was voluntary, and in jest.

MAN!  WAS I WRONG!!! He hit me so hard, one eye was staring at the pencil sharpener, while the other was looking across the road at some blurry cow in a field. I heard the exultation of the angels, along with the tortured screams of tormented souls being drug down a chute to the pit. As my fillings popped out and poisoned my gut with mercurial amalgam, one of my two brain cells gave up the ghost and fell over with a dull thud in my hollow head. I still believe that I have bruising and scaring, which I affectionately call “Felder Ass,” which coincidentally was my future designation for said teacher.

I signed the paddle with shaking hand. This was a totally Pyrrhic victory on my part. I think somewhere I can imagine him cackling with a fond memory of his actual victory. What I find ironical is that in today’s generation of cell-phone-equipped internet justice warriors, such violence would be met with more comments that a kid falling in a gorilla cage or a Cecil the lion shooting dentist. For me, it brought back a phrase I refer to as Grandmother’s saying. I could still envision her with tears in her eyes saying, “Sid, don’t be a jackass!!!”

Up next, Southwest Mississippi Christian Academy: More Stories.

Southwest Mississippi Christian Academy: The School

Site of Ruth School

I want to preface this post with a strongly stated disclaimer. Here, I am only describing the Deep South in which I grew up. There has been so much truly wrong with our national history. I will leave it for the historians to redress the Civil War, the Reconstruction, the Jim Crowe era, and the Civil Rights movement. I can tell you positively that the 60s and the 70’s was a really bad time to be black in the South.

In 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education set the precedent for desegregation of public schools. Throughout much of the Deep South segregation was not only tolerated but also the law of the land.  No longer was the doctrine of separate but equal applied to segregation of schools. This ruling was largely ignored until around 1969 when the status changed from desegregation to forced integration.

I remember when the change happened distinctly. I was in the fourth grade and my first day back at school, and the racial make-up of my class dramatically changed.

Overnight. white-only private schools popped up all over the South. Almost to a letter every one was started in 1969-1970. Most folded in under ten years. They were usually shabby, and ultimately, most of their parents grew tired of the expense.

My Mom and Dad were not racist people.  Dad generally looked down on public schools and grew to hate them with a passion in his later life. I just think the shock of the change caused him to move us. I don’t fault him. He was truly trying to give us the best education, and he was willing to spend money to make it happen.

Out of the next five schools, mom taught in four of them. She was never my teacher directly at this time. Many of these schools were CINO, Christian In Name Only. When I started there, the school named Southwest Mississippi Christian Academy. We got word from the state that one couldn’t have the name of the state and Christian together, so we voted on one of three names Southwest Academy, Southwest Mississippi Academy, or Southwest Christian Academy. Thankfully, we chose Southwest Christian Academy, but its name was totally optional at the whim of the student body.

When we moved to Summit, we enrolled in Southwest Mississippi Christian Academy. This was truly one of the strangest schools in my pedigree.

Most of these private academies put up a new school building. SMCA assimilated an old public school formerly Ruth School. I knew the school was old. Until I read the memorial plaque, I never knew how old.

The original school was started in 1924 as a consolidation of several community schools. It was expanded twice and closed down in 1961. My theory was that the school was too dilapidated to keep sending kids to such a horrid place. It was used as a cotton warehouse for eight years and then sold to be a private school.

The school was forty-seven years old when I went there. It is hard to describe how bad it was, but here I go.

Our school colors were maroon and white. This beautiful color pallette was shamelessly woven throughout the building. The halls were fourteen feet high with six feet maroon gloss oil pine bead-board wainscoting. The walls had so many coats of paint that you couldn’t stick a booger to it with a quart of muscilege. The upper wall was a dingy horsehair plaster. The school had honest-to-goodness schoolhouse globes hanging from a likely asbestos ceiling.

The classrooms were done in that lovely shade of mint green that every building that survived the 1960s green wave of interior decorating has buried under some beige. Our desks dating back to the 1920s had troughs for your pencil and a hole for your inkwell. Since we were of the Bic ballpoint pen generation, we never got the joy of dipping pigtails of the girl in front of you in the ink.

Our auditorium had that look of the last dance hall Buddy Holly played before The Day the Music Died. The football field was a repurposed cotton field. Cropdusters would spray the adjacent field to the delight of the students looking for a respite from academia. The school had a brand new gym and a full athletic program. Generally, the athletic program was a huge drain on the finances of institutions, but it was absolutely a must for the South.

This was truly a bizarre and wonderful place.

Stay tuned for Southwest Mississippi Christian Academy: The Stories.

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.