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.

Significant Influences: Ralph Lewis

Part of my goal in doing this blog is to point out people who have a significant investment in my life.  As a prelude to the Ten Commandments while God visits the iniquity of the Fathers to the Third and Fourth Generation he is actively “Showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.”  (Exodus 20:6)  People who have invested their love and their heart in my life, while they may be long gone from this life have extended a legacy to generations of my descendants.

I am a little reserved to list certain people with special mention, particularly in a small church like Lewiston.  Part of the significance of Ralph Lewis, or as we always called him Mr. Ralph is that he was my closest neighbor.  He owned the land on three of the five sides of the road junction that makes up the Lewiston Church yard.  If I don’t mention someone by name, it doesn’t mean they didn’t have a big impact on me.  It was more that he was someone I interacted with daily, and because of his heart toward us kids became a very influential friend in my life.

As part of my research for this post I got curious about how old Mr. Ralph was when we were neighbors in 1969-1973.  His tombstone lists his birth date as April 11, 1910.  He was twenty years older than my father, and about my age, fifty-nine, we first started at Lewiston.  Often you don’t think of a nine year old and a fifty-nine year old as friends.  The thing I have learned is that if you talk to children as adults, and treat them like their input on a conversation is valuable; a magical thing begins to happen.  The generation gap disappears!  Obviously there should be respect for an elder, but often we forget that there should be respect for a child as well.  I always referred to him as Mr. Ralph.  In Louisiana most of the older people in your life were referred to as Mr. (First Name).  All women were referred to by Miss (First Name).  If you had a special relationship with them like your Father’s best friend, or your favorite playmates father or they were considered an elder in the community, it was Uncle (First Name).

I teach Sunday school to a class of five to eight year old children.  Some of the highlights of my week are during the unstructured time in the class where we sit and talk with the kids.  There is specialness to that time where they become my friend.  The relationship carries on from that time.  Decades later the friendship stays.  I have a thirty-one-year-old friend TJ Francis who was the same age as his four-year-old daughter Rory, when TJ became my son’s friend and therefore my friend.  We need good friendships that span decades of time and decades of age.  The advice I give to people is to have a few good friends who are thirty years older than you, and then you and a few that are thirty years younger than you.

Mr. Ralph was a mentor, but he was also a good friend.  We didn’t have neighbor kids that we were that close to so often we would wander down the lane to his house and visit with Mr. Ralph and his wife Miss Louidell.

Ralph by trade was an old school house builder.  Most of the builders I know now are cell phone jockeys.  They coordinate materials and contractors, but rarely swing a hammer.  In Ralph’s day all decent houses were slab on grade, brick veneer on wooden framing.  Every nail was hand driven.  Most of the trim work and much of the framing was done with hand saws.  A builder often hand dug foundations, poured slabs.  The plumbing was galvanized iron over cast iron sewers.  Sewer joints were set in lead.  The same builder that set the foundation framed the structure.  Roofs were set with diagonal slats.  The builder set the brick.  He nailed the shingles.  He wired the electricity.  We were in Lewiston in the late sixties.  Electricity had barely inched its way up the country road around ten years before.  If you built houses you did everything.  I have watched Mr. Ralph pick up shingles by the bundle and throw them on the roof from the ground.  He had an absolute crushing handshake that felt like you grabbed a tree trunk.  That was the trophy of lifetime of hard work.

In addition to his trade as a builder, Mr. Ralph was a hobby and subsistence farmer.  He had several pasture around his place that surrounded the church on three sides.  Mom and Dad’s grave is right next to the border of the fence bordering his pasture to the south of the church.  They actually lie in what used to be his pasture, which was given to expand the cemetery.  I had a treehouse and my first motorcycle wreck in that pasture.  His property had a parlor style milking barn which was not really used for a dairy operation.  At the time we were there he had a few heifers in lactation for fresh milk, but it was predominately a beef herd of mostly Angus and Charolaise. 

He would work his fields in an early 1950’s tricycle steering John Deere 70.  The engine had a two cylinder horizontally opposed diesel engine with a long stroke.  When the engine would load up it would almost stall and get down to such a low RPM you could count the cylinder strokes.  The noise was as beautiful as a Beethoven Symphony.  The sound was a deep Poppappppa, POP Pop pop POP! Poppapoppa Pop POP!  The old timers referred to it as a Popping Johnny or a Johnny Popper.  I could tell by the sound when he had turned a corner in the field and he was loading up the engine.  He had a tall barn with a nice loft, and a stocked pond on the property behind it.  He never seemed to mind us playing on his land, or visiting in his house. 

Mr. Ralph grew a fabulous garden every year.  He kept everything heavily mulched with pine straw.  Their vegetables always had very distinct taste that was similar to pine sap.  I have a great story about Mr. Ralph and his armadillos, but at some point in the future I am going to give it its own blog page.

Mr. Ralph had really scary hands.  He cut off three of his fingers in a table saw accident when he was a young man.  It always used to amaze me that he was quite ambulatory with the remaining stubs on his fingers.  He used to laugh and say, “A bear came out of the woods and bit my fingers off.  Then he licked all the hair off my head.”  Mr. Ralph had a big bald spot on his head, which made the joke extra funny.

We moved away from the area, and then our friends from Kentwood Louisiana came up to visit us in Tennessee.  I went back with them and spent a couple of weeks with them.  It was one of the best times of my life.  Then we moved back there.  This is another story and not a great one, but again this is the subject of a future blog.

I remember Mr. Ralph commenting in his old age that he used to love to see us little boys coming over the hill to visit him.  He was a really good friend who respected us as kids and became a friend to us when we were teenagers.  The truth is that we loved to go over the hill to see our good friend.  I miss you Mr. Ralph.

Let me Reintroduce Myself

So I am a couple of weeks into a social media fast. I am finding that it has been quite therapeutic for me.  Part of the madness behind the method of getting off Facebook is that everything has just gotten so ugly out there.  The combination of election year politics with the stupid Coronavirus has just made everyone migrate to a small world of people of like tribe.

The reality is that if you think deeper than a meme flaming your opponent, some of these things require deep thought. Most of our worldviews are highly processed, but rarely challenged. It is possible to believe that the virus can be deadly, and people can be exploiting the fear for some type of agenda.  It is possible to be highly principled in political view, and not really be satisfied with any option in a given election cycle.  Life is rarely that simple.

So I used to view social media as a fun place to exchange ideas.  On some level it still is with people who like to discuss things in a respectful tone.  The problem is we, myself included, say such bitter hateful things we forget that we are interacting with people.  The really sad thing is we might be in a bitter feud with a software bot just designed to push our buttons.  The reality might be that I died a couple of years ago, and you are reading a post from a bot designed to emulate Sid. Jeremiah just said that no one could emulate you. The bot just inserted this in the text into this file as part of its predictable algorithm.

So consider this an intellectual project on my part.  I want to unpack my mind and leave a written legacy that can be passed down to other generations.  My grandparents died out between the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties. My mother and father died out nine and four years ago.  I have lost most of my uncles and aunts.  I used to love to hear their stories of life.  Now I am confined to my memories.  I wish I could call them up and remember more of the details.

Life is short.  I used to enjoy telling my life in this blog.  It is time to start writing again. I am planning to get several posts done and publish them in the future. See you soon. Until then laugh with me.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD7eG-k0pv71b6vI-_LYkIA