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.