—Boys were required to remove watches and girls were required to remove any rings or bracelets while sitting at a library table, in order that the tables not be scratched.
There were no scratches on the tables in the Newnan High Library, the place was quieter than a cemetery at midnight, and there were no smudges on the books. Students took little advantage of what the library had to offer, however; it’s difficult to read Les Miserables, for instance, when you feel like somebody is behind you holding a .45 to your head. Go ahead, punk. Smudge that book and make my day.
The superintendent of schools was Homer Drake. Mr. Drake wasn’t a bad sort, but he had a habit of appearing unannounced in class to check on his teachers. For that reason, the teachers were terribly nervous all the time. They felt the heat of the same .45, I suppose. Consequently, very little of what went on in a Newnan High School class was frivolous. You couldn’t even relax and have a few laughs in shop, lest Mr. Drake walk in and catch somebody actually enjoying themselves. The pursuit of knowledge was serious business to Homer Drake.
For added effect, Mr. Drake occasionally dropped into study hall and walked through the rows of desks pulling on boys’ ears. Not only is it impossible to work out algebraic equations while the school superintendent is pulling on your ear, but it’s also quite painful. One day I noticed that Mr. Drake had very large ears. I reasoned that somebody had pulled on his ears when he was a young man and this was his way of showing us that he was just one of the guys. I would have preferred that he went around goosing us in the belly instead of pulling on our ears.
My high school had traditional instructors, too. There was Mr. Hearn, the shop teacher, for example.
“Boys,” he would begin his classes every year, “the most important thing to remember while working with an electric saw is safety.” With that remark, he would hold up his right hand, which was missing its two middle fingers.
We had a wonderful American history teacher named Miss McGruder. She resembled a frog. In fact, her homeroom was called “The Pond.” One day she called on Harley Doakes to tell her what he had read the night before in the assignment concerning President James K. Polk.
Harley stammered for an answer.
“You don’t know anything about President Polk, Harley?” she pressed.
Harley searched his mind, a brief endeavor, and finally answered, “Was he the one who invented polk and beans?”
Miss McGruder sent a note to Harley’s parents, informing them of how he had answered her question.
“I’m proud of you, son,” Harley’s dad said to him at supper after he read the note. “I certainly didn’t know where polk and beans came from.”
Miss Garland taught geometry. She was very old and about half-blind. All of her students made high grades in geometry, because if a student could make a few straight lines on the blackboard with a piece of chalk, Miss Garland couldn’t see well enough to know whether or not he had solved the problem correctly. She would simply squint at the board for a few seconds and say, “Oh, child, you do such grand work.”
Ronnie Jenkins once drew a picture of some unidentifiable four-legged creature on the board. Miss Garland thought he had dissected an angle. She gave Ronnie an A, even though he thought an hypotenuse was a large animal he saw once at the Grant Park Zoo in Atlanta.
The teacher who ran study hall was Mrs. Carpenter, an ex-WAC sergeant. She allowed no foolishness, either. Students were to keep their eyes forward and on their books at all times ... or give her twenty-five quick push-ups.
In the stillness and silence of Mrs. Carpenter’s study hall one afternoon, my eyes facing my book, I began to hum. I don’t remember why; I just began to hum. The person behind me picked it up and started to hum, too. Soon, seventy-five of us were humming, our eyes still on our books and our mouths closed.
“Who’s doing that humming?” shouted Mrs. Carpenter.
We continued to hum.
“Stop that humming right now, or I’ll send you all to Mr. Evans’s office,” she warned.
When we still wouldn’t quit humming, she marched all seventy-five of us toward the principal’s office.
“I had a good home, but I left, right, left, right....,” she called out as we maneuvered down the hallway.
When Mr. Evans could not convince anyone to admit to malicious humming, he decided to punish us by administering an across-the-board, one-letter cut in citizenship grades on our next report cards. He also assigned us to memorize the Beatitudes out of the Book of Matthew. (The meek shall inherit the earth, and woe be unto the fool who hums in study hall.)
Students in future times would burn buildings, smoke dope in the hallways, pull knives on teachers, have frequent sexual encounters with one another, and listen to strange music sung by strange people with pink hair and safety pins stuck through their earlobes. We just hummed.
* * *
Baby Boomers like myself went off to college in droves. Never before had a larger percentage of a generation pursued higher education. More than being what we wanted, it was what our parents wanted, what they had saved and scrimped for, what they had dreamed about.
We want you to have it better than we did, they said time and again, and one way we were going to have it better was to be educated. My mother, a teacher, rarely spent money on herself. She watched every penny that came in and went out of the house, and she hoarded many of them for my college.
There were few people in my hometown who had been to college. Among some of the old folks, there was even the classic resentment for and suspicion of someone who had gone, or was going, to college.
I walked into Cureton and Cole’s one day, and some of the old men were seated around the stove.
“Heard you goin’ off to college,” said one.
“University of Georgia,” I answered proudly.
“Don’t you get too big for your britches and forget where you came from,” I was instructed.
“I won’t.”
“I tell you something, when I come along, there wadn’t no way you could go to college. Hell, my daddy jerked my tail out of school when I was twelve years old to help him bring in the crop. I got an education, but it wadn’t from no college. I got it from behind a mule.”
Somehow, I felt like a traitor. These were my people, my roots.
“I’ve seen a lot of ’em go off to college and get a lot of book sense, but then they still ain’t got no common sense. Couldn’t plow a straight row if their life depended on it.”
“Most of ’em go off to college in the first place ’cause they don’t want to do a honest day’s work.”
“Hey, college boy, what you going to study for? You goan be one of them smart-ass lawyers like they got up in the city?”
I said I wasn’t certain what I was going to study.
“Why don’t you study to be a schoolteacher like you’ mama?” somebody asked.
I said school teaching didn’t appeal to me. Besides, there wasn’t much money in it, I added.
“Money? That’s all they think about today is money, especially them damn lawyers.”
“Hey, you know the difference between a dead lawyer in the highway and a dead possum in the highway?”
“Naw.”
“Dead lawyer ain’t got no skid marks in front of him.”
I said I’d better be leaving, but before I could go, Harvey (Dynamite) Garfield, Frankie’s older brother, walked in.
“Hey, Dynamite,” somebody said, “what do you think of college-boy here going off to get an education?”
“Well, it’s just like I told that smart sonofabitch foreman of mine at the mill,” Dynamite began. “I told him I wanted to get off the third shift and get me one of them day jobs in the office. He said I needed an education for that. I told him I didn’t have no edugoddamncation, but I could whip his ass with one hand. He’s goan see what he can do about my promotion.”
They were still hooting as I walked out the door. I had learned a lot through the years, sitting a
nd listening around the stove. But at that moment, I knew I would never be as welcome again. There was no place for a college boy in the Order of the Stove. At that moment, I also knew my hometown never would be the same again. I was leaving it, and it would stay the same, but I would broaden.
I wondered if I would miss it. I wondered how often I would come back and, when I did, how I would be accepted—as one to be respected because he had seen the lamp of knowledge, or one to be ostracized because he felt that he wasn’t good enough, that he needed to rise above his roots?
I decided two things: (1) No matter how much they had laughed and hooted, no matter what anybody thought, getting an edugoddamncation was important, especially for somebody who couldn’t mug his foreman; and (2) I decided I would not go to law school.
* * *
Stories and legends abounded concerning what a young man could expect once he entered the University of Georgia, the nation’s oldest state chartered university, which was also known — to those back in the hinterlands high schools—as The Promised Land.
I arrived on the Athens campus in September, 1964, one month before my eighteenth birthday, and was assigned a corner room in Reed Hall. My roommate, who had been selected without consulting me, was a French major who smoked Pall Mall cigarettes. In the evenings, he would sit and smoke and listen to Edith Piaff records in the haze of light coming from a blue bulb in his desk lamp.
We lasted a month together. I finally managed to get transferred to a new room and acquired a new roommate — George Cobb, Jr., from Greenville, South Carolina, whose father built golf courses. George and I got along famously.
After two or three weeks together, we decided to redecorate our room. The university had furnished our tiny cubicle with one bunk bed, two desks, and a couple of hard-back chairs. A monk would have been uncomfortable in that stark environment.
George and I rented a truck and went to a used furniture store in Athens. For fifty dollars, we purchased a used sofa, lounge chair, and ottoman. Fellow freshmen came from dorms all over the campus to view our newly refurbished room.
The University of Georgia had all sorts of rules concerning housing in 1964. Among them were:
—No alcohol inside dormitories.
—No females inside dormitories.
—No used sofas, lounge chairs, nor ottomans inside dormitories.
We had not been apprised of the third rule when we decided to redecorate, so it was somewhat of a surprise when the dean of housing paid George and me a visit one evening.
“What is all this?” the dean, a stern man, asked.
“What is all what, sir?” asked George.
“This ragged furniture,” said the dean. “Where did it come from?”
“Farmer’s Furniture, sir,” George answered. “We think it gives the place a homey look.”
“I want it out of here in the morning,” the dean continued.
“Sir,” said George, a business major, “this furniture represents an investment of fifty dollars on the part of my roommate and I. We also feel it is conducive to improving our study habits, because now that our room is more comfortable, we are more anxious to remain here and do our work. Could you give us some reason why we can’t have furniture in our room?”
“I want it out of here by morning, or I’ll kick both your butts out of school,” the dean said.
Farmer’s Furniture gave us only thirty dollars for the used furniture we had bought there five days earlier for fifty. We had, however, learned two new facts:
Fact one: Used furniture depreciates in value at a very fast rate.
Fact two: My butt, which once belonged to my parents and to O.P. Evans, now was under the control of the dean of housing at the University of Georgia.
But despite that unpleasant run-in with university officialdom, George and I were finding out that most of the legends we had heard concerning campus life in Athens were, indeed, true.
The beer flowed freely at Georgia. There was Allen’s and Uppy’s and Sarge’s Place and Harry’s and the Black Horse Inn, formerly the legendary Old South, located just across the street from the campus and just above the bus station. The story was still passed around about the student who spent an afternoon at Old South, then walked outside and got into his sports car that was parked in front of the bar.
As he drove to the first stoplight, his brakes failed and he drove squarely into the bus station, his car coming to rest at the ticket counter. Amidst the screams and the shattered glass, he leaned out of his car and said to the man behind the ticket counter, “Roundtrip to Savannah, please.”
The best place to buy packaged beer in Athens was at Bubber’s Bait Shop, which over the years had become an institution of sorts. Bubber, a gentle man, knew all his student customers by name and welcomed them with the same greeting: “Whaddahyouhave?”
“Six-pack of Blue Ribbon, Bubber.”
“Bottles or cans?”
“Cans.”
“Short or tall?”
“Tall.”
“How ’bout a little Red Hurricane Wine to go with that?”
“I don’t need any wine, Bubber.”
“Ain’t but ninety-seven cents a bottle.”
“Next time, Bubber.”
“That Red Hurricane Wine’ll put hair on your chest.”
“How much for the beer, Bubber?”
“Two-seventy-five with tax.”
“Thanks, Bubber.”
“Come again.”
Bubber likely became quite wealthy selling beer at the Bait Shop, but he always was the same old Bubber. He was a very trustworthy individual, who also served as an occasional lending agency for financially-down-and-out students. Something else nice about Bubber — whenever a student was kicked out of school and stopped to say goodbye and buy a six-pack for the long ride home, Bubber often would drop a bottle of Red Hurricane wine in their sack for free.
“You going to need that,” Bubber would say. “You got a lot of explaining to do.”
Allen’s was a legendary beer and hamburger joint where, the rumor went, a young man could drink all the draft beer he pleased at twenty-five cents a glass, regardless of whether or not he had sufficient proof that he was twenty-one, the legal drinking age in Georgia at the time.
My roommate George and I tested the rumor one fine autumn evening during our freshman year. Three dollars worth of draft beer each later, we were in a rather festive mood, and George began to do his impression of the sound a mule makes. It was pure genius. First, George would make a whistling sound, and then he would do a rather throaty and low “Haaaaw!” It went something like, “Hrrrrrrrt! Haaaaaw!”
I was terribly impressed.
“You try it,” said George.
“Hrrt! Haaaaw!” I brayed.
“More whistle,” said George.
“Hrrrrrt! Haaaaaw!” I continued.
“Perfect,” said George.
After the manager of Allen’s asked us to leave, George decided it would be great sport to go over in front of FarmHouse, a fraternity for agricultural students, and make mule sounds.
“Hrrrrrrt! Haaaaaaw!” went George out front of FarmHouse.
“Hrrrrrrt! Haaaaaaw!” I followed.
After that, we did chickens and goats and cows and ducks, and George had just broken into his rooster (not as good as his mule but still quite effective) when the smiling campus policeman got out of his car and ordered our drunken butts, as he put it, into the back seat.
He drove us to our dorm room and sent us inside, but not before taking our student I.D.’s and informing us that we would hear from the Dean of Men’s office the very next morning, which we most certainly did.
Dean William Tate was a campus institution at Georgia and a gentle person until riled. We had first seen Dean Tate during orientation week, when freshmen men were summoned to his annual briefing about what was considered acceptable and unacceptable behavior of students.
The dean had also told his favorite joke, the one he�
��d been telling freshmen students for years. It involved Robert Toombs, a Georgia student in the middle nineteenth century who later ran for governor of the state. When the Civil War broke out, Toombs joined the Confederate Army and solicited troops in front of the courthouse in Marietta, Georgia, just outside Atlanta.
“I’ll tell you, men, we can whoop them yankees with cornstalks,” Toombs had said to his listeners in Marietta.
After the war, Toombs came back to that same courthouse for a campaign speech. In the middle of his many promises to his audience, a man spoke up.
“Mr. Toombs,” he said, “I stood right here before the war and heard you ask us to jine up with the Confederate Army. I jined and my brother jined. I got shot in the Battle of Chickamaugua and my brother got shot at Antietam. You told us then we could whoop the yankees with cornstalks. I believed you then, and I paid for it. So why should I believe you now?”
Toombs paused for a few moments and then replied, “Well, we could have whooped the yankees with cornstalks, but the sons of bitches wouldn’t fight that way.”
We had laughed at his story then, but we didn’t crack a smile when we wound up in his office. “What in the hell did you two boys think you were doing last night?” he asked me and George.
“Just kidding around, sir,” answered George.
“You boys got a strange sense of humor,” said Dean Tate. “I take it you had been drinking to excess.”
“We just had a couple of beers, sir,” said George.
“Takes more than a couple of beers to make a man stand outside at two o’clock in the morning cock-a-doodle-dooing. You boys were drunk, weren’t you?”
We admitted it.
“I ought to kick both your butts out of school,” Dean Tate said.
There was a pause as he stared at us over his glasses. I’m certain George was thinking the same thing I was: How do you explain to your parents that you have been kicked out of school for drunken cock-a-doodle-dooing?
Finally, the dean spoke again. “But I’m going to give you boys one more chance. I’m also going to make you a promise: If I see you two roosters in here one more time, you will be only a memory around this institution. Is that clear?”
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