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Well after a long hot Nankipooh summer, we were looking forward to getting back to school and starting the seventh grade, which at Nankipooh was like being seniors at high school, and we were looking forward to the beginning of football season, since we figured we had a pretty good team. Well right off the bat three unusual things happened. First we found out that the new seventh grade teacher was a man, and there had not been a man teaching at Nankipooh before. The second unusual thing was that this new teacher did not drive a regular car like everybody else. He did not drive a Ford or a Chevy, but instead he had a funny looking little foreign car called a Simca, and the only foreign car any of us had ever seen was a Volkswagon. So right off the bat we were a little suspicious of this "new guy". Finally, there was a new kid in our class, and he rode a motorcycle to school. We never knew his name, but he was three years older than the rest of us, and when he said "just call me Rocky", we did just that because we were all pretty scared of him.
It seems also, that Mr. Richardson, the new seventh grade teacher, as well as Nellie Smith, the principal were kinda scared of him as well. It seems that Rocky was just going to school for a few months until he turned sixteen, so that he could drop out of school, and get a job down at the textile mill. Mr. Richardson never said much to him at all. Rocky would just sit at his desk and stare down at the floor, and pretend that he was the commentator at a stock car race, and he was pretty good at it to, cause I would listen to him a lot when he would be saying things like, "Its Fireball Roberts in the lead coming down the back straightaway, with Junior Johnson and Richard Petty racing for second right behind him". I enjoyed it so much, that I am still a stock car fan today. After about four months Rocky was gone, and we never saw him or heard from him again.
We also learned pretty quick that Mr. Richardson, who we liked to call "Doberman" from the character on the "Sergeant Bilko" TV show, in addition to not disciplining Rocky, wasn't much of a teacher either. It seems that he liked history and geography, but wasn't much on math and English. In fact we studied English so little, that when I got to junior high school, the teachers could not understand why I knew so little about grammar and sentence structure, until I told them that we really didn't have English class at Nankipooh. The truth is I was not a very good student either.
As a matter of fact, I got into so much trouble, that by the middle of the year "Doberman" had me pull my desk right up against his desk in the middle row, where he could whack me with a yardstick whenever he thought I needed it. The front desk in the middle row used to belong to Carolyn, who was the best student in our class, but after he made me take the front desk, she had to sit in the one behind me. One day when he got really mad with me, he picked up a blackboard eraser from where he was standing up at the blackboard, and threw it at me as hard as he could. Well I ducked and that eraser hit Carolyn right in the eye. I believe "Doberman" got in a lot of trouble over that one.
I wasn't the only one who got into trouble, it seems like most of the boys in the seventh grade class got into trouble. One time when "Doberman' left the room for a while most of us went and hid in the closet at the back of the room, so that when he came back, it looked like half the class was gone. It was so difficult for them to figure out who was to blame for these things, that toward the end of the year it got to be pretty routine to hear Nellie Smith get on the PA system and say, "all of the seventh grade boys come down to the Principal's office. One time when we were all crowded into her office she told us that we all were going to get a whipping unless someone confessed to being the ring leader on that particular day. I don't remember if anyone confessed, but I do remember the feel of that yardstick on my backside. While I was at Nankipooh, I don't remember those big old heavy yardsticks being used for anything but whippings.
On the bright side of things, we had a pretty good football team and softball team that year, in fact we won the league championship for football that year. Our little touch football league included Double Churches, Britt David, and a few our schools in the surrounding area. At the end of the regular season we were tied with Double Churches for first place, and it was decided that there would be a playoff game. For some reason or other, that game kept getting postponed, and was finally scheduled for a week in January after we got back to school from the Christmas Holiday. We played the game at Nankipooh, and as I remember it was about thirty degrees that day. Well us Southern Boys always played in our canvass sneakers, but we believed we could run faster bare-footed, so we played the game without shoes. We won the game, and the championship, but my feet were so cold that I thought my toes were gonna fall off! The bad thing was that we were supposed to get a trophy, but we were told that because the game was played so long after the season that there would be no trophy, but we were still mighty proud, cause after all, Double Churches was sorta our arch rival, and they knew that we had whipped them.
Funny, but that football game was one of the few fond memories that I have of Mr. Richardson, who was a better coach than he was a teacher. Six months later we would be leaving Nankipooh School and moving out into a bigger world, but we took a lot of fond memories with us. Of course one of my favorite memories was the look on Doberman's faced when I ducked, and that eraser hit Carolyn right in the eye.
NBB
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