The Nankipooh School Series: 4th Grade at Nankipooh

"4th grade at Nankipooh School" By the time I started the fourth grade at Nankipooh School, I had become a shore enough "Southern Boy" who knew how to fish the small creeks around Nankipooh and run barefooted through the woods all summer long.  When we started school that first day in 1956, I had a pleasant surprise when I found out that Mrs. Revelle, my friend from the third grade, had also been promoted, and was now the teacher of the fourth grade, so things were really looking up for this "Napa Cowboy" turned "Nankipooh Southern Boy".   It looked like it was going to be a great year for me at Nankipooh, and, I wasn't the new kid at school anymore either, since there were a couple of new boys in my class. Then things took a turn for the worse, when I discovered two things which I did not know about.  One was the trouble little girls can get little boys into, and the second was Elvis Presley. Mrs. Revelle had a morning devotional in her class every morning, and the kids took turns being in charge.  When it was my turn, I brought to school a 45rpm record which had the Lord's Prayer on one side and the 23rd Psalm on the other side.  Mrs. Revelle was really pleased, and asked me to put the record on for the kids to hear, and meanwhile she ducked out to go down to the cafeteria to get an apple for her morning snack  That's when the trouble started.  We had a red-haired, freckle-faced little girl in our class, and she was as cute as a brand new puppy, so when she asked me to put on a record she had brought from home, I could not say no. Turned out that the record was Elvis Presley singing "You ain't nothing but a hound-dog" and the kids loved it.  In fact they all went a little crazy, and before you could say "swivel hips", they were up and dancing, and I was like the disc jockey on WDAK "Big Johnny Reb" radio playing rock and roll, and rocking the house down.  That's about when Mrs. Revelle stepped back into the room with a look of total disappointment for me on her face.  I was sent to sit in the hall by myself, and I never told her that the record was not mine, so I knew I had messed things up with my favorite teacher, not to mention the little red haired girl, after she discovered that I had put a big old scratch down the middle of that record which made it jump every time, right between hound and dog. To make matters worse, about the time I sat down out there in the hallway, along comes Ms. Nellie Smith, the school principal, who looked at me in disgust and asked what I was doing sitting out there in the hall.  When I told her, she told me I might as well come on down to her office and get my whipping, which she was really good at, I might add.  She used a one quarter inch thick, hardwood yardstick, and when she swung it, it made a cracking sound on your behind, that sounded like Mighty Casey at the bat. Now I learned three important things from all of this.  One you can trust cute little girls to get you into trouble, but you can't trust them to get you out of it.  The second thing I learned, is that it is probably best to not mix religion with rock and roll.  And, the third thing I learned, was that I didn't want Nellie Smith hitting anymore homeruns off of me.  NBB