Cockrell Family Reunion 2016

I created this program to play at the Cockrell Family Reunion this year. Since we were not able to show the photos, I have posted them here. Most of them are of Jasper's family but many include others in the family.  I included some of the photos I took at the reunion on Saturday, May 28, 2016.

https://youtu.be/wOM9QHKtkTw

King's Cafe

JRC, Jasper, achieved the rank of aviation cadet and got his wings while in the Navy 1943-1945.

Because I was a girl, I had to sit out on the front steps of King’s Café and Barber Shop while Mr. King cut Daddy’s hair.  I didn’t mind because I liked to watch the cars go by on Highway 59, and if the door was propped open I could listen to the men talk freely without the inhibitions a female child in the room would cause.

King’s was one of the town gathering places for men like my dad, Jasper. Males young and old allowed Mr. King to “lower their ears” and we teased the boys for their “white walls” after a fresh haircut. No one ever left Mr. King with too much hair.

On Saturdays especially the male elders -school people, farmers and ranchers - gathered to get hair cuts and shoot the breeze, tell jokes and lies that kept the men laughing and in a good mood.  From King’s porch, I could always tell when Jasper was telling a story because the place got as still and quiet as an empty sanctuary for several long minutes before I heard the men laugh.  Jasper always laughed first and loudest.

Earlier I was in the backyard throwing mud clods at a wasp nest in the eaves of the house when daddy yelled out the back door to get into the car.  My two younger sisters were sitting around the tv watching cartoons and eating cinnamon toast, and my mother was cleaning up around them. Jasper often took one or two of the sisters with him when he went to town or out to Al and Clara Mae’s especially on Saturday mornings.

Jasper graduated from high school in 1943 and went straight into the service ending up in naval aviator school. Some of the time he spent in Georgia where he made a name for himself boxing. He got his wings at 19 just as the war ended, so he left the Navy and went home to college. One time he attended the University of Texas on a football scholarship and majored in journalism. Eventually, he played football at three colleges and on one team that had four All-Americans. He was good enough at tight end to be drafted by the Pittsburg Steelers, but by that time, he had married my mother, Mary. He never spoke of it, to me anyway, but around this time in his life, he made a commitment to stay in Corrigan near Al and Clara Mae for the rest of his life. I know of several offers that came to him to move to a new job, but no amount of money or powerful job title would lure him out of Polk County.  He wanted to stay home and maybe do good things for the home folks, so he joined the faculty of his hometown school, coached and taught business classes and was named principal at aged 22. At age 31, the school board hired him as superintendent, the job he kept for the next 30 years.

When Jasper called out to me that Saturday morning, I stopped chunking mud clods, ran to the front of the house, got into the car and tried to act invisible. My daddy was not a mean person; in fact, most of the time he was the most congenial good-humored man alive. At his funeral people from all over the state gathered to remember his stories, his good humor and the positive influence he had on their lives. However, some close friends and family also remembered a special physical attribute of his that I have never encountered in anyone else I’ve ever met. 

He was a big man - 6’4” and well over 200 pounds – but what set him apart from everyone else was a “look” that was so intimidating, so unnerving, so unsettling to the depths of one’s soul that if inflicted on you, self-preservation overtook any other human instinct. I know this to be true, for I had seen the “look” many times.

Displeasure, anger or his personal imperative of punishing ignorance could initiate the “look.”  I tried to be as well behaved as possible at all times especially in his presence.  If it meant sitting stone still, I would do it. Anything rather than be submitted to the potential wrath that might emerge from the “look” on that face.  Even when he was cracking jokes and putting everyone at ease with his humor, you felt he was just one spilled Coke away from giving you the “look.”

That “look” of his put the fear of God into anyone in its path.   Once I witnessed the reputed meanest man in town who was upset over some perceived affront to one of his kids cower in fear when Jasper’s “look” hit him square in the eyes. 

Despite being the subject of many “looks” over the years, I suffered corporal punishment from my dad only twice in my life.  The first time, I was still in grade school, and my friend Ray and I were playing in the football parking lot just as school was letting out across the street from the high school.

“I dare you to jump out in front of those cars,” said Ray, slowly savoring a piece of apple his mother had given him after school.

I thought a minute and when the first car pulled out of the parking lot, I jumped in front of it, then back to the side of the road without getting hit. This was easier than I thought. The driver hit the brakes and yelled, “Watch out!” and drove on.

I did the same for the next several cars, but before long the wily teenage drivers had caught on to the game and slowed down considerably when they pulled out onto the street near Ray and me.

Bored with the pace of the game, Ray and I went back towards the football field and played there awhile before heading back to our separate houses. When I got home, Doc Edison the Ag teacher was in the den talking to Jasper.  Their conversation was muted, and instead of Doc’s usual teasing, he averted his eyes from me and abruptly left the house.

I was headed to the kitchen when Jasper stopped me.

“Come here,” he said, clutching a hot dog.  I obeyed, and I felt weak all over from the tone of his voice.  I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong in the few minutes I had been in the house.

“Were you jumping in front of cars with Ray after school?” he asked, his face a mask bearing the “look.”

I tried to say yes but my throat was too dry.

            “Well, go to the bedroom and wait for me.”

            Thus began the longest five minutes of my life as my dad gave me time to think about the whipping I was about to receive while he finished his hot dog. He entered the room taking his black leather belt from around his waist.

            “Do you know what you did wrong?” he asked.

            “Yes, sir.”

            “What?”

            “I jumped in front of cars.”

            “And why was that wrong?”

            “I might have gotten killed.”

            “Mr. Edison saw you and Ray.  Let that be a lesson that someone is always watching.”

            Pop. Pop.

            The crying commenced, and the whipping was over, and ignorance was punished.

When we got to King’s, Jasper gave me a quarter for a Coke.  I went into the café side of the building and looked around for the short, round woman with near translucent white skin and enormously teased blue-black hair. 

She saw me first and screeched, “ Girl, you are growing like a weed! What can I get for you?”  She was almost hidden behind the cash register, and I finally spotted her after scanning down the counter.

“A Coke,” I said. “Daddy’s gettin’ a hair cut, and I’m supposed to get a Coke and sit on the steps.”

“What grade are you in now?” she asked, looking down her nose at me, tilting her head as if to size up more than my height.

“Fifth,” I said.

“Well, that’s too old for yo’re Daddy to bring you to the barber shop to sit on the steps.  Yo’re too big for that nonsense now.”  (Yo’re instead of “your” was an invective meaning “I am serious.”)

“About courtin’ age, aren’t you?” she continued.  “You are surely courtin’ size,” she laughed wildly at that last part, tickled at the joke she made.

“You tell him I said that,” she added, and I said okay even though I’d rather stick straight pins under my fingernails than tell my daddy something like that.

She got the Coke out of the icebox and handed it to me. “You can sit in here with me if you want to,” she whispered as if passing a secret between us.

“That’s okay,” I said handing her the quarter. “I like to sit on the steps.”

“Suit yourself,” she snarled in a dramatic change of mood, and I worried that I upset her by not taking her advice and crossing over that imaginary boundary from childhood to adolescence on a Saturday morning at King’s Café.

(C) Copyright 2016  Carolyn Elmore

End of the Innocent

I changed the names of some characters in this abridged version of End of the Innocent.   --CE

Charlotte’s Web is one of my favorite stories, and even now, when I think of it, I’m right back in my fourth grade classroom listening to Mrs. Hill read to us from a dog-eared library copy of the book. Mrs. Hill was a pixie of a woman just slightly taller than the students in her class, with perfectly permed white hair, black and silver cat-eye glasses with rhinestones on the corners and the soft hands of one who knows tenderness. She taught me multiplication tables, and I took standardized tests in her classroom including the one that measured IQ. She had kind eyes and treated us kids kindly, and I loved her.

Story time came every afternoon. We returned sweaty and tired from recess after lunch. Lunch was usually something fried, steak patties with gravy or fish patties with homemade tartar sauce. The cafeteria ladies served potatoes - fried, mashed or boiled - and homemade yeast rolls with real butter. We’d take our full bellies to the playground after lunch. I sprinting back inside the building to the ball closet near the restrooms for first pick of the kick balls. Running in the hallway was not allowed. I got caught running once and Mrs. Winifred Manry paddled me for it - my only school paddling.

After recess we filed back to class, and put our heads down on the big kids desks, topped with smooth green Formica. As the fan hummed in the corner, Mrs. Hill would read a few pages of the book animating her voice for the different parts. I’d daydream and in my mind create scenes of farm life where the animals talked to each other.

During these years, my mother Mary, father Jasper, three sisters and I – lived in a wood frame house the school district built. White with blue shutters, the school colors, the house sat at the bottom of a hill on a tar-and-chip topped road that ended abruptly just beyond our house at a steep drop of about 20 feet into a creek below. One day I was playing in front of the house when I noticed Susie, our teenage neighbor from across the street, backing out of her driveway in her forest green ‘55 Chevy. As she braked and turned the wheel to point the car forward toward town, something happened - she got her foot hung, or the gearshift stuck. I never found out why Susie’s car didn’t stop as it reached the cliff. It continued its backward motion off the edge and disappeared into the creek. Miraculously, Susie jumped out at the last second. She stared hopelessly over the edge of the cliff at her car below and then cried until the wrecker arrived and pulled it, remarkably unscathed, out of the creek. The incident caused quite a stir in the neighborhood, and everyone ran down to look at the strange sight of a car being pulled from the creek.

Throughout my grammar school years, I lived in a world of imaginary friends and magical places and playtime with Barbie and Ken and Disney’s Wonderful World of Color tv shows. My neighbor Ray and I were the same age, and he was a companion for bicycle rides, stick baseball games, army and cowboy battle reenactments even playing Ken when I asked him to. I spent most of those lazy school days and weekends riding my bicycle. Underneath the towering pines trees on the west the side of our house, I built a bicycle town of one large circular lane crisscrossed with shortcut paths and pretend houses and stores. I raked away the pine needle carpet and rode around and around the circle packing the dirt to a consistency much smoother than asphalt roads. I spent hours there singing and riding, soaking up the monotony of it, wanting nothing more than another day of the same. 

I often ventured beyond my little bicycle town to the back roads on the south side of Corrigan and the mile or so to and from the elementary school. I’d often test my bicycle skills by riding over rocks, sticks and drop-offs in the road to see if I could keep from falling. Because I knew the workings of my bicycle so well, I often rode without hands.

Our driveway was at the front of our house, and the garage was converted into a bedroom and bath for my parents. The den separated my parent’s room from two bedrooms on the east side of the house; one for my older sister, Sisi, and me, and another for my two younger sisters, Beverly and Janice. Both bedrooms had large wood frame windows that faced east, the woods side, and were dressed with sheer curtains and Venetian blinds.  Sisi’s and my room also had one window that faced the front of the house, south. Since our house was not air conditioned, we kept these windows and the blinds open on warm nights. 

At the back of the house was a large yard at the far edge of which was an old barn that had no other use than to store old paper – newspapers, magazines and books from the school, a recycling practice begun during the war years. Vines and weeds consumed an old WWII jeep parked nearby. The barn sat just outside a dense thicket, a wooded patch of land with tall pine timber, undergrowth saplings, berry bushes and briar patches. The thicket covered an acre or two, and we didn’t play there because you could get tangled up in the briars or worse get lost in it. We doubted a clever cat could get from one side to the other without great difficulty.

Amid this country town setting, we four girls experienced a childhood full of school activities and adventurous outside playtime. Sisi was a teenager, and she was beautiful. She wore her red hair in the style of the day, short and teased under the crown and sides, sprayed with Aqua Net and then combed down just enough to make it smooth. She wore oversized sweaters, straight skirts, bobby socks and penny loafers and on special occasions Chanel #5 that was intoxicating to a little girl, and I expect to her boyfriend as well.

We had one bathroom for all four girls in our part of the house. A small window high on the wall between the tub and the commode was a source of air and light in the small room. One night I was in the bathroom, and I heard a thud against the wall just under the window. Sisi heard it, too, and we both went to tell Mary. We didn’t think about again until the next day. I was playing around outside and came upon my younger sister’s tricycle. Oddly, it was under the bathroom window, its seat had been wrenched sideways, almost broken off.

With last night’s thud and today’s discovery of the tricycle in an odd spot where we heard the sound, we began to piece together evidence of an evening visitor-a peeper. We all became more aware of strange sounds after sundown.  I especially became wary at night, and like a hound dog was highly tuned to the slightest snap of a stick or rustle of leaves outside our house. Many quiet evenings passed until one evening the peeper theory was proven correct. Sisi had just walked out of the bathroom and stood before the dresser mirror, and I was sitting on the bed getting ready to turn in. Five-year-old sister Beverly walked into the bedroom and said, “Who’s that?”  as she pointed to the window. Sisi and I turned and saw at the same time a hand reaching in the window to pull back the curtain. We screamed in unison. Sisi ran for the other side of the house yelling for Jasper as Beverly and I stumbled out of the room behind her. 

Jasper, already in bed dressed in his usual sleeping attire - boxer shorts and undershirt - did not hesitate or stop to pull on his pants. He grabbed his shotgun and ran out of the front of the house chasing the peeper. Mary and the sisters waited in the den all chilled and shaking from the scare. Soon Jasper returned with a faculty neighbor, Mr. Couch, Ray’s dad, whose help he had elicited in the chase. He followed Jasper into the house carrying a pistol. He asked my sister if she might know the name of the peeper.

Remembering creepy rumors about her friend May’s brother, she said, “It might be Bruce Landry.”

Mr. Couch said, “Well, I tell you one thing, whoever it is will be all scratched up tomorrow because he high-tailed it through those briars.”

The next day at school Bruce Landry showed up scratched to pieces. He was called to the office and Jasper and Mr. Couch interrogated him. After that, he was not seen around school for a while. Sisi heard about it sitting in Mrs. Black’s math class next to May. May told Sisi she was not surprised it was her brother and to look for little holes in the screen just above the hook-and-eye latch where he would punch a hole with a pencil to unlock the screen. Then she added, “What if you had to live with him?” 

I was to keep up my bicycle town for a few more years, but I became a little less innocent after the peeper incident. I developed a fear of strangers. I heard tales of a tramp who stole kids off the street, carrying them in a large tow slack slung over his shoulder. He wore a droopy hat and a long gray beard covered most of his face so no one ever got a good bead on his facial features. I thought I saw him one day walking down the farm-to-market road not far from the school.

On Monday nights at 6:30, the fire siren in town called the volunteer firemen practice, and I knew it was time for me to get home to supper and watch Twilight Zone.  I was drawn to the macabre “theater of the absurd” with its weird characters and storylines, which only fueled my childhood fear of lurking danger. 

In the back of my mind, I knew danger could pop out at any time.  To discourage any more peeping, my parents added a large spotlight to the woods side of the house. The light provided some security. However, one night as I stared through the window trying to fall asleep, a cat jumped onto the window screen and hung by the claws of all four feet, legs splayed, meowing. It scared me so bad I thought I would faint.  Although the peeper disappeared from my life, danger became a constant possibility. I learned to look for it around every corner. I still do today.

(C) Copyright 2016  Carolyn Elmore

The Circle

I could never quite see Al’s eyes when we stood toe to toe.  It was a long way from my head to his face - he, standing over 6 feet tall and me, a lanky 9-year-old whose waist-high view of the adult world hovered halfway between the real and the imagined.  Without clearly seeing them, however, I knew his eyes were kind and sparkly with humor. The ends turned up which made him seem always in a good mood.  Al is my grandpa, Pa Al we called him, and as I remember him in this special ‘place and pose’ – a giant of a man amid the storytellers of the campfire circle – I thank God for placing me there to know him.  

I first approached the circle of men – mostly uncles and cousins - anxiously as any kid would, not knowing if they would tell me to scat or, worse, simply ignore me.  But Al’s eyes said what I needed to know: it was okay to join them. He welcomed me by reaching into his pocket and holding out penny candy in his massive hand from which I chose my favorite.  Relieved, I prepared for the storytelling by being as quiet as possible, popping the candy into my mouth, and waiting and listening.

Though the campfire circle and the house where Al lived were just a mile or two from town, the scene was so enveloped in evening darkness by the canopy of trees that it could have been hundreds of miles from civilization. We were not isolated here by any stretch of the imagination. In fact our nearest neighbor – a second or third cousin – lived shouting distance of Al’s house.  The cousin's dogs slept nearby, and occasionally one would rise up to scratch his long ears and pound the earth with an errant foot.

My mind raced with excitement.  I imagined myself in the deepest reaches of isolation.  The feeling made me aware of things I would not normally notice. My hair and clothes would smell like wood smoke until I washed in the morning.  Sounds in the night became loud. The serenade of night creatures was familiar and comforting.  Like an arrangement in a recording studio, the constant banter of crickets and other critters created the background music for the soloist, a lonesome whip-poor-will. Mournful tree frogs were the backup singers.  Only the solitary barred owl’s hooting disturbs the melody by sending the dogs into fits of howling and baying. 

The coolness of the night air reminds me that fall turnips will be planted soon.  I don’t like to eat them, but Al and my grandmother Clara Mae do.  They have turnip greens almost every meal. I think greens remind them of hard times that have been conquered and are now behind them.  They are not materially wealthy, but they have enough to live a comfortable life - rich with generosity and friendships, family and neighborly get-togethers.

Since he was a young boy, Al worked mostly in the woods.  His older brothers worked a team of oxen to pull logs out of the woods.  Think of it: young men steering a team of oxen for miles all day long.  Al cut, loaded and hauled logs to the local sawmill after trucks were introduced into the woods.  He earned an honest living by laboring 6 days a week.  His reputation as a generous, kind and helpful man was earned throughout his life, but especially during the Great Depression and the years that followed as people struggled to survive. Everyone who knew him genuinely loved him. Though he completed only the compulsory eight grades of school and never went to college, he inspired generations of college and post-college graduates – all of his five children attended college and most of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The hounds were fitful when the storytelling began.  Al’s tale is an adventure with his family. His slow, languorous speech quieted the dogs and they commenced the ancient spinning to create a safe bed for the evening.  Satisfied now that he had everyone’s attention, Al’s story took on the cadence of an honest to goodness narrative.

I imagine his stories now. The young boys set out on hunting escapades in the woods as sleuths looking for clues that would lead them to their prey, and often the story ended in a suspenseful, heroic effort by one or all of the boys.  My dad was the hero of one story. He conquered nature by valiantly swimming a swollen river in December with one of his friends on his shoulders saving the friend from certain death by exposure.  Another story told how the cousins tracked a deer for almost a whole day before it was slain.  The cousins ended up outwitting the deer on their own as the dogs got too tired to run. The boys had no choice but to continue the chase, for their Uncle Ervin had told them not to come home without a deer; the family had nothing to eat at home but turnips greens and biscuits. They needed meat now in the dead of winter, and the woods would provide if the boys would be smart and persevere.

I listened as different ones in the circle commented. One would enhance the story by remembering a new detail. Another remembered a comment Uncle Ervin made when the troupe arrived home with their kill. One would piggy-back off this story to transition to a similar one where the outcome was not quite so heroic or maybe even more heroic. The storytelling would eventually wind its way back to the present – “What ever happened to old so-and-so?” or “That spot sure looks different now.” At the end, there was a period of silence as if the circle of men needed the time to cement the images of the story into their minds for the next telling.

After many years and many tellings, the stories never lost their significance.  My dad, the uncles and cousins would always be heroes. At the gathering of the clan each summer, the youngsters looked at the men with awe and admiration, no matter what they did or did not do with the rest of their lives.

As an adult, I would enter another circle of mostly men gathered around a conference table instead of a campfire. I was comfortable in this new circle because of how I was welcomed all those many years ago.  Al saw me as a child wanting to learn, and I became as comfortable in the company of adults as I was with kids my age.  I enjoyed being around the older folks.  I looked forward to the storytelling, and I felt the love in the way they saw each youngster as a precious link between the past and the future.  There was great respect in their love, and in return I am respectful of the stories they told and what they mean to me as an adult.

I remember Al when the smell of turned earth on a spring morning fills my mind’s eye with the pictures of youth; when the first birds of spring sing to me from an opened window. The night sounds, the adventures of a long time ago remind me how precious each generation is to the next. Al taught me this, and I am grateful.

(C) Copyright 2016   Carolyn Elmore

Fire

            Deep inside my head, I heard ringing. At first the noise was abrupt and frightful. “I’m dreaming,” I thought. Closing my eyes tighter against the ringing’s urgency, I nudged deeper under the covers and awaited someone to make it stop. But it wouldn’t stop. As consciousness bubbled up to the surface, I realized the telephone was ringing in the middle of the night, and all around me in the room in which I slept was black as pitch. Fear made me shudder, and I awoke into what would soon become the new reality for my town, my family and me.

Like most teens, I had no trouble sleeping. In fact, if allowed to do so I could sleep most of the day.  The reason I slept so much, I reasoned, was because I was catching up on much needed rest after my frenetic elementary school years. Until age 12 or so, I was in constant motion, sunup to sundown, one of those kids that really can get on your nerves because I would not be still anytime, anywhere. The fact is documented in an old 8 mm film shot at Al and Clara Mae’s house when I was around 8 years old.  Film cameras unlike the Kodak Brownie model I received one Christmas were oddities in East Texas in the early 1960s. Some adults would glance with suspicion at the whirring picture machine, no doubt a throw back to superstitions passed down through the generations about the bad luck that follows catching one’s spirit in reflection.  

My Uncle Johnnie was cameraman, and as he panned the great room, there sat the adults motionless as if paralyzed by the camera’s light attachment. My girl cousins sat on the couch in their starched Sunday dresses as meek as Disney mice. And then there is me bouncing up and down, pigtails flying, until someone out of the camera’s eye obviously gives me a “look,” and I guiltily slow down the bouncing and eventually stop. I think I caught up on my sleep in my teen years from all this jumping around.

            I mention this change in sleep habits because around 4:30 in the morning of Friday, February 24, 1967, I took a long time to answer a ringing telephone extension beside my bed. I was 14 years old, and most of my waking hours were spent daydreaming about boys and twirling in the living room to Beatles music on the large credenza-type “hi-fi” stereo my oldest sister won at the furniture store in a Philco contest.  

            So as I struggled to sleepy consciousness from a day of music and daydreaming, I answered the phone unwarily, too immature and innocent to dread the oddity of it.

            “Hullo?” I mumbled.

            “Carolyn, Carolyn. Wake up. This is Mary. Are you awake?”

“Yes, I’m awake,” I said, searching the room to find some light somewhere to assure me I wasn’t blind.

“Tell Jasper the Lufkin and Livingston fire departments are on the way,” said the caller, and she hung up.

            I sat up on the side the bed and let this information process within my juvenile mind. Mary had to be my cousin Buzzy’s wife, Mary. Fire departments meant a fire somewhere. Two fire departments in addition to the volunteer fire-fighting force in town must mean a big fire. It’s not our house, I reasoned, because I don’t see any fire around me. Puzzled by this seemingly conflicting information, I pulled back the curtain on the window that faced south toward the street in front of the house. I didn’t see any fire.

            So I got up to find my dad, Jasper, and pass along the caller’s message. I crept toward the other end of the darkened house. I passed through our den, which was covered with windows on the backside that opened onto a screened back porch. That’s when I saw it. An unworldly yellow glow so bright I could clearly see the yard - grass, an odd toy ball and a tricycle with its wheels awkwardly askew. A more experienced person would have known at that point that a fire bright enough to light up a backyard like sunrise was a huge fire. But that fact didn’t register with me. I continued through the den to my parent’s bedroom. I softly tapped on the door and opened it. No one was in the room.

            Shaken from my drowsiness, the fact that my parents were not in the house was a very scary realization. I walked back to the den through the screened-in porch at the back of the house, into the yard and looked west toward the source of the light. Unbelievably, the entire landscape was not just bright, but aflame. Through a stand of timber and beyond several houses, I saw the actual flames some quarter mile away that were higher than seemed real and were causing the incredible light in the yard around me. The high school was on fire. In that moment, I felt the physical response to fear that would come to me a number of times in my lifetime. It’s a blow-to-the-gut panic that drains my mind of anything but the primordial instinct to run.

            I don’t know how I got there, but I found myself sitting in a car looking at the burning building from the parking lot in front of the high school. By this time, the flames had consumed every morsel of wood and paper, and what remained of the building had crumbled to the ground where a pile of red-hot embers flickered in the February darkness. I remember the clear frigid night like yesterday. There was the emersion affect of the smoke, its smell invading the closed car. Hoses snaked from fire trucks toward a pile of rubble, limp now, their work futile against the inferno. People of all ages huddled in groups, wrapped in quilts, blankets, bedspreads - whatever they could grab as they rushed to the scene. Above, the stars flickered in an ocean of darkness just as they had for millennia as if nothing had changed. From inside the car, the brutal truth of the loss slowly became clear and permanent as I realized what the loss of the school meant, especially to Jasper who was the superintendent of schools.

            No cause of the blaze was ever determined. The red brick high school building was 27 years old in 1967.  Its inside was paneled and floored throughout with some of the most unblemished yellow pine planks that you can imagine.  Even the furniture in some of the classrooms, in the library, the home economics rooms, the administrative offices, and the hard stationary seats in the auditorium were wood. All of this wood was clear varnished to a fare-thee-well, all conspiring to create a spectacular and fast-burning fire. Separate buildings on campus survived: a gymnasium, a band hall and an agricultural education building.

            The most logical explanation given was a faulty natural gas heater. In the auditorium, two huge gas heaters hung from the ceiling on both sides of the stage. Some of the first to arrive on the scene seemed to think the fire started on that south side of the building in the auditorium with its heaters.

            When first light came, we learned of the heroic attempts by our beloved maintenance chief who attempted over and over to enter the flaming building and retrieve student records from the main office. All evidence of school history not recorded at the county superintendent’s office since its formal beginning as a free school in 1892 was gone. Every test score, shot record, teacher note to file was lost.  Every trophy and memorial item placed with pride in the trophy case was melted into an unrecognizable heap or charred into ash. No evidence of wood remained.  Only the red brick and the twisted iron beams lay above the smoldering mess. One bronze plaque that memorialized the opening of the school survived the inferno. School personnel would spend months trying to replace records that were lost.

A photo appeared in the newspaper that summed up our loss.  It is a photo of the back of my dad in a light-weight jacket standing on bricks amid the smoldering rubble, hands deep into his pants pockets, shoulders stooped against the biting cold. It seems at that moment he bore the full weight of all those generations whose schoolhouse past had burned to the ground in front of him. 

(C) Copyright 2016  Carolyn Elmore