THE EARLY YEARS

When we lived at Era (from about September 1962 to December 1962), we had a big house in the country. I shared a room with Luann while Butch had his room in the attic. Actually, it was the attic but he was kinda weird and liked his privacy more than most. The house was surrounded by farmland and there weren't any trees around the place. I liked to throw dirt clods across the road and see if I could hit the telephone lines. Anytime a car or truck came down the road, they left a big cloud of dust in their wake. Everywhere in the house was covered in a fine layer of dust and Mama never could keep up with the cleaning.

Here, I attended the second grade. At school, my classroom looked out over the holding pen for the high school's pigs and calves. I had my eyes checked here and this was a big day for us. We all had to go to the nurse's office and stand on a big black line. From there, we had to tell the nurse which direction the lines were pointing. The girl in front of me kept saying that the letters didn't make any sense and the nurse kept explaining that they weren't letters. It didn't take too long to do the test but this girl seemed to take forever. I guess I had OK eyesight because I only had to tell her two directions. Several of my classmates came to school later wearing glasses.

We had fire drills and tornado drills about once a week. The best thing about tornado drills was being able to get down on the floor under our desks. We found some of the most interesting things written on the bottom of our desks. When we had to leave the building and go to the tornado shelter, we would be in neat little lines and would have to stand in rows according to our class in the shelter. And, after every tornado drill, we got to go to recess. Our normal, authorized playground was a center court surrounded on three sides by the middle school. The elementary school was a long building that was the fourth side of the court. That was a really small and boring playground so we played at other places (when we could sneak away from the monitor and that was easy.).

It was here that I was sent to the principal. My friend (I think his name was Billy) and I snuck away from the monitors and were pretending to be in battle against the Nazis. I was a commando and he was a guard at the top of a fortress. He was on a stone fence about four feet high and I threw a knife at him. Of course, it was a pretend knife but I got him in the heart. He died well and jumped off of the fence and landed on some broken glass. When we went to the school nurse, she really flipped out when she saw all of the blood on his hand and asked what happened. Billy said that I threw a knife at him. Well, the nurse didn't listen to anything else and cuffed me up side the head and sent her assistant and me directly to the principal. I was being read the riot act and was told that I was going to be expelled from school for my behavior and how dare I, a new student, come to her school with a knife. Not only was I humble, I was crying. But before the principal called home and had Mama come get me, the nurse and Billy came in and finally, someone listened to me. Billy told the nurse that we were just pretending and he had cut his hand on some glass. I was safe but the principal was so upset that she gave both of us stern lectures about knives. Also, she never apologized.

There are three, most vivid memories from this house in Era. The first was the fireplace. We put some bodark limbs on the fire and watched the sparks. We would scamper about trying to put out the sparks before they flamed the rug. Most of the floor was wooden and when we left, we left lots of little burns spots in the hardwood floor.

The next was Dutch making homemade beer in the tornado cellar. A friend of his convinced him that homemade beer was better and cheaper than the store variety. The smell of beer brewing was horrible and I tried to stay away from the cellar as much as possible. When he bottled the beer, he gave a case away to a visitor who sat around a while having coffee. A couple of hours after he left he called to let us know that he, but not the beer, arrived home safely. While he was having coffee, the beer was sitting in his back seat and getting very hot. As he was driving home, the bottles started exploding and covered his back seat with hot beer.