A Hundred Year Story, Part 34

By Elton Camp

High School Days

Senior high was in the three-story, columned building next to the junior high and
consisted of grades 9-12. This was the same building my father had attended decades
before. In the absence of proper maintenance, it had gone down to the point that some
feared as to its safety.

Albertville High School

The balcony in the auditorium showed signs of impending collapse. Nobody was
allowed to sit in it or under it. Of course, we entered and left beneath it. In some
classrooms, the floor showed separation from the walls. Rumors that it could fall in at
any minute circulated. Also scary was a noticeable separation of the floor from the walls
on the third floor throughout the building. That was in 1954.

Either the fears were unfounded or the town was incredibly fortunate. The
building continued in use without significant repair into the two thousands. It’s only as
of 2009, being renovated along with other extensive changes to the campus to the tune of
thirty-five million dollars. McCord Avenue School has been demolished to make space
for a new football stadium. I predict the overly ambitious project will come to be a
financial disaster for the town, but time will tell.

When I entered the ninth grade, for the first time, we were able to rent lockers.
The transaction was handled in the Agriculture Building on a first-come-first-served
basis. The school didn’t have quite enough lockers for each student to have one. To
share was sometimes necessary, especially for freshmen.

I had my own locker each year, except that I voluntarily shared my large senior
locker with a girl in the class who had ended up without one. It presented no problem,
especially since I worked in the principal’s office and was able to obtain a second locker
from a student who dropped out.

Fights between boys were fairly common, but it was at the high school where I
saw a fight between two girls. It started on the third floor near the stairwell. They
slapped, cursed, and pulled hair as they wrested on the floor. A crowd gathered to watch
and cheer. This served to intensify the altercation. Incredibly, they started slowly
tumbling down the stairs as they struggled. The fight terminated on the ground floor
when the principal finally showed up. The girl fight was far more vicious than any tiff
I’d seen between boys.

An amusing incident involved a girl, Susan, who had the vilest reputation
imaginable. Whether it was deserved, I don’t know, but she was universally regarded as
a whore. Her name was written on bathroom walls and she was the butt of bawdy
comments by both boys and girls.

When I was in the 8th grade, Joe Wayne Biddle and I decided we wanted to see
what the infamous girl looked like. We’d heard that, during breaks, she always stood at
the same spot on one of the stairway landings in the high school building. We slipped
over during morning break and climbed the stairs to the first landing. There she was. We
stared at her for a few seconds and then began to giggle. She looked our way, grinned,
and said, “Boys!” We ran for our lives.

Not voluptuous at all, she was short, slightly stout, modestly dressed, but had
penetrating eyes with far too much mascara. It’s possible she was merely the victim of
vicious slander. Such things could happen.

Our junior year, the school employed a magic show to present a program in the
auditorium for the student body. Among the acts was a “mind reader.” The performers
had covertly gathered bits of trivial information from students prior to the program. The
psychic then called various students to the stage and pretended to be able to extract
information from their minds about a variety of things. One of the more prominent boys
was on the stage and the man revealed the name of his regular girl friend.

“It’s Susan,” he said with assurance.

Some jokester had fed the spurious information to the performers to get a laugh.
It worked in a big way. The audience hooted and roared in mirth over and over. The
teachers attempted to remain somber, but even a couple of them chuckled. The boy
turned red in the face with extreme embarrassment. Even the “mind reader” laughed. He
perceived that they’d been scammed and the true nature of the “girl friend” he’d
announced.

Beginning with the ninth grade, we had different teachers each period. I’ll
comment on a few of the ones I especially remember, whether for good or for bad. The
mediocre ones didn’t impress me enough even to recall their names.

We had a new, young physical education teacher, Coach Alford, whose beautiful
red-haired wife taught English. I took physical education only in the ninth grade. After
that, I worked in the principal’s office. Office practice, as it was called, substituted for
physical education.
 The young, friendly coach ran an exceptional physical education program. He
was a nonsmoker and one who didn’t curse, at least in front of the boys, like Coach Wells
had done. He’d sometimes take part in the games himself. To this day he’s the only
coach for which I’ve any degree of respect. He and his wife drove a flashy Pontiac
convertible, often with the top down, and we all thought they were “cool cats.”

Ralph Reed I recall mainly because he was killed in a bus accident on a school
trip. None of the students were injured. Another vehicle struck the bus directly at his seat.
After his death one of the girls, in a fit of emotion, said, “Oh, and he had a Purple Heart.”
Another girl asked in alarm, “How bad did it affect him?” She didn’t realize that a Purple
Heart was a medal from the government given to people injured while in the military.

Miss Boone was my English teacher for the junior and senior years. She had the
name of being an excellent teacher, but looking back, I can see that she was very poor to
the point of incompetence. She failed almost totally in her responsibility to teach us how
to write. She spent an inordinate amount of time on literature and journalism. Her
neglect of composition caused me some trouble in college until Miss Maude Spencer at
Snead College pointed the way.

Miss Boone was a self-righteous, churchy, rabidly patriotic, and enthusiastically

political old maid. If she spotted a boy and girl in the hallway holding hands, she’d force
them into her room and pray for them. At the same time she a big supporter of the
military. She often spoke in favor of boys going into the army and killing for God and
country. She contemptuously characterized boys who avoided the draft, a common and
legal practice at the time, as “slackers.” Yet, she hadn’t, as a young person, served in the
military. What she wanted others to do didn’t apply to her. She attempted to force
elements of her political views on students during instructional time for English. Such
political pressure was entirely out of line.

“You should always vote only for the candidates of your political party. Vote a
straight ticket.” Ironically, the voting age was twenty-one and most of us were seventeen
and eighteen.

After several times of hearing this, a student asked, “What some of them aren’t
worthy of support?”

“Then you should be running yourself,” was her lame reply.

One night, some prankster wrote the “F” word in foot-high letters with soap on
both sides of her black Ford. She drove through town and to school without noticing the
graffiti. When she discovered the words, she cried in front of the class. I think “Bitch”
would’ve been a more appropriate word. I have little doubt that she was a sixty-year-old
virgin. She was a direct descendent of Daniel Boone, but seemed ashamed of that fact.
 At the time I didn’t realize what a poor teacher she was. Later I understood the
comments of a former student who returned to visit in her class after having had college
composition.

“How well did I prepare you for college?” she asked. It was obvious that she
expected praise.

“To tell the truth, you didn’t give us what we needed,” he responded. “You didn’t
teach us how to write. It nearly caused me to fail English 101.”

“You’ve insulted me. Get out of my room,” she ordered angrily.

He didn’t leave. She didn’t press the point. After class, he approached her to try
to explain the reasons for what he’d said, but she was having nothing to do with it. As
we filed from the room, she bitterly reviled him. What he did was tell the truth but she
didn’t want to hear that.

I don’t often notice what anybody wears, but I well remember a day when Miss
Boone wore a completely transparent see-through blouse that showed her slip down to
the waist. I couldn’t believe she did that. It was repulsive and seemed out of character
with her. Some of the teachers must’ve tipped her off. She never wore it again.

The librarian was Miss Brown whom I liked very much. She was annual sponsor
the year I was on the Mountaineer staff. She had me appointed to Quill and Scroll, a
journalism society. Later she was librarian at Jacksonville State when I was in school
there. When I was a small child, living on Baltimore Avenue near her house, we’d
visited Miss Brown. The main thing I remember was her talking parrot. She fed it
crackers and told us that it might well live more than seventy years.

For biology we were victims of one of those “wonder” graduates from Auburn.
Like thousands of others, he went to school on the G.I. Bill of Rights. The universities
lowered their standards to keep them in school so they could get the tuition money. He
knew little or nothing about biology and was the worst speller I’ve ever known. One time
he attempted to write “oak” on the board and put it as “oke.” He quickly erased it when
he saw us sniggering, but didn’t write it back, likely because he didn’t know how. It was
a poor start for me in biology, but that ended up as my college major.

I learned to type well during the 11th and 12th grades. Willie Maude Nelson, wife
of the principal, Dr. E.E. Nelson was the instructor for Typing I. We had manual
typewriters with blank keyboards. They were designed to prevent us from getting in the
habit of looking at the keys as we typed. A single electric model sat at the back. We
took turns using it. With the size of the class, we got to use it about every month and a
half. I hated the electric model. When I laid my hands on the home keys, all of them
activated. I was accustomed to the heavy striking needed on manual models.
 The way to correct keying errors was to pull the carriage to one side and erase the
mistake. We had special round erasers with a stiff brush on one side. If the eraser
crumbs fell into the typewriter, they caused problems. This type of correction produced
unsightly documents, but there was no other option. Whiteout was years in the future.

About five spaces from the end of each line, a bell sounded to signal us to
manually return the carriage to the left for the next line. If a word being typed was longer
than that, it was necessary to press margin release to finish it.

The key now called “Enter” was called “Return” on early models of electric
typewriters. “Return” still had to be pressed at the end of each line when the bell
sounded. Typewriter ribbons began to grow dimmer from the very first use and required
a messy periodic replacement. It was necessary to clean the keys frequently or
accumulated ink would fill in any enclosed space, especially on “o” and “e.” To create
professional looking documents was virtually impossible.

The reason the “Shift” key for capital letters bears that name is because, on
manual models, pressing “Shift” literally shifted the armatures so that a different part hit
the paper to make capital letters. Failure to fully depress “Shift” would result in “flying
capitals” which appeared well above the line. Only a very poor typist produced them.

Special formats were difficult to accomplish. Superscript or subscript was

possible only by manually turning the roller a half turn and then typing the number. Only
by calculating the midpoint of the line, placing the carriage at that point, and then
backspacing half the number letters in a line were we able to center text. Placing text in
columns required a complicated set of mathematical calculations. To have a justified
right margin, it was necessary to place slashes at the end of each sentence to bring all the
lines to the same point. Then the typist counted the slashes on each line and then retyped
the page while inserting extra spaces between words so that the right margin was even.

Only one size font was possible on a given machine. Most typewriters had Pica
and a few the smaller Elite. Bold of a sort could result from backspacing and typing the
letters again. Italic font wasn’t possible, but one could underline words by backspacing
and typing again with the underline key. A shift to the upper part of the ribbon produced
red type if the machine contained that type ribbon. Print produced by the ribbon began
to decline in quality almost immediately. Changing it was a messy job.

It was common for keys to stick. That required a trip to the repair shop. Any
major corrections or rearrangement of text required starting over and retyping the entire
document. If a page being typed had to be removed from the machine, it was impossible
to reinsert it correctly so the material lined up. Only persons who endured that primitive
technology can truly appreciate word processing.

While I was enrolled in Typing I, my parents bought me a typewriter to use at

home. That was a big help even if it was an old model Royal. We got it somewhere near
Scottsboro and I used it through undergraduate school.
 Similar to My Typewriter

I was, I think, the only boy in Typing II, but I saw the value in being able to type
well and didn’t care. Nobody could’ve anticipated the need for keyboarding that would
arise in future years in connection with computers, so that skill was even more valuable
than I’d anticipated. Those two courses helped me more over the years than any others.

M.G. Couch replaced Dr. Nelson as principal. Nelson had cancer so he moved to
the faculty at Jacksonville State. He didn’t live long after that. Mr. Couch was a skinny,
pale, tall man who looked like a dried-up vampire in a horror movie. I liked him and he
was a good principal far as I knew. When I was in college at Jacksonville, Mr. Couch
came there on a recruiting trip for teachers. He spotted me and told me he was
considering a certain student. I took it that he was asking my opinion, especially since I’d
worked as his office assistant in the senior year.

“You better be careful,” I replied. “He’s really dumb and I hear that he isn’t
going to get his degree because of not having enough quality points.”

“I hope he’d be able to say something better about you,” he responded with
obvious hostility. His rudeness embarrassed me so I quickly excused myself and left the
room.

Couch didn’t like it because I’d been candid and truthful. He went on to hire the
guy. As I predicted, he didn’t graduate. He reportedly claimed a degree and drew pay
based on that falsehood. It led to legal problems and a lawsuit being filed against Mr.
Couch. He later told my parents that I tried to warn him but he didn’t listen. I thought it
was good enough for him and thought of the words, “A wise man listens to counsel.”

(TO BE CONTINUED.)