High School Years

When I started in Bethany Township High School in the fall of 1937 it seemed huge compared with little one-room East Center grade school. There were 44 students in my freshman class, there were eight classrooms and I had five different teachers. It was a bit confusing for the first couple of days, but I soon got used to it.

I took high school seriously, just as I had grade school, and worked hard so that I almost always had the highest grade-average in my class. I sometimes procrastinated on longer-term assignments, such as reading a book and writing a book report, but then would set the alarm clock and get up a couple of hours early to study in order to catch up and get the report in on time. I liked most of my subjects—English was my favorite. I struggled through two years of Latin and completely missed what Mother said she had found to be “a wonderful base for understanding English words.” In Algebra and Geometry I started out well through the first half of the year and then found the work getting much harder as the year went on.

I really enjoyed my Agriculture courses and taking part in the Future Farmers of America program—in those days I assumed that I would follow in the family footsteps and be a farmer. I entered the FFA public speaking contest three years and each time won at the regional level, but was beaten at the state meet. In my senior year the Ag department held a father-son banquet and I was asked to give a short “welcome” speech. I thought this simple speech would be so easy that I spent very little time in preparation. It was a disaster! Somehow my first few words came out “backwards” from my intention—and I just froze. I just stood there for half a minute or so, until one of my classmates snickered, and then I stammered a few halting words of welcome and sat down. Dad was surely embarrassed by my performance, but he was sympathetic and simply told me that I should learn from this experience and be better prepared next time. I never again treated public speaking in a cavalier manner after that humiliating welcome speech.

The summer following my Junior year I joined six other FFA members for a camping trip to the Ozarks. Joe Cole’s father rigged a canvas cover for his farm truck; we all loaded gear and food, and off we went for our big adventure. But it didn’t turn out to be quite as much fun as we had hoped. A few hours after we set out it started raining and rained off and on every day. The canvas cover on the truck leaked, so everyone and all our clothes and blankets got soaked. We hadn’t coordinated our food supplies and it turned out we had brought mostly canned pork and beans and potatoes for frying. We did camp and fight mosquitoes for a couple of days in the Ozarks in Arkansas, but then gave up and headed home. And, to top it all off, Max Cribbet and I came down with malaria a few days after we got back. I was really sick with a very high fever and spent a week in the hospital in Shelbyville. (The total hospital charge for that week was $75.) I tempor-arily lost most of my hair from the fever—and it never did come back as thick as before. (Some think I never completely came back from the delirium, either.)

One fall evening our class had a wiener roast at “Cornbread Bottom,” a little clearing by a swampy area east of Bethany. We had a great time. When I started to drive home our car suddenly lost power and died—and I couldn’t get it started again. Kenneth Brewer drove me home, where I got our pickup truck and a log chain. We then towed the car to the Ford garage in Bethany. I went to the garage before school the next morning and was pleasantly surprised when Mr. Snyder told me the car was fixed and there was no charge. It seems that in turning the car around I had backed into a low dirt bank and filled the tailpipe with mud. When the tailpipe was cleared the car ran fine.

When I was in high school I sometimes envied the boys that lived in Bethany. These “town kids” never seemed to have any chores to do at home, so they had lots more time for play and leisure than we farm kids had. And, perhaps because they had more time to be with friends, they tended to be more poised and to make new friends more easily. In contrast, we farm kids had been raised in a more isolated environment, had attended tiny grade schools, and tended to be somewhat more shy. There were exceptions in both groups, of course, but I used to feel the town kids had a much easier life.