Small Southern Towns

Southern Fried Schoolin’

/ cigarman501 / 6 Comments

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

For some reason, a memory of a manure spreader hooked to the back of a pickup truck as they waited in the school’s carpool line wandered through my mind. A smelly, just used manure spreader at that. It is just a normal day in the rural South. A manure spreader one day, a hay bailer the next…just another day in the sunny South. Why am I thinking about manure spreaders? I don’t know but I’m sure the thought was triggered by something one of our politicians said.

This is the tenth-year anniversary of my last year teaching full time. Time flies and I’m amazed at the changes that have occurred in public education in the decade since I retired. Changes that I saw on the horizon ten years ago. I was fortunate to escape the ‘looney bin’ that has become public education. I was lucky they didn’t lock the doors until after I escaped.

As I look back on my career, memories allow me to smile. As I look to the future I realize, if faced with the same two choices of careers when I graduated from college, I would pick the other. There doesn’t seem to be much joy in teaching these days and that is a shame. It is better to focus on warm memories than the cold future of education. Hopefully, you will smile too.  

Just like politics, there are differences between schoolin’ in an urban setting and a rural setting…and even more so, in a Southern rural setting. I received my “schoolin’” in a Southern rural school and was lucky to teach in a couple of small rural middle and high schools over my forty plus years.

In a Southern rural school, one sees and hears things you do not see anywhere else. I am somewhat of an authority having taught both in urban, inner-city schools, affluent suburban schools, and Southern rural schools, one tucked so far back into the sticks the only air pollution was the tart smell of a nearby moonshine still or the woodsmoke from the fire cookin’ the corn liquor.

During my high school days, I took agriculture classes as electives and was an active participant in the FFA. I was a member of the cattle judging and soil judging teams…soil judging? I judge you to be dirty. I can honestly say, “I’ve never used what I learned about cows or soil in my everyday life.” I do try to grow tomatoes, so I guess soil judging paid off.

Frequently the agriculture class would travel to local farms in the springtime to assist in the castration of bull calves. Always a fun time to be had by all except the calves we wrestled to the ground. Holding on to a rear leg for dear life, the scared animal decided to spray us with solid waste. I doubt an urban school would have an entire class dismissed because they were covered in cow poop.

Later, during my teaching career, I found myself tardy for an interview because of a small wagon being pulled by a team of burros on a narrow and curvy country road. Passing was impossible and the gentleman handling the rig was in no mood to pull over. I found out it was just the local drunk who had lost his driver’s license and was on his way to pick up his daily allotment of MD 2020 or Boones Farm. I guess if you are sober enough to hitch up a team of burros, you are sober enough to drive them.

One of my teaching stops celebrated “ride your horse to school day” in the early Fall and another “drive your tractor to school day” in the late Spring. They weren’t school sanctioned, just something that happened. In between there were rodeos and turkey shoots that many of the students from both schools participated in.

One Spring Fling, held on the baseball field, required an outfield cleanup before we could play again after the “cow patty drop” fund raiser. The outfield was gridded and numbered; each grid sold for five dollars. Ole Betty the cow was led out and turned loose. Whichever grid Betty first pooped in won some lucky soul half the pot, the other half was donated to the athletic department. Anything to make a dollar and it could have been worse, “cow patty toss?”

One school might as well have called off school on the first day of deer hunting season as our attendance went down by at least a third. Most days there was someone dressed in camo with an orange or yellow vest sitting in class who had been in the woods very, very early. I’m sure there were shotguns hidden behind the seats of many pickups in the student parking lot so their owners could get a jump on an evening spent in a deer stand.

I once told my classes that I didn’t care if they ate snacks if they did it quietly and shared with the rest of the class…and their teacher. I’ve never understood keeping growing teenagers from eating despite school rules to the contrary. One student brought a large tub of boiled peanuts and a fresh roll of paper towels for us all to eat on. Another provided me with homemade deer jerky on a weekly basis during deer season. Boiled peanuts and homemade deer jerky were acceptable as classroom snacks or party appetizers and were some of the best Christmas presents, I ever received. You can keep your shiny red apple or fruit cake.

At the urban schools where I taught, I never paused baseball practice to watch a deer sprint across the outfield before escaping by jumping the left centerfield fence or stopped practice when a parent brought by the five-hundred-pound boar hog he had killed. We were the only folks around to show off for I guess, and we stood around the truck bed and expressed our awe to the proud hunter. We ate slow cooked Boar BBQ two days later. Being nice does pay off.

While I’m on pigs, being late to school because “the pigs got out” was an acceptable reason to be tardy…or goats, cows, chickens, and horses.

A teaching peer once asked me, “What was the difference between teaching at the affluent, suburban (so and so) High School and the poorer, rural (the other) High School?”

I smiled, “At (so and so) High School if the conversation included ‘I shot’ it was about golf. At (the other) High School, it was about hunting.”

If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy one of Don Miller’s nonfiction works. His latest nonfiction is “Pig Trails and Rabbit Holes” and may be purchase in paper back or downloaded through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Pig-Trails-Rabbit-Holes-Southerner/dp/B09GQSNYL2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3QCP1VFAVULJY&keywords=Pig+Trails+and+Rabbit+Holes&qid=1679679089&sprefix=pig+trails+and+rabbit+holes%2Caps%2C213&sr=8-1

Small Town Rivalries

/ cigarman501 / 8 Comments

There’s nothing to do here on a Friday night but go to a football game. This town really revolves around football. – John Williams

There was a time….before the small towns were overrun by the Godzilla monster of urban sprawl.  Before cell phones, computers, and social media hypnotized us all.  Before there were so many choices at our fingertips.  Friday night football was king.

I guess there are still small towns that close up lock, stock, and barrel and migrate to the local football stadium on a Friday night.  Bright stadium lights and green grass with sharply painted or chalked white lines.  Marching bands and cheerleaders dressed in their finest, strutting to this year’s marching songs.  Drumlines rocking, pompoms shaking, rabid fans cheering at a fever pitch.  Yeah, there was a time.

This coming Friday the annual bloodletting known as the “Golden Strip Derby.”  I was a part of the rivalry for nine years early in my teaching and coaching career.  During those days I fancied myself as a football coach and felt there could be no higher calling.  No greater high than those heady moments after a win…especially against your “down the road” rival.  “Better than sex,” one coaching chum tried to convince me, “sex lasts but a few minutes, winning a football game last all week long.  Beating your rival last all year long.”

I know it has changed, but during those days, Mauldin, SC, was at one end of the Golden Strip, Simpsonville at the other, maybe five miles separating them by road, closer as the crow flies. 

Mauldin High School was created in the early Nineteen Seventies mostly from the student body of Hillcrest High School, just outside Simpsonville.  In the Seventies, Mauldin proper was a wide-place on a crossroads, Simpsonville, not much larger but they did have a main street.  That is one thing that has changed as Greenville has come calling.

Hillcrest looked down their noses at the farmers and “sh!tkickers” down the road, at least that’s what we told the kids. They probably had as many “rednecks” as we did. It was inevitable a small town, Southern football rivalry would manifest itself.  Rednecks versus the townies. Mavericks versus Rams.

I don’t rightly remember who came up with the idea of playing a game for a cheap sporting goods trophy, calling it the Golden Strip Derby. That would be cheap in monetary value. I’m sure it was as valuable as the Lombardi Trophy to those kids. 

I think I remember but don’t want to put someone’s nose out of joint if I’m wrong.  I know we had a couple of rabid fans I’d put blame on.  They bled their school colors. I remember some pretty outlandish bets being wagered…free gasoline for a year?  A lot of bottles of Daniel’s or Walker’s finest or five-hundred-dollar bets were the norm.

I read Hillcrest is on an eight-game winning streak. I know hope springs eternal for the Mauldin fans. I was a part of nine straight wins by Mauldin in the Seventies and early Eighties. Never lost to them and winning never got old. Our orange, white, and brown-clad Mavericks never fell to the red, white, and black-clad Rams…although there were some close ones.  I’m sure there was always hope by those fans on the opposite side of the field.  Hope that we stomped flat.

Many were close, hard-fought games…” slobber knockers.”  I remember one was 6-0 on a dreary wet night and not decided until Ray Ritchy secured it with a late interception.  He nearly broke my nose when he jumped into my arms and then got tangled in my head set cord. We both went down in a jubilant, muddy heap.

I also remember mocking the Radio City Rockettes as we coaches danced to “Rock and Roll Part Two” watching the final seconds tick off of the clock.  I don’t think the opposing school appreciated the lightness of our feet and the Rockettes weren’t in danger of replacement.

In another game we were down by double digits at halftime when a short, stocky running back named Timmy May and our offensive line decided we weren’t going to lose and we didn’t.  Stuffed it down their throats we did.  Did I mention our defense shut them out in the second half?

The stands will be filled on Friday night and periodically I’ll check the score.  I won’t be one of those fans in attendance.  When I retired I found out it was about the kids and the coaches, the parents of those kids, the students, teachers, and administrators who supported us.

It was about the people who played the game, not the game itself.  The games are not as important when you don’t know anyone.  They are not as important when you haven’t invested a part of yourself.  The win is no longer better than sex…but the memories might be.

My favorite memory of one of those rival games was a pre-game speech.  We had heard how great the Rams were that year, a bunch of college recruits, top to bottom. This was going to be their year. Remember, hope springs eternal.

Our head coach lamented to the team while asking the question, “What can we do to fire you up? We’ll do it. What do we have to do to win the game?”  An offensive lineman no longer with us in this life, Preston Trotter, raised his hand and in his best country voice asked, “You reckon Coach Long could do that Johnny B. Good song?”  Not at all what was expected.

Coach Long was our Elvis impersonator and on the baseball field next to the stadium he did Elvis doing “Johnny B. Good.”  We kicked their butts.

Football is about being a part of something bigger than yourself, even if it is a small town rivalry. It is not about stadiums holding eighty thousand. Its about lifelong friendships forged in the heat of August. About lessons learned form exhilarating victories or excruciating defeats. It is about people, not pigskin.

Good times, good memories.  Good luck to the Mauldin Mavericks.

Don Miller wrote a book, “Winning Was Never the Only Thing….” about his teaching and coaching career. It may be purchased or downloaded on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OM8ONRM/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i4

Image from Greenvilleonline.com