I was visiting my birthplace in Kentucky recently, and my drive down memory lane took me past the school that I went to back then. Wrigley Elementary. Wrigley, Kentucky was -and still is- a wide place in the road on a back road in a rural part of the state. That sure narrows it down huh? Most of Kentucky is rural. So I drove by and reminisced aloud to my family (captive audience that they were), "I went to school there. Elementary school." Cricket sounds from outside. "There wasn't a middle school then. It was first through eighth. Each grade had a room and you stayed there through the whole year."

Yawns. Kids don't appreciate anything. So I spiced things up a bit.

"I got my first paddling just behind those doors there," pointing at a set of double doors in the old sandstone building. "From the principal no less. Charlie Williams." I expected some interest from this, but when I looked over at the youngest, Sam, 8 or so at the time, I saw puzzlement.

"Paddling?" he asked, interested in spite of himself.

I had just happened on one of those big cultural gaps that occur between kids today and parents that used to be kids a long time ago. He didn't even know what I was talking about.

I plunged into story mode, delighted more than if he had asked "Did you ever walk to school in the snow Pop?". I did by the way. But not because we were so poor -which we were by the way- but because I didn't want to ride the bus. Can you imagine riding the school bus in rural Kentucky when your name is Kerwin Lumpkins? I had several antagonists on the bus, all with the same last name of course. They weren't brothers (or sisters in some cases). It's just that pretty much everyone in rural Kentucky where I grew up then was named Whitt or Adkins. Roll call each morning consisted of 20 A names, and 20 W names, and 3 or 4 of the wierdo non-Adkins or Whitt names. But the school bus is another story. This one's about paddles.

Corporal punishment was as common as tasteless green beans in the lunchroom in those days. It was so accepted that teachers were going to physically punish children, that it was standard operating procedure for every teacher to have a wooden paddle on her desk. Teachers were generally women then, at least where I grew up. I don't use the "her desk" in the modern sense of sprinkling his and hers equally throughout the text so as to not offend females reading my story and thinking that I'm sexist.

Anyway, on HER desk would be a paddle. And let me go further. Not only was it commonplace enough for the paddle to be visible, it was usually adorned with artwork. Some were painted, some had intricate scroll work like some piece of Indian cutlery. Indian as in Taj Mahal type Indian. If I had said Indian cutlery to the people I had grown up with, most would have said "Injuns don't have knives and forks". What am I saying? Really, if I had said Indian cutlery to the kids I grew up with, say one of the Whitt boys for instance, he would have said "what's a cutlery?" just before he beat me up on the school bus.

Paddles! Right!

Mrs Smith in fifth grade had one of the more remarkable ones. Mrs Howard for instance had a standard issue paddle, about twelve inches long and 8 inches wide, with her name written on it. In marker no less. All utility, Mrs. Howard. But Lois Smith reached for more in life. She stood apart in the pantheon of paddles. It was about eighteen inches long and perhaps four inches side. It was long and slim. Like a sword, a deadly thing but nonetheless elegant. It was lovingly made for her by some craftsman. Her husband perhaps. Maybe it had been an anniversary present.

I never saw Mrs. Smith take that paddle to anyone. Mrs. Howard on the other hand (sixth grade). I saw her take that frying pan of a thing to several people. Myself included, though only once. But Mrs. Smith, despite what at times could be a frosty exterior, I think just didn't have it in her. Her paddle was like a piece of hard candy, just for lookin' at. Nevertheless, it was in fifth grade that I received my first paddling. It was also my first hard look at injustice. A story on the order of the imprisonment of Andy Dufresne. Oh sure, I made such complaints at the various beatings my mother doled out to me, usually joint sessions to my brother and I. But I had all of those coming, despite my protests to the contrary. This one though...

Recess. Winter, dreary, wet winter recess. Ten minutes before the bell rings, and we're trying to play, without actually being able to play because we're inside. If it had been spring, we would have been outside on the playground. On the swings, or being thrown off the merry-go-round by some Whitt kid. But wet and dreary? "Children, get out the puzzles" or "Get out the math flash cards". My kids at least knew what flash cards were so I didn't have to pause. I was a nerdy kid and even I didn't get out flash cards at recess. No, no. This was the inevitable scene of teacherly order giving way to childish chaos. The slow encroachment of squeals, then shrieks onto reasonable excited responses to a hard flash card. Of slowly building vocal volume. Of antics into shenanigans. Could it have been avoided? Might just as well ask could Archduke Ferdinand have just stayed home that day?

Kathy Cassidy (eww, forgot that one. Cassidy. Wow.) reaches for her sweater on the back of her desk. Joyce Whitt snatches at it. Gerald Whitt begins humming some song, the theme from Little House on the Prairie maybe. I join in on the second verse. Comrade like, I put my arm around his shoulder and we go on parade. Kathy jerks at the sweater and screeches. Joyce screeches back in delight and lets go. Kathy falls back, shoving a desk behind her out into the aisle and into my foot. The desk makes that distinctive shriek of metal feet on wood. I stumble, Gerald totters off balance.

At that precise instant, the principal, Charles Williams walks by the classroom doors. Hearing some commotion, he looks in and sees…

Two boys grappling, a desk knocked from its orderly row by their thrashing. Two girls shrieking in horror at the naked face of violence in their very midst.

His shout pierces the din like a old west marshall's shotgun blast.

"You two", his index and third finger stab out in a deadly Y at two victims, Adkins boys most likely. But then the Y swings in my direction. I'm index. "and you two! Come to my office in five minutes".

There is no silence like that following an angry principal putting an end to all merriment. Utter silence. All eyes on the doomed. Williams, like a hurricane blew through and was gone. I never understood that one. Why "in five minutes"? Did he have some important business to attend to? I think it was the equivalent of "go cut a switch for me to beat you with". I couldn't tell you how that five minutes passed. I imagine that the two other boys started out the door to the office and everyone watched, waiting for me to follow or some similar scene. I couldn't tell you who those other luckless souls were. They aren't even shadows in my memory of that day. For all I know, they were executed on the hill behind the school instead of standing next to me in that awful space. The office that has upon it's door written "Principal".

I do remember standing there in that office and hearing my judge, jury and executioner shout at me. I don't remember what he shouted, but I remember him being angry. That guy always seemed angry. Now that I've been a parent for over ten years I understand him perfectly, but at the time it was just scary.

He must have paused. For breath maybe, because I foolishly pleaded my case. He'd just declared something about the desks being pushed around and I siezed on it. Too many courtroom TV shows I guess. And I asked permission to speak first . Can you believe that? No wonder I got beat up on the bus. I said something like "those desks were already parted". Parted? How do words like that find their way into your mouth?

Gerald, and the other faceless two just bore it in silence. They knew this routine. Many years later, Martin Scorceze captured this kind of moment with a still shot and Ray Liotta's voiceover saying "The way I saw it, everybody takes a beating sometime". They were tough kids. The kind that got sent to the principal's office and came back in the class room with a smirk that made everybody laugh. No such stoicism was in me back then. Williams roared back something that silenced my petty arguments, and then laid his hand on the paddle.

I criticized Mrs. Howard earlier for her paddle being bereft of life and imagination. I retract that now. Her paddle could have been a Stradivarius next to Charlie Williams Plank of Death.

It was thick. The best word for it. It didn't look like a paddle, those dainty feminine things on the desks of my teachers. This thing was just thick, more a plank of wood. I don't even know if it had a handle. I remember looking at that thing and thinking something crazy like "he should drill holes in it so the air can move through it as he swings".

Who got it first? I don't know. Or how many licks did I get? Lick. That's the word for a paddling. What other word would you use I asked my youngest. Strokes? C'mon!

How many licks? There is a story from ancient Rome of a centurion with the nickname of Cedo Alteram, given that from his habit of breaking his staff on the back of some soldier suffering punishment and the centurion crying out "Cedo Alteram" (Give me another). Charlie Williams would have made a good Roman I think.

Hmm. Maybe not. Maybe it was only two licks.

I only received two paddlings in my time in the hallowed halls of learning. The second was less than a year later, from Mrs Howard in sixth grade. I was pumping my left arm up and down on my hand clasped under the armpit in an age old ritual of noisemaking. And ole Mrs. Howard simply was having none of it that day. She crossed the room, snatched me out of my desk, and laid three rapid fire reports across my rear, and returned to her desk in a huff, all so fast that I didn't even have time to take my hand out of my armpit.

The bus drivers had paddles. Substitute teachers sometimes brought their own. Everybody had paddles. It wouldn't have surprised me to learn that the guy who sold candy at the local country store had a "heart of oak" stored under his counter.

What happened to all those paddles I can't help but wonder, I told my kids as I pulled back onto that country road. Did they burn them ritually as the new age of kinder, gentler nonsense came crashing down onto them? Or perhaps store them in a drawer with mothballs? Cast them like Excalibur into the sea? Who knows such things?

My oldest said something about how that was wrong, how I didn't deserve it.

"Yeah," I told him. Good to have their attention for a few minutes. "But in seventh grade, I lost my head and left my seat and started talking to a buddy once. The teacher, Mr. Smith, saw me after a minute and told me to go wait in the hall." I had to explain this. That little country school building was just one long hall with the classrooms letting off of it. Standing in the hall during classtime was a signal to the principal to "deal with this hooligan while I continue my class" from the teacher.

I waited there for probably twenty minutes and finally a teacher, Mrs. Smith from fifth grade, saw me and told me that Mr. Williams was out for the rest of the day, a wry smirk on her face, and sent me back into my classroom. I got off, as they say "Scott free".

So maybe there was some justice.

End

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