by Chris Sullivan
My daughter Phoenix, fifteen years old, thinks that the USA in 2008 is the normal world. She has never seen a teacher strike a student, for example. If a teacher in her school hit a child so hard that his desk toppled over, that teacher would be unemployed and probably unemployable by the end of the day. Students today know that battery by a teacher is so egregious that they would get up and leave the room after an instance of such violence. She would simply not believe me if I told her about the time an English teacher attacked a student when I was in eighth grade in 1964 in Rochester, Minnesota, at Central Junior High School. The child made the mistake of addressing a teacher as Mr. J instead of Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson, who I remember as large, determined that assault and battery was the optimal pedagogy in this situation and was so eager to educate the child that he ran into the room. (l have no memory of ever seeing a teacher run inside of a school. Outside at school picnics, yes, but not inside.) He chased the student into the classroom. The student had nowhere to flee from his lesson but to his desk.
Phoenix also thinks that clean, safe, and rationally constructed school buildings have been the norm in Minnesota history. I have told her about the physical education classes I was subjected to and seen her glaze over with incredulity. She responded to me in the same way she did when I told her I had to walk ten miles to and from school every day and that both ways were uphill. Children always drop into wait mode whenever an adult begins a sentence with, “When I was your age…” Even if she hadn’t, the reality of Central Junior High School, which I have ever since attending it written the name as Central Junior High “School”, is so alien to her that she simply doesn’t believe me.
Take the swimming classes, for example. The pool was in the Coffman Building across the street from Central. To go to Coffman, students had to walk through a tunnel, which was lit by naked light bulbs about seven feet off the concrete floor until the greasers swatted all of them with their books. (Greasers used half a tube of Brill Cream every day. After combing their hair straight back, the pale scalp was visible through the little crevices left by the teeth of their combs.) If you were lucky enough to get to the tunnel before the greasers, fine. If not, you guided yourself through the utterly lightless tunnel by placing a hand on the steam pipes attached to the wall beneath the smashed light bulbs. In the wintertime, the pipes were too hot to touch so you tapped your fingers on the pipe every couple seconds to keep yourself walking straight through the tunnel. The return trip was always dark. Did anybody in administration ever wonder why the school bought thousands of light bulbs every year?
I can’t tell you why they called the locker room in Coffman a locker room. There were no lockers. To give the impression of giving a rat’s ass about the students, the administration had installed some hooks and a few benches. The floors were probably concrete, but they were hard enough to be marble. I couldn’t really tell what they were made of though because they were black and I doubted they had been painted that color. Here and there were bits of skid strips that hadn’t been worn away by decades of the wet feet of miserable teenagers. I was sure that sometimes the janitor spread a slurry of cattle slobber, ash, and grit on the floor.
First we were ordered to strip. As if in a scene from Schindler’s List, forty naked boys were herded into a shower about sixteen feet square with about eight shower heads, one for each of the big boys, In Phoenix’s locker room, which has lockers, each shower has its own hot and cold shut off valves. The water for the showers in Coffman in 1964 was turned on in such a comical and bizarre way, I don’t expect readers born after 1980 to believe me, but here goes anyway. First of all, there was only one crank to turn on all of the showers at once, both hot and cold water. The crank wasn’t even one of those steering wheel-like valves in the submarine movies from many years ago. It was a wrench that hung loosely on a square-shaped knob on the valve. Believe it or not, to grasp the wrench a skinny, trembling, naked boy stood on the bottom railing, a round, wet, slippery pipe, and leaned out over the top railing, while being jostled and yelled at by the other boys, across a one-story drop to a concrete floor. A quarter turn of the wrench started the showers. There was no temperature control, so the big boys pushed the little ones under the flowing water until it was warm and then pushed us into the middle. We cowered there, finishing our shower with water deflected off the hillocks of muscle and hair that had claimed the showers.
It gets worse. After all of us were wet, we were marched through another tunnel to get to the pool. This tunnel was always dark and always flooded with several inches of freezing water separated from the Minnesota permafrost by three inches of concrete. The cinderblock walls perfectly reflected and amplified the screams of forty running boys having ice water kicked up onto their backs by the boys behind them.
Once in the pool, we swam laps for forty minutes and were then allowed five minutes of free time to play. The teacher announced the end of pool time with a whistle. The last boy out of the pool, usually the unfortunate one who had just jumped off the diving board, was awarded a rosebud. The man in charge, who the parents were told was a certified teacher, obliged the slowest boy to bend over and swatted him on the wet ass so hard that a red welt – the rosebud – appeared on the white skin. And it gets still worse: When a boy spat a loogie onto the slimy tile floor, the teacher forced him to lick it back up. I’m not making this up.
The hiring practices at Central Junior High “School” must have required of candidates a profound and abiding hatred of children. A streak of sadism improved the probability of employment. Certainly, these policies were never committed to paper, but I can’t account for the historical facts in any other way. And Rochester was a relatively enlightened community. I shudder to think of the “education” inflicted upon the children in Alabama, Saudi Arabia, or Rhodesia in 1964.
I am pleased that for Phoenix, ice water on her naked back, blows to her face, and instructions to lick spit off the floor are not normal.