Intimidation Isn't What It Used To Be

Intimidation isn’t what it used to be

I learned to count by sixes. If we’d had a goal post, I might have learned to count by sevens. Our one room school had a varying number of students during my nine years at Mt. Olive. The first year there were more than 20; at the smallest I think that there were only 9 and 2 were girls. But the intimidation was really effective when there were more. The three seventh and eighth graders made the other seven or eight of us play football. It was tackle football without either pads or helmets. The three biggest took on the rest of and it seemed fair. None us had read Gulliver’s Travels or at least I hadn’t but we little kids were the Lilliputians and we were able to constrain the Gulliver stand-ins at least long enough for them to admit that they’d been tackled. That was the fairness of the process; they could have adjusted the rules to ensure their winning but they only adjusted our desire to play. We had to play; tattling or sitting out wasn’t an option. Surprisingly, there were lots of bruises but no injuries then; the injuries came later when we were fewer and couldn’t even put together such uneven sides.

As the number dwindled year by year, we had to modify our other games as well. How do you play softball with only seven players for both teams? We figured out a way. We played workup with three batters. The batters had to do their own catching. Since we didn’t have gloves or enough players to staff the bases and the outfield and certainly not enough skill to attempt to throw to a base-person anyway we played cross-out. If a fielder threw a ball between a runner and the base toward which he was headed, the runner was out. If the ball passed behind him, he could take that base and one more but no more. We didn’t play baseball; we played softball. All the country schools played softball, even those that had enough players to man the usual positions. Probably the reason we didn’t play baseball was because the school yards where we played weren’t large enough for baseball. Certainly, softball was friendlier to hands and bodies in that era when no one could afford a glove.

But I noted that intimidation failed when we were the potential intimidators. I always blamed the failure on the childish nature of the pansies who were entering the school as we were leaving it but maybe we just weren’t cut out to provide the punishment for tattle tales. It was probably just as well. Since we couldn’t create a football game by intimidation, we invented another activity that went pretty well until we broke Vernon Mark’s collar bone. Later I would learn that our game was a regular part of football practice called a “breakdown drill”. Of course by then, all players were equipped with pads and helmets; Vernon would have been much safer had he enjoyed such protection but he was very macho and two years older than the next oldest. He might have ripped them off to prove that he could have run through our gauntlet without being tackled. In any case, he flew through the air rather gracefully until his shoulder met the ground. He probably thought that being tripped was different from being tackled. But our rules were loose and we had stopped him; probably blamed him for causing us to stop the game; I don’t think that we played that version again and I don’t think that any adult required the stoppage. Our teacher was probably unaware of our game just as the teachers were unaware of the intimidation seven years earlier. An era had come and gone without intervention.

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