The Fishbowl Room

Tommy Towery

LHS '64

I think I spent more time trying to come up with a snappy title for this story than I did worrying about the content of the same. Titles like “Tales from the Glass House” and “Students Who Study in Glass Classrooms”, “The Fishbowl” and such were bouncing about in my head, and even now I do not know what will win out in the long run.

In the Lee Junior High ninth grade student handbook there is an empty space between the bookkeeping room and the typing classroom that has no name. It is a small room with glass windows facing each of the other two classrooms. It is probably only one-third the size of the other classrooms in the school. In reality it is an odd room, for there is no entrance to it from the hallway and so it must be entered through doors from the other classrooms. It makes one wonder what plans the original designer had for it.

So, here are a few of my personal memories about this small glass enclosed space in Lee Junior and Lee High School.

It was actually used as a classroom for a while in my time at Lee because one of my memories concerns an event which took place when I was taking a class there (though I do not recall which class or who was teaching it). One day one of the pranksters in the class arrived early and set up his joke for the day. He (and I don’t remember who he was either) took a small spool of sewing thread and ran it from a desk in the back of the room up over the florescence lights in the ceiling of the room and dropped it down into the waste basket placed by the teacher’s desk. He then tied the end to a crumpled sheet of paper in the basket. The string was almost invisible to casual observers. After class has started, from his desk in the rear he gently pulled the string to make the paper pop up from the waste basket and then drop back down into it. This was out of view of the teacher sitting behind her desk, but in full view of the students.  The teacher had no idea what set off the reactions of the students, and none of them told her what had happened. A few minutes later he did it again, and that time more students laughed and reacted confusing the teacher even more as to what was going on. The next time he made the paper float out of the basket in almost a “Ghostbusters” fashion and the whole room erupted with laughter. The teacher took it well and no punishment was inflicted.

Sometime during my 10th Grade at Lee, the school bought a Gestetner mimeograph machine for us to use in printing the school paper. This was done by cutting stencils by typing on them with a typewriter and cutting small holes in the fabric backed stencil. The stencil was then attached to the machine and tubes of ink were squeezed in it and using the stencil the machine would transfer the ink to the paper feed into it.  I somehow received only basic training on how to run the machine, but somehow became the expert and the student operator of the machine and really was about the only one who ran it. I was even entrusted to run off some tests for several teachers since the mimeograph machine produced black ink, very readable, copies of documents as opposed to the light purple spirit duplicator (Ditto machine). 

I had to research a little about the process. Ditto machines uses two-ply "spirit masters", also called "master sheets". The first sheet can be typed, drawn, or written upon. The second sheet is coated with a layer of wax that had been impregnated with one of a variety of colorants. The pressure of writing or typing on the first sheet transfers the colored wax from the second sheet to the shiny/coated back side of the first sheet, producing a mirror image. This produces the same result as a sheet of carbon paper put in backwards. The two sheets are then separated, and the first sheet is fastened onto the drum of the machine, with the back side facing out, acting as a printing plate.

There is no separate ink used in spirit duplication, which we called the Ditto machine, since the wax transferred to the back side of the first sheet contains the ink. As the paper to be printed moves through the printer, the solvent is spread across each sheet by an absorbent wick. When the solvent-impregnated paper comes into contact with the back side of the first sheet, it dissolves just enough of the pigmented wax to print the image onto the paper as it goes under the printing drum. One master can produce 40 or so good copies; after that, the copies gradually become paler as the colored wax is used up. The usual wax color was aniline purple (mauve), a cheap, moderately durable pigment that provided good contrast, The duplicating fluid typically consisted of a 50/50 mix of isopropanol and methanol, both of which were inexpensive, readily available in quantity, evaporated quickly, and would not wrinkle the paper. It always had a chemical smell to me.

Another strong memory of the room was an incident which happened between the teachers in the opposite classrooms. Mrs. Parks’ typing class was on one side and I think it was Coach Godsey’s bookkeeping class in the other. Anyway, one day Mrs. Parks had left the room for a minute and one of the male students in her room did something crazy that pranksters like to do. I don't even remember what it was, but Coach Godsey saw it since he could see through the Fishbowl room and proceeded to leave his room and walk through the Fishbowl and discipline the offended. It may have been a whack with a paddle, but I am not sure. Anyway, when Mrs. Parks got back and heard about it she became livid. Though she did not confront him, that afternoon when we were working on Lee’s Traveller in the Fishbowl she had us tape up both sides of the Fishbowl windows with full pages of The Huntsville Times, thus blocking the view from one classroom to the other. The papers stayed up the rest of the year.

I will add one final story to the Fishbowl room. It's a little personal, but it was many years ago. As noted, we used it a lot for publishing the paper version of Lee’s Traveller back then, and the newspaper staff was often left alone in the room. One afternoon I was working in there with one other member of the paper staff and we were clowning around. She was wearing a spaghetti strap blouse and we were joking around and she wanted to show me a trick she had seen in a movie or somewhere. She positioned the strap on the edge of her shoulder and twitched her shoulder and the strap fell loose. It was kind of like a flirty Italian movie scene you would expect to see Sophia Loren perform. Well she did it again, that time with both straps and both of the straps fell off her shoulders…and the blouse kept falling before she could grab it. If the truth be known, it probably only revealed the top of her strapless bra, but in the eyes of a teenage boy it was much more revealing. Of course she was red with embarrassment and I am sure I was the same. We made a vow to never reveal it to anyone, so her name will remain unknown, but the incident is revealed. Things were really so innocent back then. The event has nothing to do with the Fishbowl room, except it was there it happened, and in my perverted teenage mind it burnt an image which will never be erased.

I am sure there are other stories by some of you which relate to this unique room in the old Lee High School building and I would love for some of you to share them with the rest of us. Please use the comment form to do so. 

I have finally got my desktop system back in operation, after a lot of re-installing programs and documents. What a mess. Anyway, it is done and I am back in operation. I have a quick trip to the Nashville area coming up this week, but will be back in plenty of time for next week's issue. 

Please consider contributing some of your own memories with your classmates. 

Comments on Last Week's Issue

Janet James Holland, LHS ‘67, "My favorite subject was languages. I had Spanish in 6th grade (Monte Sano), the Latin, French and German at Lee. I transferred into German late, 3 weeks. I guess German was my favorite because I have chosen to relearn it so I can read the books I've bought. They have all helped my music, teaching voice, singing in all the languages. When I watch Scandinavian and German movies, I catch so many words, but not enough to follow the sentence's thought."

Craig Bannecke, LHS ‘65, "Jim McBride just performed for the last time Saturday evening February 12th at the Von Braun Civic Center as he goes into retirement. I noticed on Facebook several members of our Lee High Family were in attendance.  Would love to read their personal observations while watching Jim perform.  Jennifer and I came to Athens, Georgia to see Jim perform in approximately 2005, I think. Jim, along with several other professional musicians, had come to speak at a UGA Music Business class. They then performed that night.  It was a wonderful experience and Bill Anderson, who lives in Athens, came from a Sugarland performance in town to watch Jim and invite him to come back with him to the Sugarland performance.  Jim declined Bill's invitation very nicely to say he had old friends here and wanted to stay with us. Jennifer and I were really touched.  So, I would love to read the comments of our classmates who were in attendance at this wonderful and last performance."

Darla Gentry Steinberg,  LHS ‘66, "My favorite subject was math….any math taught by Ms. Capell. Did you have her? I thought she was a marvelous teacher and inspired me to get a minor in math at college. Actually Speech and Drama with Mrs. Barron was the most fun class and probably the information most used later in life."

John Drummond, LHS ‘65, "Tommy, like yourself geometry came easy for me.  It is a lot about awareness of spatial relationships, like one's sense of direction, which I think is a born-with-it gift rather than an acquired talent obtained through studying, like history.  My favorite subject was physics, because it was taught by a great educator, Mr. Tommy Fox.  LHS suffered a great loss when he left the teaching profession to work for Brown Engineering, for purely financial reasons.  Mr. Fox could simply not make enough money to support his family by teaching at the high school level.  His class later helped me a great deal at Auburn, where the pre-med curriculum was a major in chemistry and a minor in physics.  BTW, Auburn has been ranked #1 in college basketball this season (currently #2, behind Gonzaga) with only two losses, both in OT.  This feels a bit weird for us AU grads, because the ball is a strange shape (round)."

Photographic Memories - Who Are They?

Each week I plan to share a group of photos from the 1960 "The General" yearbook without disclosing the names of the individuals. You may stop and try to identify them here, and when you are through you may scroll to the bottom of this page to see the identities of your classmates in the photos.

Slow Song Selections

You Picked in the Past

There I've Said It Again – Bobby Vinton

Clip from the January 11, 1964, American Bandstand Show

"There! I've Said It Again" is a popular song written by Redd Evans and David Mann, and popularized originally by Vaughn Monroe in 1945, and then again in late 1963 and early 1964 by Bobby Vinton. The song charted at No. 1 on January 4, 1964 for four weeks.

Bobby Vinton, backed by arranger/conductor Stan Applebaum, recorded and released the most widely successful version of "There! I've Said It Again" as a single in the fall of 1963. In 1964, Vinton released the song on the album There! I've Said It Again. Vinton's version topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart on January 4, 1964 and remained there for four weeks. It was the first No. 1 song of 1964, and spent 13 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

The Identites of the Classmates in the Pictures Above