Remembering Junior High School Days

John Scales

LHS '66

I have written an autobiography for my hopefully-to-be grandchildren, and I thought some of my reminisces might be of use to you in reminding our classmates of their own stories. I did omit a couple of names (of both the innocent and the guilty!) 

Junior High! That’s what we called it back then, junior high school, for grades seven through nine. Middle school was not a thing. So, the day after Labor Day I boarded the bus (yes, bus again) and rode to Lee Junior High, on the east side of the tracks from where it is right now. Supposedly it was named after the Lee Highway, the extension of Andrew Jackson Way that I-565 was built over. As memorialized by the plaque on the auditorium out front, it was originally named “Northeast Huntsville Junior High”. We arrived in the front parking lot, I got off the bus, and people started looking at me – a tall, skinny kid with glasses and wearing shorts. Someone came up to me and said, “Mr. Fain better not see you in shorts or you’ll get paddled.” Cecil Fain was the principal. Luckily it was a short “get acquainted” day, so he didn’t see me. But was my mother mad! She had to get me some new long pants that day as I had outgrown the old ones during the summer. 

In the photo above, the auditorium is in the center, the lunchroom front left with the band and chorus rooms right of the lunchroom, and the art and debate rooms behind them on the front wing. The office was in the center behind the auditorium, the library behind the office, and the PE dressing rooms and a gym behind that. Academic wings were to the right and the back-left wing had shop, mechanical drawing, home economics, and some classrooms. The seventh and eighth grades seem to wash together in my memory. I remember having Miss Monroe, a sweet old Southern lady, one year. She wrote the alma mater, sung to the tune of an old Civil War song, Aura Lea. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEIByIZfHqM 

Another teacher I had was wild man Al Stewart, supposedly a preacher on the side but who would talk about anything random and who one day embarrassed the crap out of a pretty girl who had developed early. For some reason (this was 8th or 9th Grade), he was talking rather elliptically about sex and turned to her, saying “Isn’t that right, -----?” (Name omitted to protect the victim.) He’d have gotten fired for that today, and at the time I’m pretty sure she was as innocent as I was, or maybe as innocent as most of the class anyway. Funny what you remember. We had one teacher whose name I forget but there was a rumor in the air that she had been in Playboy. I never saw any proof of that, though. Mrs. Hedden was my homeroom teacher one year (we had to memorize the Gettysburg address in her room) and Mrs. Milburn taught Human Physiology in the 8th Grade. I took art rather than physical education both years, but during 8th Grade the art teacher took a disliking to me (and all the other boys – having taught the same grade I can kind of see the other side now) and I was paddled several times. At first my parents punished me as well, but after three or four times they figured out it wasn’t me so much as her. The only other teacher I really remember taught 9th Grade Algebra I and, unfortunately, had a bit of a lisp. Mish Davish, as we called her, was probably a pretty good teacher but I remember being initially baffled by algebra before the light bulb turned on.

I think it was 7th grade when I was invited to a party at Candy Folk’s house along with a dozen or so classmates. She lived in a large older home with a sizeable yard. As it got dark the kids wanted to play “Spin the Bottle” or something like that and I didn’t know how to act. Eventually I was tagged to “walk around the house holding hands” with someone (don’t remember who), I think with the theory we would kiss or make out. Didn’t happen, I guarantee – I was so embarrassed! I believe that was the last party I went to, at least in junior high. The word quickly got passed around that I was a geek and had no clue.

I remember there were some kids running around playing at being James Dean, wearing a tee shirt with a leather jacket over it, wearing a duck’s ass haircut, and sometimes having peroxided hair. Think the Fonz. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Duck%27s%20Ass Saw them most often at lunch. The lunchroom game was “football”. You folded a piece of paper into a triangle, spread some salt on a table, and two guys would sit across from each other. The idea was to flick the triangle towards the edge in front of the other player and a touchdown was if you could get the triangle to stick over the edge without falling off. If you scored you could try an extra point by kicking it through uprights formed by the other’s hands and fingers. If your (single) flick didn’t result in a touchdown or it went over the edge, it was the other guy’s turn.

Another game that was played would get you in trouble for gambling if you got caught. It was called pitching pennies. You would stand a certain distance from a wall and throw your penny at it, trying to minimize the distance from the wall where it came to rest. The closest to the wall won the pennies used. I remember it happening back near the entrance to the boys’ PE locker room.

One of the strange things the school did was program a “break” mid-morning, a 15-minute time to change classes (later reduced to 12). There was nothing to do really, no snack rooms or anything, so everyone just walked in circles around the auditorium. It was kind of like being in a Hispanic town in the evening – everyone promenading around checking out the opposite sex or walking in couples if the couple was already a thing.

I was in 8th grade when I stumbled across a scam that I worked all the way through 12th. One day during announcements the principal asked for a couple of Boy Scouts who knew how to fold flags and who had good grades to volunteer. My friend Steve Campbell (who lived on Titus off Oakwood) and I bit. I still see him around town occasionally – he was a Beach Boys and Jan & Dean fan. Anyway, the idea was to go to the office and pick up the US and state flags and raise them before school. The scam was we would be allowed out of class if it started raining or 10 minutes before the end of the day so we could properly fold the flags, store them, and still make the bus. Steve dropped out of flag duty after a year and afterwards I had to use a radiator to fold the flag on, but I did that for five years – got out of class early!

We had sports for the first time and had pep rallies. The band would play Rebel Rouser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGPG_Y-_BZI and the cheerleaders would flounce around while we all clapped. The connection to General Lee as the Confederate song and our team name, the Generals, was pretty explicit.

One of my nerd friends, Bill Howard, ran for school office in either 8th or 9th grade and asked me to be his campaign manager. Everyone had a couple of minutes to give a speech in a school assembly. He and I (OK, it was my idea) worked up a quick sketch based on the popular TV Show, This Is Your Life, during which we pretended it was 20 years later and he had a political career that had started and become successful due to his great performance as the student council treasurer (I think). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Your_Life He didn’t win (we were in the lowest class, after all) but we garnered some respect from teachers and students for having the courage to get up in front of everyone and put on a skit.

(Continued Next Week)

The Wayback Machine

"School Days" is an American popular song written in 1907 by Will D. Cobb and Gus Edwards. Its subject is of a mature couple looking back sentimentally on their childhood together in primary school. The song was featured in a Broadway show of the same name, the first in a series of Edwards' school acts. It was the inspiration for many subsequent school acts, including the Marx Brothers' Fun in Hi Skule, their first major Vaudeville success.

Thanks to John Scales for providing us another look back into our early school days. I encourage all of you to share some of your own memories with the rest of our classmates. It is so much fun for most of us to remember those awkward days.

The following emails were not delivered :

bevstill@comcast

echols80@mchsi.com

tnladylm@yahoo.com

puma1965@tampabay.rr.com

Last Week's Questions, Answers, 

And Comments

Quiet week last week...no responses.