SIN, LIKE PRACTICALLY every other element of life, isn’t as simple as it used to be. And retribution, which always seemed to involve my rear end in one way or another, isn’t as firm or as fast as it once was.
Of course, there are many more opportunities to sin today than there were twenty years ago. Combine that with the obvious erosion of discipline and respect for authority, and what you have is a lot of young people running around having loads of fun doing things it never occurred to the youth of twenty years ago to do.
We’ve already discussed sex. With the pill for safety and the Penthouse Forum for directions, who knows what’s going on in the back seats of Toyotas these days? Whatever it is, I’m certain that the participants are much more cramped than they would have been had the 1957 Chevy lived on into the eighties.
Peeping Tomism, which was popular with my generation, also has lost its way in the modern world. We used to slip around and snoop in windows to see if we could catch girls in their underclothing. Kids today get their equivalent kicks by using computers to invade the privacy of large corporations. I suppose they see enough skin on television and in the newspaper ads for movies; they don’t have to waste their time crouching outside of windows. But if I had to pick, I still would rather watch Kathy Sue Loudermilk do her famous eight-o’clock-every-Wednesday-evening striptease from the tree outside her bedroom than to gaze at the financial records of AT&T in my computer.
The sin of gluttony has even changed since I was growing up. We used to steal watermelons and then gorge ourselves. I was even known to gnaw on the rinds when I was feeling especially gluttonous. Kids today pig-out on Slurpies and Twinkies and Little Debbie Snack Cakes, and they can get pizza delivered to their doorsteps. And not long ago I was at Baskin-Robbins behind a kid who was having trouble deciding which of the thirty-one flavors he wanted, so he finally said, “I’ll just have a scoop of each.” When I left, he had eaten down through the Almond Toffee and was working on the Fudge Swirl and washing it all down with Tab.
Frankly, I’m glad that I’m not twenty years younger and confronted with all the temptations that the nation’s youth face today. I’m glad, for example, that I never had to deal with the issue of drugs.
There certainly were no drugs in my high school, and a real druggie when I was in college was someone who took No-Doz. We knew from seeing Sal Mineo in The Gene Krupa Story that a thing called marijuana existed, but we had never seen any. We figured that only kids in New York City smoked it, and that was why they all looked so greasy and undernourished.
The only thing we took to alter our mental state was beer or maybe bourbon mixed with Coke. Even that was only an occasional indulgence, because beginning drinkers (as most of us were) spent a lot of time embracing the stone pony. That means we spent a lot of time throwing up into a commode, and that definitely wasn’t cool.
Had drugs been available in my school days, there would have been some to try them, no doubt. Norris Brantley, for instance. He would try anything.
Norris had a big date one evening, but his parents had made him spend the afternoon painting the garage. When Norris finished, he was covered in paint and had only an hour to make himself presentable for his date. He showered and scrubbed, but he couldn’t get the paint off his arms and legs.
Norris had heard that gasoline was a marvelous paint remover, so he siphoned several buckets full out of his mother’s car and filled the tub. Then he sat soaking in the gasoline, waiting for it to remove the paint.
Meanwhile, Norris’s mother was busy hostessing a bridge party.
“Do you smell gas fumes, Marjorie?” one of the ladies said to Mrs. Brantley.
Soon all the ladies smelled the fumes, and Mrs. Brantley began searching through the house to find the source. The closer she got to Norris’s bathroom, the stronger the scent became.
She finally looked in the bathroom and found Norris sprawled out in the tub. He had passed out from breathing the gasoline fumes. Moving quickly, Mrs. Brantley pulled Norris out of the tub and, using a fireman’s carry, hauled him out of the bathroom, through the den where the bridge ladies were, and out into the yard. After a few minutes, Norris revived.
Mrs. Brantley then went back inside and attempted to revive two of the bridge ladies, who had fainted at the sight of Mrs. Brantley carrying ol’ naked Norris through the den.
That was the last time Norris ever tried to take a gasoline bath, but later on he tried something even more daring. He actually ate the “mystery meat” they served us in the high school cafeteria on Wednesdays, which was worse than the Friday meatloaf that had been forced upon us back at Moreland elementary.
Previously, no student had been brave enough to attempt the Wednesday mystery meat. It defied description and categorization. It was a dark, hideous-looking substance which the cooks tried to hide by covering it with gravy. Whenever a student would ask, “What is this?”, the cooks would simply look at each other and smile knowingly. They would never answer the question.
Norris, who had eaten an entire package of crayons in third-grade art class on a dare, became so intrigued by the mystery meat that he actually cut a piece with his knife and fork, which required a considerable struggle, and ate it.
“What does it taste like?” somebody asked Norris.
“Sort of like a blue crayon,” he answered.
We never did learn the identity of the mystery meat, but Norris later reported that he took a piece home and tried to feed it to his dog. The dog ran and hid under the bed and wouldn’t come out until Norris buried the substance in the yard.
Norris would drink anything, too. We were on a camping trip when one of the kids from out in the country produced a pint of his father’s white liquor, known to some as “moonshine.”
“Let me have a chug of that,” Norris said to the kid with the pint.
“You need to strain it first,” said the kid. “It’s got some leaves and dead bugs in it.”
That was no problem for Norris. He took off his T-shirt and strained the pint through it. Then he took a deep pull out of the jar.
When Norris got his breath back, he said, “It ain’t much to taste, but next time I got to paint the garage, I sure could use a couple of gallons.”
* * *
Most of us were quite satisfied with drinking beer. The only problem was obtaining it. Unless your parents went out of town and left some in the refrigerator, or you had an older brother who would buy it for you, or you had an understanding uncle who would bring you out a case from the Moose Club, you normally had to resort to bribing curb boys.
I drank my first beer when I was six. I found a half-full can on the coffee table one morning after my parents had entertained the evening before. They were still in bed, so I picked up the can and drank what was left in it. Having never tasted cold beer, I wasn’t bothered in the least that this was warm. As a matter of fact, I quite enjoyed it, and afterwards I began singing “She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain,” my favorite song when I was six. Then I took myself a long nap.
I didn’t try another beer until I was fourteen. Nathanial, one of the curb waiters at Steve Smith’s truckstop, brought Danny Thompson and me three tall-boy Carling Black Labels out to the back of the truckstop for the price of the beer plus a dollar for his risk and trouble.
I drank my Carling Black Labels faster than Danny did, so I threw up first. We walked home — both of us quite ill.
It was a warm night. We had no air conditioning at my house, but I was still sober enough to remember how cool the inside of a refrigerator feels on a hot summer night in Georgia. So I sat down next to the refrigerator, opened the door, and stuck my head inside on one of the racks.
Then, just as I had done eight years earlier, I took a little nap. It was in that position, sleeping with my head stuck between lettuce and banana pudding in the refrigerator, that my mother found me a couple of hours later.
“Why are you sleeping in the refrigerator?” she asked.
“I was going to get myself some leftover banana pudding,” I answered, “but it was so nice and cool in here that I decided to take a nap.”
I always underestimated my mother’s ability to tell when I was lying.
“Let me smell your breath,” she said. “I think you’ve been drinking.”
I was dead. I let her smell my breath.
“How much did you have?” she asked.
“Two cans of beer that I remember,” I answered. “I’m a little hazy on the third one.”
“Did it make you sick?”
“As a dog.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Curb waiter at Steve’s.”
My mother put me to bed, and the next morning, as I lay hovering between life and death, she brought me aspirin. I expected her to give me a long lecture about drinking, but instead all she said was, “I hope you’ve learned a lesson.”
And I had. I learned never to drink Carling Black Label beer on a warm evening and never to stick my head in a refrigerator unless I’m wide awake.
* * *
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that most of us wouldn’t have gotten involved with drugs even if they had been available. Our parents certainly did not condone drinking, but at least there had been beer when they were young, and most of them knew the appeal it held for adolescents.
But not drugs. They would have been outraged, and they would have cracked down hard on us. And I don’t think we would have rebelled against them, either, because their disciplinary measures were fast and firm in those days.
These were not people to be trifled with. They had learned from the harsh parenting they had received, and they would stop at nothing to be sure that we understood they were in complete control.
My own dear mother had a strict rule that I was not allowed, under any circumstances, to ride on any mechanized vehicle that had less than four wheels. What she had in mind specifically was Dudley Stamps’s motor scooter.
When Dudley was fourteen, his parents bought him a motor scooter. My mode of transportation at the time still required a great deal of pedaling. Dudley would ride into my yard on his scooter and invite me to go for a spin.
“You aren’t going to get on any motor scooter,” my mother would insist. “You could fall off and break your neck.”
I knew I wasn’t going to fall off and break my neck, but I couldn’t convince my mother of that. When I was younger, she had been the same way about my running with a sharp stick in my hand.
“Put that stick down, young man!” she would scream at me. “You might fall and put out your eye.”
For years, I have been following the papers trying to find just one instance of a child running with a sharp stick in his hand and falling and putting out an eye. I have yet to come across one, but I suppose that’s the result of the constant vigil of mothers guarding against running and carrying sharp sticks simultaneously.
I rarely disobeyed my mother, but one day Dudley came by on his scooter and my mother wasn’t home.
“We’ll just be gone a few minutes,” Dudley said. “She’ll never know you went for a ride.”
The thrill of riding on the scooter caused me to lose all track of time. When I returned home three hours later, my mother went into hysterics. She sentenced me to no television for a month, forbade me ever to be in the company of Dudley Stamps again until I had children of my own, and fed me liver twice a week for three months. I considered myself lucky that parents didn’t have the right to give the death penalty in cases of such extreme disobedience.
I get the impression that parents of children today, in most instances, do not rule their disobedient young with the strong hand of discipline and authority that once was used.
Some parents think nothing today of allowing their fourteen-year-olds to hang out at rock concerts. Even if it weren’t for all the known evils (see earlier reference to Elton John concert), attendance at such events obviously is having a detrimental effect on the hearing of today’s youth. Nobody can listen to that much sound without suffering some degree of hearing impairment. Perhaps many of our children already have suffered severe hearing loss, which is why they think the music at rock concerts is appealing.
The schools aren’t nearly as strict as they once were, either. If a teacher spanks a child today, she may have a lawsuit on her hands. But that’s another reason I don’t think many members of my generation would have gotten involved with drugs and dyed their hair orange and exhibited all the rebellious, independent behavior of seventies and eighties youth. If our parents hadn’t stopped us from such, the folks at school would have had a field day with our hindparts.
Not long ago I ran into one of my former teachers.
“It was never the same after your class (Class of ’64),” he said. “You were the last class that took it as we dished it out. I’ve missed you.”
Certainly the children changed, but I wonder if the teachers didn’t, too. I wonder if their growing fears of lawsuits and even their fears of some of the students didn’t cause them to lose their grip.
My old high school principal, O.P. Evans, is dead now. Maybe what killed him was living long enough to see discipline erode in the public school system.
Mr. Evans always began each student assembly by reading from his worn Bible, which was held together by a few rubberbands and the grace of the book’s main character I can hear him now, booming out from the Word:
“‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child ... but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’“
That was Mr. Evans’s way of saying that any student caught chewing gum in study hall would be beaten within an inch of his or her life. O.P had rules and enforced them.
—No gum chewing anytime or anywhere.
—A student caught smoking faced certain suspension. This included smoking on weekends and before and after school. O.P. Evans held that when a student entered his high school, the student belonged to him until graduation.
—No fooling around between male and female students. When walking down the halls with a member of the opposite sex, for instance, a student was to maintain at least twelve inches of space between himself and herself. Those who violated this rule were taken to Mr. Harris’s health class, where he lectured about pregnancy, venereal disease, and saving yourself for your life’s partner.
—Any student missing time from school must bring a detailed excuse written and signed by his parents. Norris Brantley once was out of school for several days at the same time his parents were conveniently out of town. Norris attempted to write his own excuse. It said, “Please excuse Norris from class. He was real sick Oct. 29, 30, 31, and 32.” As punishment, they made him eat two helpings of mystery meat for every day he was out of school.
Mr. Evans’s wife, Mrs. Evans to us, was head librarian. She had rules, too:
—No reading a library book before you washed your hands. Any library book turned in with a smudge on any page would bring punishment for the smudger. I always read library books wearing the rubber gloves my mother used for washing dishes.
—No sound whatsoever in the library. This included throat-clearing, sneezing, coughing, and the sound a chair makes when it’s pulled out from under a table for the purpose of sitting.
—Boys were required to remove watches and girls were required to remove any rings or bracelets while sitting at a library table, in order that the tables not be scratched.
There were no scratches on the tables in the Newnan High Library, the place was quieter than a cemetery at midnight, and there were no smudges on the books. Students took little advantage of what the library had to offer, however; it’s difficult to read Les Miserables, for instance, when you feel like somebody is behind you holding a .45 to your head. Go ahead, punk. Smudge that book and make my day.
The superintendent of schools was Homer Drake. Mr. Drake wasn’t a bad sort, but he had a habit of appearing unannounced in class to check on his teachers. For that reason, the teachers were terribly nervous all the time. They felt the heat of the same .45, I suppose. Consequently, very little of what went on in a Newnan High School class was frivolous. You couldn’t even relax and have a few laughs in shop, lest Mr. Drake walk in and catch somebody actually enjoying themselves. The pursuit of knowledge was serious business to Homer Drake.
For added effect, Mr. Drake occasionally dropped into study hall and walked through the rows of desks pulling on boys’ ears. Not only is it impossible to work out algebraic equations while the school superintendent is pulling on your ear, but it’s also quite painful. One day I noticed that Mr. Drake had very large ears. I reasoned that somebody had pulled on his ears when he was a young man and this was his way of showing us that he was just one of the guys. I would have preferred that he went around goosing us in the belly instead of pulling on our ears.
My high school had traditional instructors, too. There was Mr. Hearn, the shop teacher, for example.
“Boys,” he would begin his classes every year, “the most important thing to remember while working with an electric saw is safety.” With that remark, he would hold up his right hand, which was missing its two middle fingers.
We had a wonderful American history teacher named Miss McGruder. She resembled a frog. In fact, her homeroom was called “The Pond.” One day she called on Harley Doakes to tell her what he had read the night before in the assignment concerning President James K. Polk.
Harley stammered for an answer.
“You don’t know anything about President Polk, Harley?” she pressed.
Harley searched his mind, a brief endeavor, and finally answered, “Was he the one who invented polk and beans?”
Miss McGruder sent a note to Harley’s parents, informing them of how he had answered her question.
“I’m proud of you, son,” Harley’s dad said to him at supper after he read the note. “I certainly didn’t know where polk and beans came from.”
Miss Garland taught geometry. She was very old and about half-blind. All of her students made high grades in geometry, because if a student could make a few straight lines on the blackboard with a piece of chalk, Miss Garland couldn’t see well enough to know whether or not he had solved the problem correctly. She would simply squint at the board for a few seconds and say, “Oh, child, you do such grand work.”
Ronnie Jenkins once drew a picture of some unidentifiable four-legged creature on the board. Miss Garland thought he had dissected an angle. She gave Ronnie an A, even though he thought an hypotenuse was a large animal he saw once at the Grant Park Zoo in Atlanta.
The teacher who ran study hall was Mrs. Carpenter, an ex-WAC sergeant. She allowed no foolishness, either. Students were to keep their eyes forward and on their books at all times ... or give her twenty-five quick push-ups.
In the stillness and silence of Mrs. Carpenter’s study hall one afternoon, my eyes facing my book, I began to hum. I don’t remember why; I just began to hum. The person behind me picked it up and started to hum, too. Soon, seventy-five of us were humming, our eyes still on our books and our mouths closed.
“Who’s doing that humming?” shouted Mrs. Carpenter.
We continued to hum.
“Stop that humming right now, or I’ll send you all to Mr. Evans’s office,” she warned.
When we still wouldn’t quit humming, she marched all seventy-five of us toward the principal’s office.
“I had a good home, but I left, right, left, right....,” she called out as we maneuvered down the hallway.
When Mr. Evans could not convince anyone to admit to malicious humming, he decided to punish us by administering an across-the-board, one-letter cut in citizenship grades on our next report cards. He also assigned us to memorize the Beatitudes out of the Book of Matthew. (The meek shall inherit the earth, and woe be unto the fool who hums in study hall.)
Students in future times would burn buildings, smoke dope in the hallways, pull knives on teachers, have frequent sexual encounters with one another, and listen to strange music sung by strange people with pink hair and safety pins stuck through their earlobes. We just hummed.
Baby Boomers like myself went off to college in droves. Never before had a larger percentage of a generation pursued higher education. More than being what we wanted, it was what our parents wanted, what they had saved and scrimped for, what they had dreamed about.
We want you to have it better than we did, they said time and again, and one way we were going to have it better was to be educated. My mother, a teacher, rarely spent money on herself. She watched every penny that came in and went out of the house, and she hoarded many of them for my college.
There were few people in my hometown who had been to college. Among some of the old folks, there was even the classic resentment for and suspicion of someone who had gone, or was going, to college.
I walked into Cureton and Cole’s one day, and some of the old men were seated around the stove.
“Heard you goin’ off to college,” said one.
“University of Georgia,” I answered proudly.
“Don’t you get too big for your britches and forget where you came from,” I was instructed.
“I won’t.”
“I tell you something, when I come along, there wadn’t no way you could go to college. Hell, my daddy jerked my tail out of school when I was twelve years old to help him bring in the crop. I got an education, but it wadn’t from no college. I got it from behind a mule.”
Somehow, I felt like a traitor. These were my people, my roots.
“I’ve seen a lot of ’em go off to college and get a lot of book sense, but then they still ain’t got no common sense. Couldn’t plow a straight row if their life depended on it.”
“Most of ’em go off to college in the first place ’cause they don’t want to do a honest day’s work.”
“Hey, college boy, what you going to study for? You goan be one of them smart-ass lawyers like they got up in the city?”
I said I wasn’t certain what I was going to study.
“Why don’t you study to be a schoolteacher like you’ mama?” somebody asked.
I said school teaching didn’t appeal to me. Besides, there wasn’t much money in it, I added.
“Money? That’s all they think about today is money, especially them damn lawyers.”
“Hey, you know the difference between a dead lawyer in the highway and a dead possum in the highway?”
“Naw.”
“Dead lawyer ain’t got no skid marks in front of him.”
I said I’d better be leaving, but before I could go, Harvey (Dynamite) Garfield, Frankie’s older brother, walked in.
“Hey, Dynamite,” somebody said, “what do you think of college-boy here going off to get an education?”
“Well, it’s just like I told that smart sonofabitch foreman of mine at the mill,” Dynamite began. “I told him I wanted to get off the third shift and get me one of them day jobs in the office. He said I needed an education for that. I told him I didn’t have no edugoddamncation, but I could whip his ass with one hand. He’s goan see what he can do about my promotion.”
They were still hooting as I walked out the door. I had learned a lot through the years, sitting and listening around the stove. But at that moment, I knew I would never be as welcome again. There was no place for a college boy in the Order of the Stove. At that moment, I also knew my hometown never would be the same again. I was leaving it, and it would stay the same, but I would broaden.
I wondered if I would miss it. I wondered how often I would come back and, when I did, how I would be accepted—as one to be respected because he had seen the lamp of knowledge, or one to be ostracized because he felt that he wasn’t good enough, that he needed to rise above his roots?
I decided two things: (1) No matter how much they had laughed and hooted, no matter what anybody thought, getting an edugoddamncation was important, especially for somebody who couldn’t mug his foreman; and (2) I decided I would not go to law school.
* * *
Stories and legends abounded concerning what a young man could expect once he entered the University of Georgia, the nation’s oldest state chartered university, which was also known — to those back in the hinterlands high schools—as The Promised Land.
I arrived on the Athens campus in September, 1964, one month before my eighteenth birthday, and was assigned a corner room in Reed Hall. My roommate, who had been selected without consulting me, was a French major who smoked Pall Mall cigarettes. In the evenings, he would sit and smoke and listen to Edith Piaff records in the haze of light coming from a blue bulb in his desk lamp.
We lasted a month together. I finally managed to get transferred to a new room and acquired a new roommate — George Cobb, Jr., from Greenville, South Carolina, whose father built golf courses. George and I got along famously.
After two or three weeks together, we decided to redecorate our room. The university had furnished our tiny cubicle with one bunk bed, two desks, and a couple of hard-back chairs. A monk would have been uncomfortable in that stark environment.
George and I rented a truck and went to a used furniture store in Athens. For fifty dollars, we purchased a used sofa, lounge chair, and ottoman. Fellow freshmen came from dorms all over the campus to view our newly refurbished room.
The University of Georgia had all sorts of rules concerning housing in 1964. Among them were:
—No alcohol inside dormitories.
—No females inside dormitories.
—No used sofas, lounge chairs, nor ottomans inside dormitories.
We had not been apprised of the third rule when we decided to redecorate, so it was somewhat of a surprise when the dean of housing paid George and me a visit one evening.
“What is all this?” the dean, a stern man, asked.
“What is all what, sir?” asked George.
“This ragged furniture,” said the dean. “Where did it come from?”
“Farmer’s Furniture, sir,” George answered. “We think it gives the place a homey look.”
“I want it out of here in the morning,” the dean continued.
“Sir,” said George, a business major, “this furniture represents an investment of fifty dollars on the part of my roommate and I. We also feel it is conducive to improving our study habits, because now that our room is more comfortable, we are more anxious to remain here and do our work. Could you give us some reason why we can’t have furniture in our room?”
“I want it out of here by morning, or I’ll kick both your butts out of school,” the dean said.
Farmer’s Furniture gave us only thirty dollars for the used furniture we had bought there five days earlier for fifty. We had, however, learned two new facts:
Fact one: Used furniture depreciates in value at a very fast rate.
Fact two: My butt, which once belonged to my parents and to O.P. Evans, now was under the control of the dean of housing at the University of Georgia.
But despite that unpleasant run-in with university officialdom, George and I were finding out that most of the legends we had heard concerning campus life in Athens were, indeed, true.
The beer flowed freely at Georgia. There was Allen’s and Uppy’s and Sarge’s Place and Harry’s and the Black Horse Inn, formerly the legendary Old South, located just across the street from the campus and just above the bus station. The story was still passed around about the student who spent an afternoon at Old South, then walked outside and got into his sports car that was parked in front of the bar.
As he drove to the first stoplight, his brakes failed and he drove squarely into the bus station, his car coming to rest at the ticket counter. Amidst the screams and the shattered glass, he leaned out of his car and said to the man behind the ticket counter, “Roundtrip to Savannah, please.”
The best place to buy packaged beer in Athens was at Bubber’s Bait Shop, which over the years had become an institution of sorts. Bubber, a gentle man, knew all his student customers by name and welcomed them with the same greeting: “Whaddahyouhave?”
“Six-pack of Blue Ribbon, Bubber.”
“Bottles or cans?”
“Cans.”
“Short or tall?”
“Tall.”
“How ’bout a little Red Hurricane Wine to go with that?”
“I don’t need any wine, Bubber.”
“Ain’t but ninety-seven cents a bottle.”
“Next time, Bubber.”
“That Red Hurricane Wine’ll put hair on your chest.”
“How much for the beer, Bubber?”
“Two-seventy-five with tax.”
“Thanks, Bubber.”
“Come again.”
Bubber likely became quite wealthy selling beer at the Bait Shop, but he always was the same old Bubber. He was a very trustworthy individual, who also served as an occasional lending agency for financially-down-and-out students. Something else nice about Bubber — whenever a student was kicked out of school and stopped to say goodbye and buy a six-pack for the long ride home, Bubber often would drop a bottle of Red Hurricane wine in their sack for free.
“You going to need that,” Bubber would say. “You got a lot of explaining to do.”
Allen’s was a legendary beer and hamburger joint where, the rumor went, a young man could drink all the draft beer he pleased at twenty-five cents a glass, regardless of whether or not he had sufficient proof that he was twenty-one, the legal drinking age in Georgia at the time.
My roommate George and I tested the rumor one fine autumn evening during our freshman year. Three dollars worth of draft beer each later, we were in a rather festive mood, and George began to do his impression of the sound a mule makes. It was pure genius. First, George would make a whistling sound, and then he would do a rather throaty and low “Haaaaw!” It went something like, “Hrrrrrrrt! Haaaaaw!”
I was terribly impressed.
“You try it,” said George.
“Hrrt! Haaaaw!” I brayed.
“More whistle,” said George.
“Hrrrrrt! Haaaaaw!” I continued.
“Perfect,” said George.
After the manager of Allen’s asked us to leave, George decided it would be great sport to go over in front of FarmHouse, a fraternity for agricultural students, and make mule sounds.
“Hrrrrrrt! Haaaaaaw!” went George out front of FarmHouse.
“Hrrrrrrt! Haaaaaaw!” I followed.
After that, we did chickens and goats and cows and ducks, and George had just broken into his rooster (not as good as his mule but still quite effective) when the smiling campus policeman got out of his car and ordered our drunken butts, as he put it, into the back seat.
He drove us to our dorm room and sent us inside, but not before taking our student I.D.’s and informing us that we would hear from the Dean of Men’s office the very next morning, which we most certainly did.
Dean William Tate was a campus institution at Georgia and a gentle person until riled. We had first seen Dean Tate during orientation week, when freshmen men were summoned to his annual briefing about what was considered acceptable and unacceptable behavior of students.
The dean had also told his favorite joke, the one he’d been telling freshmen students for years. It involved Robert Toombs, a Georgia student in the middle nineteenth century who later ran for governor of the state. When the Civil War broke out, Toombs joined the Confederate Army and solicited troops in front of the courthouse in Marietta, Georgia, just outside Atlanta.
“I’ll tell you, men, we can whoop them yankees with cornstalks,” Toombs had said to his listeners in Marietta.
After the war, Toombs came back to that same courthouse for a campaign speech. In the middle of his many promises to his audience, a man spoke up.
“Mr. Toombs,” he said, “I stood right here before the war and heard you ask us to jine up with the Confederate Army. I jined and my brother jined. I got shot in the Battle of Chickamaugua and my brother got shot at Antietam. You told us then we could whoop the yankees with cornstalks. I believed you then, and I paid for it. So why should I believe you now?”
Toombs paused for a few moments and then replied, “Well, we could have whooped the yankees with cornstalks, but the sons of bitches wouldn’t fight that way.”
We had laughed at his story then, but we didn’t crack a smile when we wound up in his office. “What in the hell did you two boys think you were doing last night?” he asked me and George.
“Just kidding around, sir,” answered George.
“You boys got a strange sense of humor,” said Dean Tate. “I take it you had been drinking to excess.”
“We just had a couple of beers, sir,” said George.
“Takes more than a couple of beers to make a man stand outside at two o’clock in the morning cock-a-doodle-dooing. You boys were drunk, weren’t you?”
We admitted it.
“I ought to kick both your butts out of school,” Dean Tate said.
There was a pause as he stared at us over his glasses. I’m certain George was thinking the same thing I was: How do you explain to your parents that you have been kicked out of school for drunken cock-a-doodle-dooing?
Finally, the dean spoke again. “But I’m going to give you boys one more chance. I’m also going to make you a promise: If I see you two roosters in here one more time, you will be only a memory around this institution. Is that clear?”
It was clear.
“We appreciate your faith in us, sir,” said George.
We immediately went to Allen’s to celebrate our good fortune of being able to remain in school. George lifted his first glass of beer to mine.
“To Dean Tate,” he said.
“A fair man,” I answered.
“To FarmHouse fraternity,” said George.
“Cock-a-doodle-doo,” I answered him.
“To our butts,” toasted George.
“To our butts,” I toasted back.
I suppose what has happened to discipline and authority these days is that most everybody has a lot more control over his or her own butt than they used to. But I’m not so certain that’s all for the better.
There have been many times, even recently, when I wished somebody would take charge of mine again, if for no other reason than to render the much-needed service of pointing out to me when I was about to put it on exhibition.