Teaching in Madison

                                        

          Some people know what they’re going to do with their life early on, not so with me.  It probably was sometime in the middle of my sophomore year at Anderson College that I began thinking about the teaching profession.  It kind of came down to what else could I do with the History and Government classes that I enjoyed so much?

          I took a couple of education courses, which I wasn’t too impressed with. The most notable memories from the classes were: how to change the bulb in the filmstrip projector, how to thread the movie projector and how to the run the ditto machine.  If you are having trouble visualizing these mechanisms you will have to get a copy of Ancient Teaching Technology.

          I did my student teaching at Central Jr. High, which included most of the slums of Anderson.  After teaching two classes for five weeks I was declared fit to teach.  While I’m not sure how prepared I was, I did learn a few lessons that would come in handy during my career.

 Lesson number one:   you never know what a junior high student will do. “Leroy isn’t going to be in class for awhile,” another student reported as he came in the door.  “Why not?” I stupidly asked.  “Because when Mary (who was known for her short skirts) bent over at her locker to get out some books, Leroy took his thumb and shoved it up her________. I’ll let you fill in the blank.  During my coaching career I contemplated using that technique with my high jumpers.

Lesson number two:  you never know what a junior high student will say.  As I was teaching my first lesson, a hand shot up in the back of the room.  Feeling pretty good that I had stimulated a question, I asked Billy what was on his mind.  His question was, “Mr. Newell, do you know that your zipper is down?”  Feeling the heat rising on my face I looked down to see that he had made a correct observation.  Later on in my career, I would have just chalked it up to a good technique to keep kids awake in class.  Since I’m on the subject, later on at the Madison Jr. High, we had a German teacher who took great pride in his German and dressing nicely.  One day he came into the teacher’s lounge after visiting the adjoining restroom, with his pink shirttail protruding through his zipped up fly.  Not one to miss a good opportunity, one of our veteran teachers, Vernon, let go with, “Skipper, I believe your Wiener schnitzel is showing.”

Lesson number three came from a junior high colleague Harold, he was always telling us that, “A happy child is a happy child.”  I never did figure out what that meant. In fact I never did figure out a lot of things about Harold.  He also came up with another saying that we invoked quite often, “There is nothing dumber than a kid.”  One time during my prep period I found him in the hallway standing by the closed door of his classroom full of students. I casually asked him what he was doing and he replied, “Things got so bad, I kicked myself out of class.”  Later Harold found another line of work.

I had no luck getting a teaching job the first year out of college.  Jobs were scarce since all those guys who went to college to stay out of Vietnam were graduating and flooding the job market.  Things weren’t looking much better the second year when, towards the end of July, I heard that Madison was looking for a History teacher and more importantly a Head Track Coach.  I quickly sent down an application and the very moment that the principal opened up my letter the principal who I did my piddly junior track job for was sitting in his office.  He must have given me the nod because I was invited for an interview the next day and when we got to Madison they had an unexpected resignation in Elementary.  Nancy and I both were hired and we realized that this must be the place God wanted us to be.

We moved our entire earthly belongings in our two-seat MG convertible pulling the smallest U Haul that they made. Now we couldn’t move Nancy’s closet in that amount of space.

In the early 70’s, like now, everyone was looking for new dynamic ways to improve education.  Our Junior High was built with few walls and the kids didn’t have a set schedule.  The theory was that the students were told what they needed to accomplish and then it was up to them to decide when and how they were going to do that.  We weren’t to build buildings that would interfere with free movement of their minds or bodies.  This was the same time that smoking marijuana became popular.  After a couple years of this, we began to build very expensive walls and taizers were eventually developed.

The saying that, “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach,” comes from someone who never experienced junior high.  When you walk in the door you can feel the hormones bouncing off the walls.  One thing a teacher had better learn quickly is not to take themselves too seriously.  Ninety per cent of the students, probably more like a hundred per cent, are there to have a good time.  Actual learning is something they think  is ok if it doesn’t get in their way of having fun.    The trick is let them think that they are just having fun but in reality they are learning.  It took a while for me to develop it, but eventually my philosophy became, “You have to reach them to teach them.”  That doesn’t mean I was successful in reaching all of them.  Some of them just drove me crazy!  My own saying was that “all jr. high students are either squirrels or nuts, it just depend on the time of the day.”  But the best thing about teaching junior high was that it was never boring, something weird was going to happen almost every day.  If you could just let yourself laugh at the absurdities of this age group and just shake your head when they acted  stupid, it was a pretty good job.

We could write a large book every year on the funny things that happened but I’ll just give you a few.

We had a boy who would ask to go to the restroom and then would never return. It took awhile, but we found out that he would go and sit on the john sometimes for several class periods.  Jim Bogo, the shop teacher, nicked named him, “Red ringer.” unfortunately for him the name and the seat stuck.

 A black kid, named Eric (this was before we had Afro-Americans) was learning how to play Euchre.  When he didn’t play the right card one of the other kids told him he reneged.  The room erupted with cards and chairs flying about and with Eric shouting, “You can’t call me a nigger, you can’t call me a nigger.”  It became a vocabulary teaching moment.  Eric could be a lot of fun but he did have a habit of bugging his classmates. During a standardized test, when everything was extremely quiet, all of sudden there was this loud “smack,” of flesh hitting flesh.  Looking up, I saw Eric holding his hand up to his eye in pain, and I immediately realized that someone had had enough. Since no one was screaming I evoked another lesson that I had learned.  Sometimes it’s best to leave things alone, so I did.  One more story on Eric.  It seems he was short of cash so he took to stealing A. V. items from the library where he was an aide, and selling them on the street.  To keep anyone at home from getting his loot he befriended one of our unsuspecting secretaries in the office to hold his cash.  It was an embarrassing moment for our staff when the story all unraveled.   I think Eric now works for the government.

One of the best things that I got to do at the Junior High was to give the morning announcements when I was running the daily intramural program.  Along with legitimate announcements, I was always sneaking in bogus reports to see if anyone was paying attention.  It was a lot of fun.  When the science class lost Monty the python for about two weeks, I got to give the snake report describing where he had last been seen.  When I found out that one of our faculty members had a phobia about snakes, I made sure Monty had last been seen in the vicinity of her room.  This went on long after the snake had returned to his nice warm home where mice were fed to him regularly.

All teachers have their moments when they lose it and I wasn’t exempt from losing my cool.  Our principal, Larry Cummings, called me into the office and asked me if I had really told one of the Romans boys to “get off his fat ass and get to work.”  I don’t think I’ve ever said that to anyone before but I must have been thinking it, because that’s exactly how it came out. Guilty as charged. I think it was in my mind because every time I saw him in class my mind flashed back to when I had been behind him in the fast lane of the four-lane highway. He was doing 25 mph on his mo-ped and his extra gluteus maximus was droopped over both sides of his machine’s seat. Thankfully Larry was as forgiving with me as he was with the general population.

I lost it another time when I told some kid to do something in the hallway. He took a swing at me, knocking off my glasses.  Messing with my glasses had always been an ignition point from all the way back in grade school and the next thing I knew I had the kid on the floor, pushing his face into the floor. Sorry to say, Larry was there so save the kid’s life.

Intimidation is a handy weapon in the teacher’s arsenal.  Chewing gum in class was one of the major infractions in the 70’s and 80’s – oh, for the “good old days.”  I had my own rule; if I can see actually see gum (bubbles, stretching, noises like popping) then they had to trade for a piece of ABC (already been chewed) out of my gum jar and put it in their mouth. I really can’t remember any kid making the exchange but just having the jar of multi-colored specimens on my desk was a deterrent.  Of course it helped when I flat out lied to them about a kid in the previous class who had made the switch and then pointed to a particular piece of Juicy Fruit.  I still have middle-aged people come up to me in the grocery store reminding me about the gum jar.

Towards the end of my career I had a group of tough kids.  When a boy would make some remark about doing me some bodily harm, I would puff up my chest and say that if I was going to get fired for getting into a fight with a student I was going to make it worth my while.  Most of them looked at me like I was nuts, which was part of the desired effect.  At least I didn’t get as bad as a fellow government teacher about fifty miles to the west of Madison.  He suffered a heart attack in class and when the EMTs lifted him up on the stretcher, a loaded handgun fell out of his pocket.  A later search of desk found another loaded gun for back up.  The good news was that he did recover; the bad news (for him) he was forced into early retirement. Now he does commercials for the N.R.A.

When you stay in the same job for thirty-three years many strange and often terrible events are bound to happen.  It didn’t take long for the tragedies to begin.  During my second year, one misty dark October afternoon, one of our buses pulled out on a highway never seeing the semi truck that struck it broadside, splitting the bus in half. The majority of the five kids killed were from our Junior High.

In the next spring of 1974 our community was decimated by tornados, totally destroying one of our elementary schools and damaging others.  I was trying to hold track practice when we saw the swirling dark mass and was forced to take shelter.  A fellow teacher, Mike Foley, had left school an hour earlier to take his wife to the hospital to deliver their first child.  On the way out of town they saw the funnel cloud bearing down on them, so they came back to town to take shelter.  They survived by getting under the dining room table while the house was destroyed around them.  They eventually did make it to the hospital for a safe delivery. Dennis, one of our science teachers got chased into a church basement by the same tornado only to endure having the building thrown in on top of him, killing several of his fellow refugees and himself being severely injured.

There is nothing worse than coming to work knowing that there was going to be an empty chair because of some heartbreaking event.  I had several kids killed in traffic accidents, and a girl was “accidentally” shot by her boy friend. Probably strangest was when I was at the High School one of my students who played baseball, was hit in the chest with a ball thrown from the outfield, stopping his heart.

In a small rural town like Madison you would think that major crime would be a rarity.   We were always surprised when a criminal event occurred in our beautiful quiet burg.  One of our art teachers kept track of all the murderers he had in class.  By the end of his 30 plus years of teaching the total had grown to eleven, with two of the criminals meeting their end with “Old Sparky.”     

We had three girls from our Junior High kidnap a rival girl from another town and drive around with her in the trunk of their car all night.  Eventually they killed her and then tried to burn the body outside of town.  We had another girl who had her mom killed so she could inherit her money.

Now for the most bazaar. While I didn’t see this personally, I did know all the participants involved in the story.  We had a nice family that lived in a nearby very small community of Lancaster. The head of the family was a fine Christian man who was a lay preacher.   His neighbors asked if they could borrow his pony so they could plow their garden.  Being a man who practiced what he preached, he quickly agreed to the request.  After the pony wasn’t returned in a few days he decided that he better go claim his property.  As he approached the neighbor’s house he was dismayed to see his pony’s hide lying over the fence.  They had eaten it for dinner.  This was the same family that when the school truant officer came to inquire about continual absences, she happened to notice the family dog in the corner of the room nursing a large litter of pups.  What really caught his eye was that in the midst of litter was the infant of the family trying to get his share of the liquid refreshment.  There are other stories about this notorious family but I’m afraid that in telling them I might accidentally slip up and mention their real name. If I did that I’m afraid I would have to go into the Witness Protection Program.

Enough of the tragic and bazaar.  I said earlier that I truly believed that Lord put us in Madison for a reason.  A big part of that reason is the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.  While I had been a member of F. C. A. in college, I had no intention of doing anything with it afterwards, but God had other plans.

          A couple of months after we arrived in town several guys asked me if I would help them get an F.C.A. chapter started.  And so started a twenty five year ministry that became very important to me and my family.  F.C.A. is a great vehicle for athletes and coaches to express their spiritual values.  It gave me chance to get into the homes and lives of students that is almost impossible to do in the classroom.

          We took boys and girls across the country to summer camps where they met professional, college and other high school athletes who were not ashamed of their faith, and lived their lives accordingly.  They brought back to our community the confidence that they too could live the way Christ would have them to.  We were able to bring in some “big name” athletes to give their Christian witness to our community. Archie Griffin came to speak, who up until this writing is the only person to win two Heisman Trophies.  Hall of Famer, Reggie White, also came to speak to us.  I used the philosophy of “the worse they can say is no” when asking them to come. And of course capitalism played its part when we paid their fees.

          I can’t honestly say that all the kids who were part of F.C.A. held on to their values, but looking back, enough did to make the efforts very worthwhile. After twenty-five years the group became harder to keep together.  One of the best reasons was that many of the churches had progressed to full time youth ministers and so the strong Christian kids became more active in their local congregations.  Another factor was that I had lost some of my energy that is needed for the youth ministry.  Any ministry to young people today is sorely needed and I hope someone picks up F.C.A. in Madison.

          I guess since I learned that taking kids out of town with F.C.A. was not that hard and never having serious problems, I got into taking my school classes on field trips.  Taking my Government classes to Indianapolis, our State Capital, to meet their legislators became a regular event.  Some of our kids had never been more than fifty miles from town. When the terrible bus accident occurred across the river from us where a drunk driving the wrong way on the interstate and killed 25 kids in a fiery crash, we went to the trial.  The students found out that it was nothing like what they see on T.V.  One of the results of that horrible accident is that all buses now have an escape hatch on the roof and at least one pop out window on each side.

          My two best class trips were to Washington D. C.  The first one was to the impeachment trial in the Senate of Bill Clinton.  Because it happened so quickly, in a week’s time we organized the trip. We flew to Baltimore, took the train to D.C. and sat in on a rare moment of U. S. History.  The next trip was better planned but circumstances made it a little more difficult.  Four weeks before the trip, planes went into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Air travel stopped for a couple of weeks and then as things began to get better, Anthrax was discovered in D.C., shutting down most of the government buildings. With some parents filled with trepidation we went anyway and basically had the town to ourselves.  People on the street kept asking us what were we doing there.  Fortunately for us, the main attractions opened up the day we arrived. 

          I was always trying to get my students out of their desks and found that one way was to take them on fake field trips, which were far less costly than real ones. One of my favorites was the trip around the pyramid.  I figured out that the Great Pyramid of Gaza would just fit between our Junior High and High School which was mostly parking lot.  I would put on a bathrobe, drape a towel over my head, call myself Abdul Newell and take the class around the imaginary ancient structure.  As we traveled around I would point out various aspects of this “Wonder of the Ancient World.”  Some kids would get into it and ask questions about the construction. Others thought I was plain nuts and would hide their faces when strangers came by and saw this group looking upward, led by a man in a bathrobe pointing into the empty sky.

Once while making our tour, the Goodyear Blimp came right over us and where the middle of the pyramid would have been, then it turned ninety degrees left and disappeared.  Why it came and where it went we never found out.  Abdul chalked it up to those crazy American tourists.

        I also dressed up as a Jewish holocaust survivor named Abraham, and took the kids out in the woods to the railroad tracks that ran near our school.  Abraham would welcome the tourist students to Trabinka, Poland, the site of one of the worst extermination camps. He would explain how as a young boy he had made the train trip to the extermination camp and survived while he watched his family and tens of thousands of other fellow Jews go to their horrible deaths in the gas chambers and then to the crematorium.  Sometimes Abraham could work up a few tears if he really got into it.  Over the years I never had a past student come up to me and say, “I remember what we learned on page 58,” but I have had several recall some of those weird trips.

          I think I got out of the teaching profession at just the right time.  I had a habit of doing anything that popped into my mind, sometimes that wasn’t always best thing in the school setting.  When we were discussing W.W. II one of my students told me about a sniper rifle that his grandfather had picked up during the war.  Without thinking, I asked him if he would bring it in.  The next day I opened the backdoor of the building for his mom and we had a great time examining this fine weapon.  Today I’m sure that the S.W.A.T  team would have surrounded the building and FOX news would have been hovering in helicopters if someone had reported that a weapon was in the building.

          One spur-of-the-moment idea that did work out pretty good started with a lecture on the Sistine Chapel.  While showing pictures of paintings on Michelango’s ceiling, one the students asked, “Why don’t we paint our ceiling?”  I remember my own student days when I was so bored in class I tried to count those small holes in the acoustical tile.  When I couldn’t think of a good reason not to, we began painting our ceiling tiles with historic scenes or people.  One kid who never did a thing in class and I’m not sure he ever graduated, got into recreating “The Touch,” where God reaches out and creates man with his finger.  He mixed his own paint from left-overs that kids brought in from home and it turned out to be a masterpiece.  I took those tiles to the High School when I transferred there and then brought them home when I retired.  They’re now in the ceiling above my pool table in the basement.

          I liked getting kids into doing special projects.  I found that some of the students, who were pretty bad with the book stuff, had other talents if given the chance to be creative.  If they were good, I would try to get them to donate them to the room, which spiced it up quite a bit.  Some of them I kept to for my own personal agenda. A three-foot Jesus on the Cross, made from paper-mâché and a two tablets of the Ten Commandments were prominently displayed.  I kept other projects too just to keep the A.C.L.U. off my back. One project I missed out on was a wonderful original model of the first airplane done by a boy named Orville Wright, and yes he did claim to be a direct descendant of the famed aviator.

          One thing you could count on when you have a thousand kids in a school is that there would be some fights.  For the guys, it was usually mother fights.  Someone would say something about someone’s mother and punches would fly.  Usually after they got in a couple swings they would immediately break it up when a teacher stepped between them.  With the girls it was different.  These confrontations usually revolved around a boyfriend and the ignition point was when bitch and whore was screamed.  We always hated to break up the girl fights because they wouldn’t quit.  The best technique I learned was to grab a handful of hair and start pulling them away.  They always came quickly because it hurt and for my behalf it didn’t leave any marks for them to complain to the administrators and parents about.  You also didn’t mistakenly grab any body parts that you could be sued for later.

          After the Culumbine  tragedy occurred in Colorado where a couple of students killed more than a dozen of their classmates, people began to look at their public schools differently.  Instead of a safe haven, they saw them as places where the worst can happen.

Actually, even after these horrible incidents, schools are still the safest place for young people to be.  Less bad things happen at school compared to if they were home or on the roads.

          Right after that episode happened we had a nut call in a bomb threat against the high school to the police during the night.  The state police came in and did a thorough search with their dogs and pronounced the building bomb free. Just to make sure, all the doors were locked except two and every kid’s bag was searched when they came in the building in the morning.  I was manning one of the doors when I spotted Jimmy, one of my students, coming across the parking lot with a microwave on his shoulders.  Jimmy who didn’t know what the situation was, couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about. He was just going to make some ‘smores  in ag class.   

          Halfway through the morning word came down that we had another bomb threat so we began herding the students to the gym.  Which I thought was dumb because how did they know that that was a safe area?  I had opened some of those lockers before and I was sure that some of them were at critical mass. Somehow word got out in the community that we were being attacked and mothers began arriving, screaming for their babies.  Of course no bomb was found, and it’s still my contention that no bomb threat, phoned into a school has ever gone off in the history of our county. Think about it.

          The next day the police were at my classroom door.  It turned out that one of my students had left after my class, went across the street and called in the threat.  It does my heart good knowing that I may have inspired one of my students to note-worthy things.  Maybe he just thought that the best thing that could happen in my class was for it to blown to bits.  He may have been right.

          I thoroughly enjoyed my teaching career but found that this old dog had trouble adapting to the new demands of the job.  When twenty to thirty per cent of the kids are diagnosed as having some kind of learning disability I found I didn’t have the talent to teach to their individual needs.  I hope the better-trained new teachers will be able to do the job and I’m sure they will.

ANDERSON COLLEGE

 

          I found out about Anderson through the Boys Brigade Magazine.  I can’t remember what attracted me to it, but when I found out that it had no foreign language requirement and not much of a math requirement, it looked like a possibility to me.  At my high school, if you were going to go to college, you were supposed to take College Prep. Since I took the business track, to say the least I wasn’t very well prepared for the college curriculum.  Another draw back was that I didn’t take the SATs. until the spring of my senior year and didn’t do that well.  But for some reason, God wanted me to go to Anderson, so he blinded the eyes and sensibilities of the admission officer and this kid took Horace Greeley’s advice and headed west to Hoosier land.

          My only experience with Indiana before going to school there was to drive through it via the Toll Road on the way to Nebraska.

When my parents dumped out my few belongings and drove off, leaving me on the sidewalk, it was probably one of the loneliest moments of my life.  That didn’t last long since my roommate, Dennis Denton, was a great match.  We were the same height and weight and we even brought exactly the same Harmony guitar to college.  He was from Phoenix and wore cowboy boots, which he soon found out didn’t work very well on icy sidewalks.  Of course being from Phoenix he didn’t do very well with anything that had the word ice, snow or cold connected to it.

 It didn’t take long to develop friendships with other displaced guys from other parts of the country. Since Anderson is a Church of God school, most everyone was coming from a connected church, except me.

When you’re in a freshmen dorm you learn all sorts of tricks that you’ll never be able to use again. Here are a few:  Take a large envelope, fill it up with shaving cream, and rip off the end and stuff the open end under the door of the victim. Knock on the door and when you hear him coming, stomp on envelope.  Another one is to push in the top of the closed door and squeeze a pencil between the door and the jam.  This creates pressure on the opening mechanism, making it impossible to open from the inside.

One of guys we loved to aggravate was Glenn Fredricks.  One night we thought it would be fun to set our wind-up alarm clocks to different hours and then hide them in his room.  Starting at three a.m. every half hour a clock would begin ringing its terror.  Glenn found out the best way to stop the noise was to find the offending mechanism and smash the clock against the cement block wall.  That  became  one of those “one time” pranks.  Glenn used his intelligence to marry a girl whose family was millionaires.  Every once in awhile I see his picture in the Alumni magazine with his latest donation, smiling profusely, seemingly saying, “Look who got the last laugh, you dummies!”

1967 was height of the folk music scene. Hootenannies were the rage, featuring Peter, Paul and Mary songs like; Puff The Magic Dragon and If I had a Hammer.  Dennis (my roommate) and I, joined up with a fellow freshman, Mike Leak, a string bass player, and formed a trio called the Three-Fourths. (We couldn’t find anyone else to make a quartet.)  We had one big performance at the all school variety show.  I don’t know good we were, or could have been, but it all ended tragically when Mike was injured in a car accident.  He ended up being a quadriplegic, and never came back to school. 

I brought my fetish with cherry bombs to campus with me.  It was great fun to plant them around the outside of the dorm on cigarette fuses, then go to a dorm meeting and have them explode while the R.A. told us about dangers of having fireworks on the premises. It also drove the recent Vietnam vets crazy.

One of our friends from Alabama, Dan Perkins, brought his hunting bow and arrow to school with him.  I’m not sure why he brought it but we probably would have got into less trouble if it had been an M 16.  One night we decided to launch cherry bombs over the married housing trailer court from my third floor dorm room.  There were probably eight to ten guys letting out big cheers as we watched the artillery attack on the poor unarmed married housing.  It’s amazing how quickly the cheers can go silent when a knock on the door and the announcement is made that the security man is outside and he desires to come in.

The same bow came into play when one boring day its owner, while sitting on his bed, decided to practice his hunting skills on the door across the hall.  Again we thought it was a good laugh when the arrow went flying across the room, across the hall and buried itself halfway through the neighbor’s door.  It became even funnier when we opened the arrowed door and there stood Tom with his mouth agape.  He had been coming to open the door when an arrow appeared suddenly pointing at his head.

The last escapade with the bow came one rainy afternoon and again feeling pretty bored, I noticed some pigeons trying to stay dry under the eves of the neighboring girls dorm.  I let fly with an arrow (this obviously was not during my Age of Reason) striking the intended target.  Before you get too upset, the pigeon was only wounded and he probably had been in the process of bombing the cars parked below him. One of the guys who wanted to be a doctor sewed up the wound and so began our relationship with Delbert.  He hung out mostly in the shower, which made it easy to clean up after him.  You just had to be careful where you stepped early in the morning when you weren’t quite awake. Delbert later got sick and became a candidate for assisted suicide – think cherry bomb.

1968 was a bad year for the county. The assassinations of King and Kennedy, and the Vietnam War were tearing up our land.  At that time if you went to college you had an automatic deferment –  most everyone else was eligible for the draft.  To fix the inequality they came up with the lottery.  Our birthdays were put in the spinning container (this was before Powerball), and if your date was pulled out early you were going to meet a new relative, Uncle Sam. While I was never averse to going to the war, I found out that I liked college pretty good and was relieved to have my number pulled towards the end. If the war was still going on after college, I figured I could go in as an officer.  Some of the unlucky ones quit school and joined the Navy if they could so the Army wouldn’t get them. The fullback from our football team was called several times to take a physical.  He was a wonderful physical specimen but  his short height and muscular 215 pounds put him on the edge of being overweight for his height. You knew when he was up for the physical by the number of milkshakes he was drinking at dinner.

While many schools were having sit-ins, teach-ins, and other kinds of demonstrations, the best we could come up with at Anderson was a panty raid.  It was pretty tame. All the guys on campus stood under the girls’ windows and hollered “silk, silk.”  The girls thought it was great fun and would throw out some of their well worn garments to the frenzied crowd of males.  Someone must have called the city police that we were burning down the school or something, because they arrived in mass with paddy wagons and dogs.  I used my running skills to disembark and the rest of the night was filled with excited laughing and tall tales.  I’m sure that the school administration was relieved that the end of the semester was only a couple days away. 

When I came back to school that fall I was shocked to find out that I had been identified as one of the ringleaders of the famous raid and that I had been assessed serious penalties. I used the information that had been espoused in my government class and protested to the Dean that my constitutional rights had been violated. He must have seen some value in my arguments because the school backed off.  Finally a class that paid off!

We had several candidates or their representatives campaign on the campus during the ‘68 election, and from that time on I was hooked on politics.  Bobby Kennedy was in Indianapolis campaigning when he got word that King had been shot so we only saw his wife. My first vote, (you had to be twenty-one then), for President was for Richard Nixon who later became the first President to resign.  So much for my judgment of character.  I helped in my government professor’s Congressional campaign.  His competition was in Vietnam and his mother would go to the rallies, set up a picture of her son in uniform, and play a cassette recording from the war hero.  I thought it was hokey but he won, in fact he held that seat for the next 30 years.

Catching the political fever myself, I ran for President of the Senior class.  I knew that the job didn’t do anything and would look good on a resume.  I lost by one vote.  It didn’t help that a number of my friends came up and said that if they knew it was going to be that close they would have gotten out of bed and actually voted.  That’s why I have never missed voting since.

Anderson required us to attend chapel a couple times a week.  We spent way too much time and effort trying to figure out ways of getting out of it.  Looking back with a more mature view, most of the events were of value and we had many distinguished presenters.  Winston Churchill’s son showed up one time and he looked and sounded just like his famous father.  Unfortunately the tea he was sipping must have been 80 % proof.  For a campus that was supposed to be alcohol free it created quite a stir.

Being a liberal arts school we were force to take a variety of classes.  Besides Judo, Golf, Tennis and Bowling, one of my favorites was speech class, especially the demonstration speeches.  One of my classmates woke us up while giving a presentation on dangers of handguns when he fired off a couple of rounds with a blank pistol.  Not to be outdone, I gave a presentation on the advantages of using Right Guard.  I got a few leering looks when I took off my shirt to show the proper technique of spraying my armpits.  The professor’s eyes really bugged out when I demonstrated how, by holding a lighter in front of the spray, you can use the can as a blow torch, just in case you have any welding to do.

1. I also had problems with math and chemistry, but on the whole I did better in college than I did in high school and it took me less time to get through it.

Some high schools and all liberal arts colleges require students take Psychology and Philosophy.  If there are any parents reading this here is one of my few words of advice, “Don’t let your kid take these classes!”  Students like these classes so much that many of them think this would be a great career choice. Wrong! The only people who can make it in these careers are college professors, the rest usually become over educated social workers.  Of course that statement isn’t quite true but I still like to use it.

When times were tough and we lamented of the difficulties of our lives to our track coach, Jim Malcoltz,, he would say, “Men, this is the best time in your life, enjoy it.”  We always snickered something to the effect that if this is the best time then we are not sure we want to experience what was in store for us.  Of course he turned out to be right.  He also gave us this word of wisdom when we were having female problems.  He would say “Men, girls are like buses. If you wait five minutes there will be another one come around.”  I think I used that one several times while raising my boys and during my teaching career.  I thank the Lord every day that the right bus came around and stopped and picked me up.

The most important thing about Anderson was that it was a Christ centered school and that was demonstrated in many ways.  An important marker in my spiritual life came during our annual Religious Emphasis Week.  I can’t remember who spoke but we were challenged to dedicate our future life to God’s service.  After the meeting I walked the streets in the dark by myself communing with God.  I had no idea what He had in mind for me but I committed myself to His service.  I truly believe from that moment on God was directing my path to Madison to have influence on the young people of our community.  This happened through sponsoring the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and working with the young people at Calvary Baptist Church.

Anderson was a lot of fun and I actually learned some things there.  It was a good stop on the road of life.

Jersey Family

 

          Dad had the exact same name of his dad but generally used Everitt except when he was signing something, then he was P. (for Paul) Everitt.

          He was born on a small farm in Beverly in southern New Jersey  on January 21, 1921.  In the late 20s his parents bought a farm on Woodlane Road, outside of Mt. Holly.

          He was the oldest of seven children, four boys (Charles, Bert Jim) and three sisters (Ruth, Joy, Edna).  Can’t say I know much about his early life, since he never talked about it. I do know that he was a sprinter on the Mt. Holly track team, while in high school. That speed must have been handed down the gene pool, since I was always one of the fastest in our school.  I knew my speed was developing when the day came that I could out sprint him.  Of course it was an incentive that he was brandishing a belt with the intent of bodily harm. It’s too bad that no one had invented child abuse yet.  The only thing I know about his high school days was that he took shop and when his class took their senior trip to Washington D. C. one of his black friends couldn’t stay with the rest of the class because the hotel was segregated.  That’s not much, is it.

          Dad was twenty when the most shaping event of the 20^th century occurred, the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7^th.  Since he was the oldest of the seven children, his dad impressed upon him of his importance to the farm, so he took an agriculture deferment.  In 1944 he finally convinced his dad to let him join the war effort, signed up for the Army.  He was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia for his basic training.  In the Spring of 1945 he was shipped to the European theater.  By the time he arrived in Germany the Nazis had just been defeated.   After a couple of months there he was shipped back to the U.S., transported to the West Coast where they were assembling our forces to attack the mainland of Japan.  The military leaders approached this task with great trepidation. If the Japanese would fight so fanatically for islands as we approached their homeland, it only stood to reason that hundreds of thousands of Americans would be killed in the invasion of the main land.  Thank goodness for the Atomic Bomb, it saved a lot of American and Japanese lives.

          Since dad came into the war late, he was going to have to be one of the last ones out.  He was sent to Ft. Robinson Nebraska, where we had a German prisoner of war camp.  There he met a pretty 19-year-old waitress by the name of Ruby Chubb. Things moved quickly in those days and in a couple of months they were married.  I think mom was just inching to get out of Nebraska and it didn’t matter who she was going with.  I say this because at the time she met dad she had already been engaged for a year to an Army guy from North Carolina.  He got out of Army and went back home.  I’m glad it worked out the way it did, I wouldn’t want to have gone through life with tar on my heels.

          Mom’s family had branches that could be traced to coming to this country from Ireland in the late 1500s and distinguished military careers, including Gen. Burnside of the Civil War.  Her grandmother drove a covered wagon through the Sand hills of central Nebraska, claiming a homestead in the badlands outside of Crawford, which is in the northwestern part of the state.  Moms Dad (Fred) severed in WW I and was slightly wounded in battle at the Marne River.  After the war he married Mary Saxon and eventually settled into the metropolis of Crawford, population 2,000.  They raised four children, Wanda, Cecil, Lyle, Ruby and Leo. (Just wanted to see if you were paying attention).  Granddad died in 1944 after a long battle with diabetes, so I never got the chance to meet him.

         One of moms earliest memories was ridding behind a team of horses in a wagon on a winter night, all bundled up with the rest of her siblings as the family returned from a square dance.  Her dad played the fiddle and her mother played the organ.

          Crawford is a small railroad cow town, surrounded by beautiful rock buttes with names like Saddle Rock, Grants Tomb and Lovers Leap.  Its survival has been connected to Ft. Robinson which was originally set up during the Indian Wars and eventually became a Sioux reservation.  Red Cloud was killed there during an outbreak.

          During the World War II, the fort was a training ground for the Canine Corps and eventually became a home for German Prisoners of War.  I guess the government thought that if they escaped, where could they go.  Mom and her teenage friends got caught up in the excitement that the war brought to her small town.  She and her girl friends would go down to the railroad station and wave to the boys who were on the troop trains who were not allowed to get off.  If they threw out their names and address the girls would write to them.  Mom would do almost anything to get mail.

          A couple of months after they were married, mom and dad moved to a small house behind dad’s parents place in New Jersey.  Eventually dad bought several acres next to his father’s land and built his own house.

          The family was a little leery of new girl from the great west.  They were pretty sure she must be part Indian (a this time “the only good Indian was a dead Indian was still the watchword).  They were even more convinced when I was born with darkish yellow skin (jaundice) and jet back hair.

        P. Everitt was very focused in every thing he did.  Everything was black or white and this type of person has little tolerance with those who aren’t like that.  He never could watch much T.V., unless it was a real story, fiction was not enjoyable.  Sitting around doing nothing would almost kill him.  Later on in life he must have heard a preacher or someone else he respected suggest that he needed to read something else beside the Bible.  From then on he made a vow to read a book every month, mostly biographies.

          Before the war he worked at the Wall Rope factory and returned to work there when he came back with his new bride.  He continued there for over 25 years eventually becoming a Forman.  He wouldn’t let the company take any money from his check for retirement because he truly believed the Lord would return before he died.  While he was wrong about that, he never had to worry about money in his retirement since he worked as a painter until the day he passed on.  I’ve met a lot of people who said that they believed the Lord was going to return in their lifetime but he was the only one that I’ve known who actually lived his life like he believed it. He would never do anything questionable, like go to a movie,  because he was sure that if he did that would be the moment of the Lord’s return.

          On one of the trips to Nebraska, Dad as I’ve said before, couldn’t stand to do nothing, began running around the high school track.  This began a wonderful love affair with running that just fit his personally.  Here was something that could keep you busy, something that you could keep detailed records, and something that would keep you from getting fat, which he took it as a sign of laziness.  He loved that everything about running was measurable.  Including the time it took to run, how far you went, what place you got and even the weather conditions.  And of course he wrote them all down in his running diary.

          Just to digress on the record keeping, whenever gas was put in the car, the amount, mileage and brand had to be recorded in a small book in the glove compartment.  Whenever a trip was taken by anybody the first questioned asked would be “what kind of mileage did you get.  My Uncle Harold who lived next to us, claims that every once in while he would add some gas to dads car just to hear him brag about the great mileage he was getting.  Before I was old enough to get my license I would take the car out for a spin when my parents weren’t home.  But since I was paranoid that dad always knew what the number was on the odometer, I would disconnect the cable. I think he made the politicians pass a law that makes that illegal and almost impossible to do now.

          Dad became a local legend with his running.  Through the sport he became friends with the Lewis’s who were the parents of Carl.  He watched Carl as a kid come up through the age group completion to eventually become one of finest sprinters in the history of the world, winning nine gold medals. He continued to increase his mileage until he was able to compete in marathons and ran Boston several times.  But that wasn’t enough of a challenge, when he found out they were running a 50 miler in Washington D.C. he had to go for it.  He not only finished the race but also took an hour off the record for his age group. I think it took him about nine hours.  When he moved to Madison, he developed a diverse group of friends all of which had great respect for a fellow competitor who would never quit.

          He was good at multi-tasking.  When he ran he began carrying a plastic sack to put in aluminum cans which he would donate the proceeds to Habitat for Humanity. If he found money, it was considered money from God and would go to missions.  He found that if he went by the fast food drive-thurs when they were closed, he might pick up twenty or thirty cents.  This once led to a serious confrontation with mom.  They were invited to our house one Christmas morning to open presents, but he didn’t want to come because all the fast food establishments were closed and it would be a good day for finding the mother lode.  Mom not only stomped her foot, but shook her finger at him which meant his plans were cooked.  After the presents were opened he went to change into his running gear hoping that no one had beat him to the hope fore bonanza.  A couple of the boys and I got in the car before he got out of the house and started for town.  We proceed to throw coins in every drive through on the hilltop.

When he got home, he could hardly contain himself. “Look,” he exclaimed!  He lined up across the kitchen counter all the coins he had found according to denomination.  “ And look at these, two fifty cent pieces, I’ve never found a fifty cent piece,” he beamed!  He was so thrilled, we didn’t have the heart to tell him about the seeding operation, and we never did. I hope in heaven he’s telling all the saints about his big day running through the fast-food establishments.  

          Dad’s single-mindedness wasn’t always an attribute, some would say that he was closed minded, and many times they would be right.  He had real problems with fat people.  As far as he was concerned they were only that way because they ate too much and didn’t exercise like he did.  He learned the hard way that overweight people didn’t care for him telling them about their conditions and how they got that way.

  Another example of his single-mindedness was when he shot a squirrel just before Thanksgiving.  He wanted mom to cook it and add it to the feast.  Mom put her foot down and said “no.”  Again Dad knew when she did that his request was a lost cause. Not to be deterred, he decided to go another way, stealth.  She was surprised when he volunteered get up at 4 am and get the turkey in the oven including stuffing the turkey.  Boy was she flabbergasted when they carving time occurred, dad pulled out from the cavity of the turkey a fully cooked squirrel. I guess we could have called it a squirkey.

       P. Everitt’s word was always good. Early in his life he committed to keeping his body pure, so alcohol and tobacco never touched his lips.  After you know what both have done to health of the people who use them, he doesn’t look like such a prude. I don’t think any of his kids have had any problem with either substance, at least their not telling.

          My parents believed in following the Word of God.  While I don’t remember them quoting the verse in Proverbs about withholding the rod spoils the child, I know they believed in it.  We had a yardstick onto of the door jam in the kitchen, though not used much, it’s threatening presence was enough to strike fear.  Once I had this bright idea that if I raised my foot a right moment the “board of correction,” would end in destruction and cause a distraction, (okay I’m done with the rhymes).   As with some of my other ideas I found out my solution just made the situation more intense.

Dad loved to support missionaries in prayer and monetarily.  His uncle Bob and aunt were in on the ground floor at Faith Academy, a missionary school in the Philippines.   We didn’t find out till after he died that he had financed a new car for the Deans, who were missionaries in Alaska. He couldn’t have been prouder than when his son Marvin and his family went to serve in Indonesia.  He never got to know that his grandson is now a missionary to the Muslims, and he has several others in full time ministry.  Or then again maybe he does.

  He got up at 5:45 everyday and you could count on seeing him at his desk at 6:00 having his devotions.  Ever since he was saved as a boy at a Billy Sunday tent meeting, his number one goal was to please the Lord.

Another way he instilled Christianity into his family was the after dinner devotions. Right after we ate we would go to the living room for a time of him reading the scripture, and mom reading a short devotional.  Then we would go to our knees and pray aloud, depending on whose turn it was.  I think all four of us kids learned valuable lesson about worshipping God even though we may not have be so excited about it at the time.

          It didn’t take much to please Dad. Two days before he died he came home from a men’s meeting at Rykersridge Baptist Church, all excited because they let him take up the offering.  His old home church, Easton Union, never took up an offering; the people just put their money in a box in the back on their way out of the sanctuary.   If you explore what that church has done over the years, especially with missions, you will see that that system  worked very well.

          I’ve already spent some time on Mom’s early years growing up on the Great Plains of Nebraska.  Living during “The Depression,” certainly shaped her future life.  Her family moved into town and bought a house when they received a bonus check for her Dad serving in W.W. I.   Her dad made a living with his team of horses, mowing roads and eventually got the job of picking up the mail at the railroad and hauling it out to Fort Robinson.  His last few years were spent in hospitals in Denver and Hot Springs looking for relief from his diabetes, which eventually took his life in 1944, the same year mom graduated from high school.

          When mom came to New Jersey, she did her best to fit into a large, fairly closed family.  She did this by producing children, which everyone else was doing after the war and becoming heavily involved in Easton Union Church.  She had learned to play the piano and organ from her mom and use her talent in the worship services. She also tried to past those skills to her children and was only half successful, with Carolyn and Don.  She did get all of us interested in music enough that we all played some instrument and were all in the band.  Even in her eighties, she still plays for Rykers Ridge Church and on occasion will sub at other churches.

          When the kids were all in school, mom decided to go also as a helper in the cafeteria.  Fortuneally for both of us, I was already gone to the high school.  With her expertise in budgeting, people skills and reliability, she was soon made the manger, a position she held for almost twenty-five years.

          I’m not going to say much about my siblings, they’re all capable of writing their own stories and I’m sure can do a better job at it.

          Marvin survived the baseball Charlie horses, married his childhood sweetheart Peggy, and became a missionary to Indonesia.  Later he got his doctorate and became a professor at Moody Bible Institute and then went on to head a large missionary organization.  I did save his life when he was drowning at Evans Plunge in Hot Springs South Dakota.  You would think that when giving his testimony he would say that his brother saved his earthy body and Jesus saved his eternal soul, but I never heard it.  The one thing he’s done that I am extremely jealous about is he has written a book that was actually published by Moody Press and has sold very well.  It’s good, go to Amazon.com. to get your copy, Martyrs Grace.

          Brother Don almost got as far away from New Jersey as you can get, Portland Oregon.   He went there to help start a church (I’ll let him tell you about it) and to pay the bills, got a job with the county highway department.  If you know Don, it doesn’t surprise anyone that he went from picking up road kill to becoming a top manager in the County Highway Department.

          Little sister, Carolyn, or as we called her, Curllin because of her golden curls, or more probably because that’s just the way we said it.  I pushed her in the baby stroller in the Rancocas baby parade which she or should I say, WE won. She went on to work for Campus Crusade in California, where she met Cal who was also on staff.  They married and eventually moved to the D. C. area, started a video production company and produced four boys.  Someday she’ll write her book about raising those boys and you’ll won’t want to miss it.  She and Cal helped started a church and after many years of hard work it has blossomed into a dynamic work. Curllin at this time is the children’s director.   

          My grandfather Paul Everitt Newell married Abertine  Kahlert  a girl from Philadelphia.  We think they met at Grand Pops vegetable stand by the Ben Franklin bridge in South Jersey. They began their life together on a small farm just outside of Burlington, N. J.  In the 20’s they then bought farm land on Woodlane Road, where they moved in a building that had been a latrine from Fort Dix and moved on to the property. I wonder what you call kids who were raised in a latrine. Any ideas?There they eventually housed all seven kids.  Grand pop later ordered a kit house from Sears and put it together during the 30’s.  No small feat since that was the heart of the Great Depression. It was and still is, a great four bedroom, two-story house with a full basement and attic. He drove a school bus to bring in cash.  He later worked for the county.

          Near as we can tell Grand pop and Dad both became Christians at the same Billy Sunday Tent Crusade in Mt. Holly. He helped start Easton Union Church on Fostertown road, that meet in an out-of-business Quaker Meeting House.  Since it didn’t have a Sunday School until years later, he went to a Methodist Church in Rancocas just a couple of miles away. He would take me there for Sunday School and then over to Easton  (about seven miles away) for worship services.

          In 1953 he sold the farm to my parents and he and Granny moved to Sandy Hill in Maryland, a camp run by George Palmer. Palmer started out as a tent preacher in S. Jersey and he actually moved into the old latrine house for awhile after the Grand Pop and family moved into the new one.  Palmer eventually became a radio preacher of great esteem in the Philadelphia area and Grand pop became the caretaker of his camp for boys. My grandparents eventually retired back to the South Jersey area were he worked for a government program called Green Thumb.

          Grand pop was a man of principals.  He didn’t want his mind to be polluted by beer commercials on T.V. so he would set right next to the box and when the offending commercials came on he would lean over and turn down the sound.  Wouldn’t he have loved the invention of the remote control?

          Granny had a stroke and spent the last ten years of her life in a nursing home.   Grand pop died at the age of 87 of cancer.  They are both buried in Easton’s cemetery next to the church they help start.

HITCH-HIKING

 

Hitchhiking was a very normal way of getting around during the 60s.   I guess I got into it during my freshman year of high school when I first went out for track.  We lived about five miles from the Rancocas Valley Regional H. S. and I knew it would be a burden on my mom and dad to come a get me, so the thumb became the solution to the problem.  It was an easy thing to do.  I just had to walk a couple of blocks to Woodlane Road and from there it was a straight five-mile shot to the house.  Since there was a lot of traffic headed to Levittown, (later renamed Willingbrough) which was just a mile beyond our house, I usually didn’t have much trouble getting a ride.

From a way to get home from school, hitch-hiking gradually expanded to getting to any other place that I didn’t think my parents would take me to. A couple of friends and I thumbed it to Philly just to see if we could and found out that we could, of course my parents were gone that day.  Since you had to be seventeen in Jersey to get your license it seemed liked that day of independence would never arrive.  I can remember marking off on my wall calendar the days, starting with five hundred and thirty five, to that important birthday

My first big trip was in 1966, just before my senior year in high school.  My cousin, Dan (we called him Peach, it had something to do with his haircut) Luethy, and I somehow convinced our parents to let us hitch to Miami Beach.  To put it in prospective, we weren’t much younger than the guys who were being sent to Vietnam and whose lives really were in danger, at least that’s how we sold it to our parents.  Originally we wanted to go to Houston to see the newly constructed Astrodome. At that time some were calling it the Seventh Wonder of the modern world.  When we figured out we couldn’t make it there and back in the week that we had available that summer, we settled on Miami.

We took off with a small suitcase and sleeping bags and with our moms’ belief that they would probably never see us alive again.  Neither one of us ever did figure out how we got permission to go.  My parents dropped us off on Route 1 in Philadelphia, which according to the map, would take us all the way to Miami.  That first day we made it to Raleigh, North Carolina.  Our accommodations that night were a city park.  We didn’t sleep very well because the police kept running through the area trying to keep guys like us out of there.

At first light we continued our journey down Route 1.  I don’t remember many of the rides those first few days except for one in the mountains of South Carolina.  This scruffy looking guy, who thought he was involved in a road race, gave us an exciting ride, all the time complaining about his “knocked up” girl friend.  Since I had never heard that term before, I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but it didn’t sound good. I think that guy probably went on to be a NASCAR driver. That night we splurged and got a hotel in southern Georgia.

In the morning when we came out of our room I had a hard time convincing Peach on which direction was south.  He wasn’t real good on his directions.  He must have overcome this disability later on because he became a long-distance truck driver and owned his own trucking company.

We got into Florida in the middle of the morning and started to look for signs for Miami.  Little did we know it was going to take all day and most of the night to reach our destination.  Because of the way our rides were taking us, we headed down the west side of the peninsula.  Just after dark we got left off out in the boondocks just north of Sarasota.  The town consisted of one streetlight and a weathered clapboard bar across the street.  The bar had two doors, over one of which hung a sign “Niggers Only.”

We stayed under that light for what seem like a long time with very few cars going by.  After a while,out of the distinctive door, staggered out a very large, very drunk, black man.   He saw us standing there and decided he wanted to make some new friends.  And we were very friendly!  In the middle of our friendly conversation a pick-up stopped and the driver hollered out to “hop in boys.” So all three of us jumped in. As we were ridding in the bed of the truck, Big Tom, as he called himself, had us feel the long scar that he had received in a knife fight on the side of his face.  Between hiccups and the wind blowing in our face, he told us how white people had treated him bad and then he wanted to know what we thought of him.  We vigorously assured him that we thought he was one of the best persons we had ever known.  Well, that agreed so much with Big Tom he announced that we since we were so nice and friendly toward him he had decided that he was going to travel with us and meet our people.  We looked at that massive body and the long scar and told him that we thought that that was a “great idea”.

When we got into Sarasota, our ride pulled over and the three of us jumped out.  Tom wanted to help carry our suitcase but I convinced him that he didn’t need to do that.  With our possessions in-hand, we took off down the road as fast as two scared white kids could go.  I was feeling pretty secure about our running ability since both of us had been on the track team the previous spring.  My confidence began to slip when I noticed we were running through a black neighborhood (remember, this is 60s – the height of this country’s racial tensions) with a drunk black man hollering “hey guys, wait up”!  After a couple a hundred yards I got up enough nerve to look back.  To our surprise big Tom was still lumbering along behind us.  We both found a new gear that Mr. Hoagland, our track coach, had never seen.  When we finally ran out of gas, Tom had disappeared and we flagged down a bus that took us across the Everglades and into Miami.

The stay in Miami was uneventful.  The hotel, right on the beach cost $6 a night and we ate a large breakfast every morning for .99 cents.  Peach was all excited when he learned to swim in the saltwater pool.  Unfortunately he almost drowned when he later tried out his newly learned skill in a regular pool back in Jersey.

Our trip home was fast and furious.  We caught a ride with a

 couple of guys from New York, who were driving a Pontiac Tempest convertible.  They were under the impression that the speed limit and the interstate number (95) were one and the same.  We sat in the back, where we started a new fashion, rap around glasses.  We didn’t dare turn our heads fearing our specs would go flying off into the southern countryside.  Through the roar of the wind we learned that our two new compatriots didn’t have enough gas money to make it home.  We chipped in four bucks, claiming that’s all we had, which was enough to buy a full tank. Gas was thirty cents a gallon then. Their well thought-out plan for the rest of the trip was to stop and siphon gas out of parked cars.  Fortunately for us, that plan came to an end in Georgia when State Troopers pulled us over for exceeding the sound barrier.  As we followed the officers to the county jail our benefactors were lamenting how they should have used the rifle in the trunk to get them out of the situation. 

      When we got to the jail, Peach and I weren’t sure what

was going to happen to us.  Using the same technique that worked before, we grabbed our stuff and quickly walked across the parking lot. We were relieved that no one hollered, “Halt”, or shot a warning round above our heads.

In a few minutes we were headed north again on interstate 95 with a young couple that was mad at each other.  I never did know the basis of their hostility.  It may have been because he stopped to pick us up.  I really think it started before we got in and he was looking for a way to keep from getting an ear-full from his angry wife all the way up the east coast.  We didn’t care, we had a ride for the next fifteen hours and they dropped us off within a mile of our house.  It took us three days to get to Miami and twenty-seven hours to get back.

Hitchhiking pretty much came to an end once I got my license and my Hog, a red Honda 50. Driving that machine was a lot more dangerous than thumbing.  I got hit twice. Once when an old lady decided to turn in my path, I got to fly like Superman across the street, I didn’t land on my feet though like the super hero did.  I got a free ride to the hospital, a new Honda a couple of nice sized bruises and a good story out of that one.

Hitch-hiking came back into vogue again when I went to college.  While my parents took me to Anderson College in Indiana, it became my responsibility to get back and forth for the next four years.  With interstate 70 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike it wasn’t too hard.  I could usually make it in less that 15 hours, I think my record was less than eleven.  Because of the hippies on the road I tried to look like a clean cut college boy and always wore a tie.  I had, and still do, a small suitcase with N J painted on one side and Ind. on the other.  It worked pretty well as long as I had the right side facing the right direction.

All kinds of people would pick me up.  Salesmen who wanted someone to talk to, a few truckers (most companies had a policy against it), and every once in awhile a young lady, but mostly it was young men.  On the Pennsylvania Turnpike my technique was to ask people as they came out of the restaurant if they were headed my way. It kind of put them on the spot since they were all headed my way. Late one night during the Thanksgiving break, some guys from Purdue gave me a lift across the state.   Three weeks later during the Christmas break I was at the same restaurant about the same time of night and the same Purdue guys came by and again took me across Pennsylvania.  You math wizards can figure out the mathematical possibilities.

Once I asked a group of guys with rather long hair for a lift and they said sure and led me to their bus that was parked in the rest area.  Turned out they were a rock band named Music Explosion and they had just recorded their one and only hot single named “Little Bit of Soul.”

I never really had much trouble out on the road.  Rarely got stuck anyplace except once in January in the middle of Ohio late at night with the wind blowing about 30 miles per hour.  I was with my roommate, Dennis Denton.  I thought that the State Troopers  were going to find our frozen bodies the next morning.

The most tense time was when I was traveling the night after Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated and many of the cities were having riots. Almost everyone who picked me up thought I was crazy for being on the road.  It worked out all right for me, each ride thought they were doing the Lord’s work by keeping some white boy from getting killed.

One of the last of my trips was when I decided I just had to see my girl, Nancy, that weekend, so I decided to cut Friday classes and headed out that Thursday night.  I didn’t get to Westchester College in Pa. until late afternoon and couldn’t wait to see the surprise in her She already had a date for that night for a concert and sent me on my way.  I fixed that situation by becoming engaged to her that summer and she transferred out to Anderson, no more broken dreams.

The hitchhiking days officially ended when my uncle gave me an old French Citroen.  It was shaped like a cigar and had numerous odd features.  The one l liked the best was you could turn the windshield washers sideways so when things got boring a trip to a crowded sidewalk was a lot of fun. The victims couldn’t figure out where the water was coming from.  Another feature was  the front seats folded all the way down which we found could create quite a stir.  The driver could lie down and steer while the front seat passenger gave directions on when to turn and brake. It was kind of tricky.  Those seats were also good for watching the submarine races.

If I’m by myself, I’ll still stop for the occasional hitch-hiker but I don’t get many opportunities any more.

Next Month:   Jersey Family

“My Life” Autobiography Of Ben Newell

For the next few months I will post a new chapter of my autobiography. You might be wondering why anyone would be interested in my life and I would respond back to you, “Now that’s a good question.”  You might also question what’s my connection with Bill Clinton, and I would respond, “Now that’s another good question.”  For the answer to these and a lot of other “Good Questions,” You will have to read the exciting saga of “My Life.”  If you chose not to read it, I wouln’t blame you!

Chapter 2   “Growing up in New Jersey”  is Up.

Upcomimg Events 2008

November 3rd   Switzerland  County Historical Society, program and book signing.

Nov. 11  Jefferson County Library   Program and book signing 6:30

Nov. 22   That Book Place (on Clifty Drive)  book signing 12 to 3

Dec. 12  Village Lights Bookstore  7-9 presentation at 7, book signing

Dec. 20  Waldon Books, Clarksville Mall  book signing 2-4

Welcome To Ben Newell’s Website

 MEDAL OF HONER WINNER  SAM WOODFILL