It Ain’t A Parade Without The Band !

 

            While at Houston, Holiday Parades were the bane of my existence.  When I first arrived, we marched in the Bartlett, Collierville and Germantown Holiday Parades.   We gave up Bartlett when they started scheduling their parade on top of the Collierville parade.  We quit marching in the Collierville parade twice for two separate reasons.  Back in the day, they did the parade around the square in Collierville.  It was so crowded that eventually a Shriner on a motorcycle ran over a pregnant lady (sad but very true).  Our band had grown so large and the street there was so narrow that we were literally on 3 sides of the square at one time.  Not only is that not conducive to a good performance – it is not a lot of fun. The year after the Shriner incident, I didn’t sign us up for the Collierville parade.  You would have thought I had taken a poop in the town square (more on poop, later).  Our not going became a huge deal.  The town’s Mayor (Herman Cox) called and threatened to “withdraw town support” if we did not come.  When informed that Collierville had never done anything to support the band, he “hrumphed” and hung up.  Then the Principal (Clayton) and Superintendent (Mitchell) called to “encourage” our attendance.  I offered to let THEM take the band if they could get the kids to go.  They both took a hard pass.  So that year we only did the Germantown parade (more on that parade, later).  

 

            After that year, the powers that be decided to move the parade to Byhalia Rd. to better accommodate crowds and performers.  The lawsuit filed by the lady who was run over by the Shriner was, I am certain, a mitigating factor.  I told the Mayor that we would give it another try.  Keep in mind that I live in Collierville and really enjoyed every chance I got to take my relatively enormous band to their parade to be compared with the Collierville band.  The athletic rivalry between Houston and Collierville was not the healthiest and, for whatever reason, some Collierville kids took it out on my band at the parade.  Now, even though we call them Holiday parades, they are essentially a moving celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus.  As such, kids in a marching band should not have things thrown at them, be spit upon, and (as best we could tell) have bass drum heads shot at with BB pistols.  Since all the Collierville kids dressed in Christmas camo, they were hard to catch. Needless to say that was our last Collierville Holiday Parade.

 

            The headache caused by the Germantown Holiday Parade was for different reasons.  Germantown is full of folks who like to be in charge of things.  This generally entails telling other folks why they can’t do something or making decisions without asking those affected if the decision works.    When they moved the parade to the second Saturday in December, they moved it onto a well-established date for ACT testing.  Out of town band participation dropped to almost none while pain and suffering for kids trying to take the test increased exponentially.  School folks were not a part of that decision.  

 

            They decided to alternate which of the local high school bands would lead the parade.  Because the parade has every politician in town in a convertible car with a poster board sign, it takes forever.  No high school kid who took the ACT earlier in the day wants to stand in the cold for an extra hour for the right to march at the end of the parade – all the while dodging horse poop.  Not only is that not fun, helping provide an audience for politicians serves what community purpose?  And speaking of cold, on the years where it was particularly cold, I would ask to keep the buses at the beginning of the parade so that the kids could sit on them and stay warm.  The first time I asked for this consideration, they said no.  A rather snooty lady in a golf cart told me it would not be appropriate (?) to have the school buses drive down the EMPTY parade route just before the parade began to get to the end of the parade.  Simple solution – we left and went home.  After we got to the school, some of the kids and I paraded through the neighborhoods for a while playing an arrangement of “Angels We Have Heard On High” coupled with the occasional “Louie, Louie”!  Germantown’s future solution to the too cold or too wet problem was two-fold.  They let us keep buses if we asked and they set a “rain date” for the parade to the following Sunday afternoon.    I’d would never have asked kids to march on a Sunday but, thank goodness, it never came up.

 

            So, what did we learn from all of this?  Maybe we learned that things like community parades need to have a fun quotient. Maybe we learned that folks who make decisions need to gather all of the relevant opinions and facts before deciding. Maybe we learned that “Keep your head up” and “Look out for horse poop” are conflicting commands.  What I learned was that, no matter the obstacle, the kids I taught would give great effort and find some way to have fun regardless of circumstance!  

We Will – We Will – Rock You!

We Will – We Will – Rock You!

            When I first came to Houston H.S., the budget for band, provided solely by the band booster organization, was much less than it had been at Shadowlawn Middle School (my previous job).  Houston boosters had been raising about $25,000 a year and I had proposed a budget of $125,000 a year.  This led to much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the parent led band boosters which, eventually, led to a new group of booster officers.  The “big money” raising parents after this transition were Molly McNally, Richard Hynes, and Sharon Kowalkie (Scheel family matriarch).  Before I came to Houston, the boosters mostly raised money by selling stuff.  They sold fruit, light bulbs, pizza kits, candy, had bake sales, etc….  I encouraged them to think bigger and maybe try to raise money without selling stuff (to parents) that they mostly didn’t want.  

Molly became quite successful soliciting businesses around town to donate big-ticket items for an auction.  We then put together either a dinner or (off campus) a wine and cheese party and asked community members to come bid on the stuff she had collected. On our first effort, we made about as much as the boosters had raised in the previous year.  Dick Hynes was my first introduction to a capital campaign where we would come up with a list of equipment needs and ask local philanthropists and businesses to either buy some stuff or donate to the purchase of some stuff. This was how we got our first set of real drums and our first vibraphone and real marimba.  Side note:  about 3 weeks after getting the vibraphone, either Steve Stires, Jason Hartsfield, or Kevin Moore flipped it out of the back of a moving pickup truck while moving it and, though it still played, much of the new was worn off!  

Sharon volunteered to be the coordinator for our first Rock-A-Thon. For those reading who are unfamiliar with the premise, we asked kids to solicit pledges or outright donations from folks based on the kid rocking in a rocking chair for 12 hours straight.  We let them out of the chairs for 5 minutes every hour to either get a snack or go to the restroom.  At the first Rock-A-Thon, the kids mostly played cards and board games.  By the time I had left Houston, kids were bringing computer or video game consoles hooked up to big flat screen TV’s, watching multiple movies, and doing karaoke or listening to live bands.  Still, for the most part, the more memorable moments at Rock-A-Thon involved more than the technology.  I remember:

One year at Rock-A-Thon it snowed.  During the five minute break, Renee Reyle, Katie Sauer and Miranda Lewis decided to strip to their underwear and run around the flagpole in front of the school to “see what that felt like”!  Keep in mind, it was 2:00 a.m.  The morons forgot to block the door open and it locked behind them.  We were having the Rock-A-Thon in the P.E. gym and, when they didn’t show up in their chairs, I went looking.  When I got to the band room, I saw a pile of clothes on the floor and heard banging on the outside door (old band room).  Renee was yelling at me to let them in but not to look!  Fearing for my job should anyone ever find out what was going on, I kicked the door open and ran for the gym.

One year, we held Rock-A-Thon about one week after the Lord of the Rings movie, “Return of the King”, came out in theaters.  I had a band kid who said they could get it for us to watch.  While I was leery, I had grown used to Katie Eggleston’s mom providing new movies for us to watch as she worked for Malco.  I thought this kid just had some connections. Not only were all the kids looking forward to this, I had some parents come who had put off seeing it in the theater to watch it free in the band room.  The kid had burned the movie to a DVD and gave it to me to play.  It was “Return of the King” all-righty…… with Russian subtitles.  I had my entire band and many parents watching an illegal and pirated version of the movie.  There is only one thing to do in that circumstance…… pass the popcorn!

Lots of little things:

1.             Lonzi Pink’s mom guarding the door to keep folks inside.

2.             Michael Wilson going to his office to sleep.

3.             Lori Tingle video taping Kathy Tuberville asleep and snoring “Hard”.

4.             A mom who showed up at 8:00 a.m. with 200 donuts (Rock-A-Thon ended at 7:00 a.m.).

5.             Leaving at 7:00 a.m. (as the Rock-A-Thon ended) with Spencer Nesvick to go to the WTSBOA band director’s manadatory meeting in Jackson, TN.

6.             The year it was canceled because of no water in the school and the kids still turned in donations in excess of what we had budgeted.

7.             The worry on the faces of freshman parents as they dropped off their kids to spend the night and the joy on those same faces when their kids had survived!

8.             Watching freshman boys eat free food like there was a global famine on the horizon…. and then turn green about 2:00 in the morning.

9.             Telling “young love” that one person to a rocking chair is the maximum allowed.

10.         Watching parents who volunteered to chaperone drift off to sleep one by one.

Just to show where the inspiration for a Rock-A-Thon came from, here is a picture of me, and some friends, from my first time in 1974.  Yes, the rocking chair had been invented by 1974!

With all that is going on right now, I hope kids in band now get to experience these sorts of “bonding” type things.  Very few people go back to a high school reunion to reminisce about conjugating verbs or solving the quadratic equation.  But watching Spencer Lane sing Taylor Swift’s “Love Story”……… Priceless!!

Statute of Limitations

Statute of Limitations

            I checked, and criminal exposure for the activity I am about to discuss has passed.  Since none of the people involved give a hoot about public embarrassment….. Here we go!

            David Pickler once told me that getting new resources, equipment, music, funding, etc… from the school system was problematic because we seemed to do so much with the little we had.  We were so successful that the need for help was not as apparent as it should be.  The competitive success came because the kids in our band were incredible and exceptional. Still, there were day-to-day needs that had to be filled and, without money, those needs were still there. Some of the kids developed a system of “Appropriation” that filled our needs as long as I was willing to not ask a whole lot of questions.  Examples would be:

            Before the storage building we have now, Shelby County Schools placed 2 small, very old, and repurposed portable buildings that had been condemned (yes – condemned) out near where the storage building is now. This was to serve to store uniforms, off season equipment, podiums, vermin, the “Beau Brady” museum of acquisition, and other stuff.  They did not, however, provide any shelving or rods for hanging uniforms.  A couple of the kids said they could rustle up some lumber and pipe and, sure enough, over the next week an impressive pile of building materials appeared next to the portables.  We all met one Saturday to outfit the portables with shelves and the like.  At some point during the day, I heard one kid tell another that the secret to “appropriating” what we needed was to not take too much from one place.  Feeling rather like Capt. Obvious, it was at that point that it occurred to me to notice all of the new house construction going on next to the school.  I thought it better not to ask.

            Every day, I would have to load up yard line markers, paint, chalk, speaker and microphone, or some such paraphernalia, and move it over to the grass area under the powerlines (TVA easement) for practice.  Flipping water moccasins back into the ditch was also a chore….. but I digress.  One day, an enterprising young man said, “Mr. Smith, what you need is a grocery cart to roll that junk in.”  The next day, a grocery cart appeared in the band room. Missing from the cart was the plastic handle cover that I suspect once said “Kroger”.  I thought it better not to ask.

            Every teacher is assigned a short filing cabinet and a desk.  If you were lucky, you would sometimes be gifted a second filing cabinet.  One day, I complained out loud to some band folks helping clean and organize the band room that life would surely be easier if we had “a few more filing cabinets”.  Keep in mind that I would regularly requisition them at the beginning of the year, only to be told that I could not get them.  A few days after complaining, I came into the band room to find 3, brand new, 4-drawer file cabinets.  The note on one of them said, “Please don’t thank the school for these – they might not understand!”  Coincidentally, I found out later that week that the school board had delivered new filing cabinets.  I found this out when a smiling plant manager delivered my 1 NEW CABINET.  Had he looked in the music library he would have been very surprised.  Though it was obvious to me that he had no idea I was now the owner of 4 new cabinets, I thought it better not to ask.

            Kevin Moore (may he rest in peace), Tom Mason, Alex Ertz and Richard Brown would probably like me to state, for the record, that they know nothing of these sorts of endeavors.  They probably would…… I thought it better not to ask!

            

One of Many!!!

If you don’t know or never met Rachel Lin, you have missed out on a real opportunity.  She was my Drum Major for a couple of years (sharing the job with Lara Pitts her Sr. year). Rachel was both our first chair clarinet player and the best violinist Houston ever turned out (sorry Michael, she wins the tiebreaker on cuteness).  Rachel was often my most efficient problem solver and, from the day I first met her in middle school, she spent quite a lot of time and energy mothering the likes of Max Docauer, Jack Mo, and other known criminals.  Talented and dedicated describes a bunch, if not the majority, of the kids I got to teach at Houston.  Rachel stood apart as special and (now) memorable because of a host of other, sometimes lesser-appreciated qualities.  

            Rachel could be picked on.  Most pretty, popular girls don’t handle this so well.  For example: It used to be that, when we went to All West, televisions got switched off in the rooms to keep kids from watching pay channels (porn).  This was obviously before the day of broadband internet service.  For years, kids would pile in my room and watch a suitable movie from among those on the pay movie channels (it was a different time!). One night, they all came up to watch the movie “Ring”.  For those of you unfamiliar with the plot, a summary is: after watching a disturbing video, a person would get a phone call where someone whispered “seven days”.  Seven days later, they died a gruesome death.  After the movie was over, Rachel went back to her room before the other kids.  We waited about 2 or 3 minutes and then called her room to say, “seven days”.  The phone rang forever and finally someone knocked on my door.  It was Rachel saying, “You guys are not funny at all!!!” Still she smiled.

            Rachel sure seemed to solve a lot of problems for me before I had to deal with them.  Once, also at All West, all the kids were just getting up for breakfast.  One of the most endearing and likable band folks you would ever hope to meet, went out into the hallway in a state of some undress to fetch a USA Today.  His roommates, obviously less endearing than he, locked him out of the room.  I missed all of this as I was in my own room getting dressed.  When the young man realized he was locked out and to some extent naked, he didn’t panic…. He just went to Rachel’s room for help!  My first clue that something was wrong was when I heard Rachel POUNDING on the door to the guy’s room.  By the time I got there, Rachel had all the other boys seated on a bed and was giving them a good chewing out about growing up.  All I had to do was throw in a “….Yeah, what she said” and close the door on my way out.  Kids not only seemed to know to go to Rachel for help, they listened to her much more intently than to me.  

            Rachel was sneaky.  For a while, she had a boyfriend that her mom and dad didn’t know about. She let me in on the ruse because she was using band as a cover.  She would tell me that, if her mom called, please tell her we got through unloading equipment at midnight instead of 10:00.  Sometimes you have to trust a kid’s judgement.  I was also told at the debriefing that seniors get from me (just before graduating) that she and other band kids would make rude hand gestures to each other during Wind Ensemble practice when I wasn’t watching.  Probably hard to understand why I find this amusing, but I do!

            I offer the preceding to establish that Rachel wasn’t a perfect child and didn’t distance herself from other band kids by being preachy. What she was, was always prepared, always caring, always thoughtful, always supportive, and always a friend to everyone in my program.  It is difficult to describe the feeling you get when someone like Rachel Lin is graduating and moving on.  Had it not been for my oldest daughter, Faith, coming into the program the next year, I might have retired much earlier.  

            This all came to mind recently as I was speaking to a group of band directors at a band clinic about getting kids to buy into their band programs.  I told them that you have to have at least one student who (1) “gets it” when it comes to what you expect, (2)is well liked by the other kids, and (3)will have your back when another kid goes off about how much you resemble the anti-Christ. I told them that having one such kid would make it possible for directors to band direct without looking over their shoulders.  I told them that just one such kid who was happy with band would be contagious such that others would get a good case of happiness.  While she was here, Rachel was one of those kids.  Though I had the good fortune to teach many like I just described, I really hope every band director gets the chance to teach at least one Rachel Lin.

A person doing his or her best becomes a natural leader, just by example.  – Joe DiMaggio

Program Hijinks!

You Can’t Tell the Oboist from the Clarinetist Without a Program!

            Every time you have a concert, you have to do a program. Seems simple enough – you just list all of the tunes with composers and all of the players by instrument.  What could go wrong!?!  I know most parents thought I gave this chore to my office assistant who passed it off to the secretary who in turn gave it to an intern to take care of.  In reality, I would usually be lying in bed the night before the concert and go “#@%^#**&” (insert your favorite expletive here), “I forgot all about the program”.  After that realization, I sometimes forgot again until band class the next day. This resulted in typing a program and getting it printed between school ending and concert time that night.  No pressure!

            I never really understood the need of a parent to come up immediately after a concert to tell me I had misspelled their kid’s name. How about  tomorrow?  Or better yet, that I had left the name off entirely.  I believe I did this to Robbie Moore for 3 concerts in a row and he still loves me.  The exact time in my life when I decided to let program worries go and have a little fun was during my third year at Houston.  My parents had come to hear my concert band for the first time ever. After the concert was over, they made their way down front to see their son (me) just as a band parent was expressing their unhappiness with my having spelled their child’s name wrongly.  At our next concert, I spelled every kid in the bands name wrong except for their kid.  Some messages aren’t meant to be subtle.

            Once, there was some emotional distress in band caused by a breakup between Jackie Young and Shane Halpern.  I don’t know whose fault it was but I did want to have some fun with it.  At the concert that week, I added Halpern as the last name for every girl in band EXCEPT Jackie (ex:  Jane Doe Halpern).  Some would think that cruel but my memory is that we all laughed.  I also think that Shane’s percentage chance of ever getting a date with a band girl plummeted – which was not a bad thing!

            There was a period of time in Jazz Band where we had discovered that the secret to life was…………. Chicken.  This resulted in me buying a jazz tune called “The Chicken”. When it came time for our concert, I changed the titles of ALL the Jazz Band tunes to something with chicken (ex: Blue Rondo ala Chicken, I’m in the Mood for Chicken, and that Commodores’ hit Brick Chicken).  The world is better off with more chicken.

            Mike Irby was our soccer coach at Houston for a while and every time we played a match, they would put the box score in the sport’s page of the Commercial Appeal.  If the other team scored, he would instead substitute the name of a Houston teacher into the box score (ex:  Ben Cook – assist).  For one of our concerts, I substituted coaches for all of the composer’s names. Oh, I dressed it up a little (ex: Wolfgang Irby, Ludwig von Haney, etc…).  The total number of folks that noticed was about 12.  Sometimes this is all only for my enjoyment.

            For the last concert I ever conducted at Houston, I left sort of a hidden message inside the names of the Wind Ensemble members. I gave everybody a middle initial. If you read the initials in order, it said, “If you can read this, you must be incredibly bored!  Happy Trails!”  The next day, I got email from a mom to tell me I had misspelled her daughter’s name and that her middle name was Ann.  The fact that she emailed and did not accost me after the concert shows we made progress in 25 years.

            I loved every minute I spent in front of the band at Houston (and even the few minutes I have gotten since I retired).  While I respect the gravity and importance of teaching someone else’s kids, I none-the-less approached my job like a game provided for my amusement.   If I haven’t thanked you for that in a while, I thank you now from the very bottom of my heart.

            

The Smith Girls!!!

Moose and Goose

            I tried to google “having kids quotes” so that I could start this with some pithy statement that would make me seem wiser than I am – which is not a high bar.  I noticed that about 95% of the quotes were about the problemscaused by having kids.  That was not my experience at all.  Both of my girls are wonderful, personable, helpful, powerful, smarticle,…….  Well, there are not enough positive adjectives so I will move on.  My wife, Amy, gets all of the credit for this.  I do understand the biology of child production and offer Faith and Mary Ann as proof.  Still, I am reasonably certain that should they be genetically tested, somehow 99% of their makeup comes from Amy.  

            Because my becoming a father lined up roughly with my taking the job at Houston, my kids were raised with and grew up with many of you. A great number of you babysat for them when they were little.  This was always a positive experience for them.  I noticed that, when Mary Ann moved to Florida for medical school and we redid her room, there was still a sign on the door made by her and Alaina Thetford during a babysitting stint.  In the ‘maybe it wasn’t always a positive experience for the babysitter” world, I recall Kathryn Anderson allowing Faith to do her hair.  Kathryn had really long, thick and curly hair and Faith (3 years old) took a comb and teased it out into an enormous afro. Probably took days to tame it back into shape!

            They spent many hours in the band room as kids. Mostly they just ran around but sometimes they would help clean or sort music.  The music part stopped when Mary Ann brought me a piece of music with Mr. Smith is a Great Big ______ (not a compliment) written on it and asked what the word after “Big” meant.  Yeah, I know we had days where I was a great big ______, but I didn’t want my kids to know! 

As we raised them, we became aware that they had negative athletic potential. What I mean by that is that if you had athletic ability and stood next to them, your talents would be diminished.  So with me as a father, being in band was almost a given.  My wife had hoped that one of them would pick the clarinet as an instrument but I used them to plug instrumental deficiencies (horn and baritone) in my own band.  They went on to become All State players so, while it may not have worked out perfectly for Amy or the girls, it worked out great for me!

            Both of my girls attended Collierville schools until coming to high school.  They were both very successful in middle school, which meant going from a hero to an unknown when moving to Houston.  They got to spend one year together at Houston, which was a dream year for their parents!  Having your parents teach at the high school you attend is not an easy thing.  When a teacher would mistreat them or they had some other issue, they would just have to suck it up.   Both even experienced some disappointment at the hands of their father who would have to hedge when giving them chair positions or leadership positions in an effort not to complicate their lives by making them look favored.  I do, however, remember Mary Ann telling me that a kid had stolen her lunch out of the instrument room so I picked him up and hurled him across the band room (as any father would do for his little girl).  There is not a parent handbook for this sort of thing and without their understanding and unconditional love, none of this would have worked.  To the extent that this hurt them, consider this a long delayed public apology.

            They are alike in many ways.  Both are extremely talented musicians and both were over the top successful as students.  They are, however, very different in demeanor!  One is more likely to listen thoughtfully when being confronted with a problem person and the other is more likely to stuff that person in a trashcan! I’m not telling which is which! Faith had the added difficulty of dating (and eventually marrying) a young man who played trumpet in the band. I often marvel at the bravery it took to ask MY daughter out while playing in MY band.  When Faith and Luke (said trumpet player) went off to college, Amy and I got something we had not had since Faith was born:  one child to focus all of our love and attention on! I am certain Mary Ann was thrilled. Her senior year, I threw showing favoritism to the wind and wrote a marching show just for her (Porgy and Bess). Maybe the best time I ever had putting a show together.  When it came time for her to graduate it also came time for me to be done.  I did not know that yet and wouldn’t for over a year but teaching a band without my kids in it suddenly, and through no fault of the kids in band, became a job and not a passion.

            Both of the girls are doing great.  After spending a year in Austin, Texas working for Intel, Faith and Luke are moving to Orlando where Faith will begin her dream job as an engineer for Disney!  They have a dog named Waddles that is perhaps the most photogenic dog ever.  Mary is working on her MD/Phd in Gainesville at the University of Florida.  Her cat, Sushi, is just like her – both cuddly and bloodthirsty at the same time! I am so extremely proud of all they have and will accomplish.  If only they could do all of that accomplishing 5 miles from home, I would have a perfect life.

Not At My Best!

            Sometimes it seems like a good idea.   In fact, sometimes it seems like such a good idea that you are stunned when it blows up in your face.  The first Spring trip we ever took at Houston had one of those moments. The trip itself was a mixture of fun and bizarre.  We went to Disney World (where else!) to march in the Main Street Parade.  It took forever to get there because of the wreck we had on the way down.  I have told this story in greater detail in a previous post but suffice it to say that the driver of bus 1 was an idiot and side swiped a car about an hour out of Germantown.  We sat in the dirt parking lot of an old rural store for 3 hours waiting on police, highway patrol, and eventually a new bus.  This is not the moment I am referring to.  

            The driver of my bus (did I say he was an idiot) was the singularly most irritating driver in the history of drivers.  He claimed to know and have met everyone in the world. He had met JFK, Einstein, Marilyn Monroe…. In fact, it became a game to mention some famous person just to have him tell us how they had met.  He claimed to have had a conversation with Amelia Earhart not long before she disappeared. He later told us his age, which would have made him 3 years old when conversing with Ms. Earhart.  He was so irritating that Dr. Bob Guinter, our booster president and a relative pacifist, had to be pulled off of him in the parking lot of Disney just before we started home.  This is not the moment I am referring to.

            When we got to Florida, we first went to Cocoa Beach for a day in the ocean.  Once before, while working at Fayette Academy, I had taken the band to a skating rink and go-cart place on the night before a marching contest.  One kid turned his ankle skating and another ran a go-cart into a wall and had to be taken to the hospital and sewn up.  I obviously learned nothing from this experience and took high school kids for 10 hours in the sun before asking them to put on wool uniforms and in some cases strap on a drum to march in a parade.  Everyone was sunburned to some extent but Kevin Moore was burned so badly, skin was coming off his back in sheets.  Kevin toughed it out which allowed me to tell other sun burned “whiners” that they also had to march.  I feel like some provisions of the Geneva Convention regarding torture were violated.  This is not the moment I am referring to.

            You see, my moment came from trying to solve a problem by being too cute and just making it so much worse.  It started off simply enough.  One of the parents came to me to tell me that she had smelled smoke coming from one of the kid’s rooms.  Back in the day, kids smoked cigarettes to a much greater extent than they do today (vaping had not yet been invented).  I had a group meeting with all the kids that night where I talked about the evils of smoking and the perils of violating school rules.  I pretended to have a long list of everyone who had been smoking on the trip and told them I would do a room check in half an hour.  Then came the cute part.  I told them that, if they would bring their cigarettes to the lobby and place them on a table, I would grant them amnesty and remove them from my list.  At the end of the half hour, I had 30 or 40 packs of cigarettes, a few cigars, and some chewing tobacco.  Needless to say, there were no cigarettes found when I did a room check. 

 Some of the chaperoning parents needed sedating but I reminded them of my promise of amnesty and asked them not to talk about this when we got home.  Flash forward to the following Monday morning. Mr. Clayton, our principal at the time, asked me to come to his office to discuss a problem.  When I got there, he said, “Jim, are you aware that all school rules apply when a group is traveling?”  I smiled my best innocent smile and replied, “Why yes Mr. Clayton, I am.” He said, “Did you confiscate a pack of cigarettes on this trip?”  I looked at him and, as honestly as I could I said, “No Mr. Clayton, I did not confiscate “A” pack of cigarettes.”  You see, technically the cigarettes had been abandoned and not confiscated.  Might I also point out that it wasn’t “A” pack but “MANY” packs.  Mr. Clayton did a calculation of how much time this would eat up in his day if he investigated versus the ease of just ignoring the situation and then he said, “That will be all, Mr. Smith.”  

“That will be all, Mr. Smith” is ironic in that this incident wasn’t remotely ALL.  Over the next 24 years, I would do my share of stupid.  My hope was to learn something from each incident so that I could experience a “new” stupid at each subsequent occurrence.   In the interest of fairness and full disclosure, I must add one more occurrence to this accounting.  When we returned to the hotel after the parade, I stood up on a table in front of the kids to make announcements and to tell them how well they had done in the parade.  Steve Stires tried to interrupt to tell me something but I was in the moment and told him to sit down and wait.  He smiled and did just that.  When I finished, I said “Now Steve, what could be so important it wouldn’t wait until I finished?”  Steve replied, “No big deal (ha ha), just that your pants are unzipped!”  ……. and THAT will be all!

GEEZERS