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
