STAYING HUMBLE-WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR [M, 9-1-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man--STAYING HUMBLE-WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR [M, 9-1-25]

 

It’s Labor Day. School starts tomorrow. Well, school has been in session for close to a month now, but back in my day, we started the day after Labor Day, like it says to in the Bible.

I was class president for three years. I was principal bassoonist in the band and orchestra and “loud, clanging cymbalist” in marching band. I was editor of the school newspaper. I was a cleanup-hitting first baseman. I set the all-time record on comprehensive exams [1]. I set the all-time record on the entrance exam at the Potter & Brumfield factory. [2]

What my classmates remember, though, was that I once tried to catch a run-away typewriter carriage. That is ALL that they have ever remembered!

It was our freshman year, in typing class, with Mr. Manford Morrow. I had never experienced a typewriter before. These were manual Royals, with a strong reflex. The first time I hit the “return” button, the carriage raced from left to right with great alacrity, so fast that it was clear that it was going to come right off the machine. I dove for it, ending up on the floor out in the aisle between desks, and I definitely was not just trying to get a better look at Linda Luttrull’s legs, although that was the view I had once down there.

Despite my best effort, I did not catch the carriage, since it, of course, had not come off. How was a farm boy, unused to advanced technology, who even plowed with horses instead of a tractor [3], to know about such things? In my world, if something flew fast from left to right, it came off.

Whenever the class of 1955 has gathered--the class Miss Grace Robb said was more closely involved with one another emotionally than any she ever saw in her many years of teaching--that is the story they have told, with great jocularity, of the skinny farm boy and the run-away typewriter.

They have kept me humble all these years. Whenever I have been tempted to think of myself “more highly than I ought to think,” I remember the laughter of Mike and Bob and the other three Bobs and Shirley and Hovey and Linda and Jack and Kenny and Bill and Donna and Jim and Nancy and Jarvis and Phyllis and Wally and “Rowdy Russ,” who, of course, was not rowdy at all, and the rest of my 61 classmates. And that run-away typewriter.

John Robert McFarland

1] Until James Burch turned his test in 30 minutes later.

Comprehensive exams took a whole day, covering the material of all four years of high school.

2] Until James Burch took the exam the next day. I missed one question. James, of course, got a perfect score.

I love James Burch. He was always willing to take the “smartness” pressure off me. We called him “Wally,” after the Mr. Peepers character of Wally Cox.

When we went to the Dog ‘N Suds in Ft. Branch, he tried to pick up girls by saying things like, “Hey, baby, want to hear me spell parsimonious? No? How’s about antidisestablishmentarianism?”

3] We later had a tractor, an orange Case. I kept a model of it on my book case, until I gave it to my grandson. It’s time to do things like that.