An Embarrassing Day At School

In 1958 I was a freshman at La Grange High School. I was born and raised on a farm six miles south of La Grange and grew up in an old farm house built in the early 1900s. It was an “L” shaped house with the original wood shingle roof. I slept in the attic along with my older brother George, Jr. The roof was in serious decay and needed replacing for the longest.

As we slept in our bed and looked up, we could see day light or at night the moon and stars as there were small cracks in the worn shingles. These would expand and shut during the rainy spells so by some miracle we never got rained on while sleeping. But this didn’t keep the north wind from blowing through in the winter time. There was no insulation in those days and the clap board siding was also warped in places and offered little protection from the cold wind. Mom did, however, provide us with plenty of blankets, quilts and a feather bed to keep us warm once we got into bed.

During my high school years one of the worst things for me to do was to get out of my bed in the morning and step out onto this freezing cold attic. My mom would be my alarm clock and every morning like clockwork, she would open the attic door and shout up at me from the stairs to wake up and come on down. Of course, I would linger a little longer in my warm bed. Then five minutes later she would open that attic door and holler up the stairs “Flo, are you up cause this is the last time I’m calling!” I would answer “yes I’m up” and force myself out of bed.

I never ate any breakfast in those years. At least not during the school week. I always thought it to be a waste of time and I’d rather stay in that warm bed 15 minutes longer than eat.

During those cold winter months in order to save even more time in the mornings, and in order to keep from freezing in the morning putting on cold clothes, I devised a plan. I don’t know if any other kids in the country did anything similar but it was one that worked for me. You see before going to bed, I would put on a clean pair of underwear and also a clean pair of blue jeans that I would wear the next day to school. Then I’d put on a T-shirt and a flannel shirt over that. I guess you could call that my pajamas for the night. This way when I hit the floor a running, I didn’t have to take the time to put on all of those clothes while they were frozen stiff.

One of the problems that occurred one day was when I put on my socks. I happened to own two pair of checkered socks. One pair had red and white checks and the other pair had black and white checks. I kept all of my clean socks stored in a cardboard box next to my bed. In choosing my white socks it made no difference which ones I picked out but that one morning I chose to wear my checkered ones and in the dim lit attic, I happened to pick out one of each color as a pair. Later on to my dismay as I was sitting in my algebra room desk, with my feet stretched out, one of my neighboring girl classmates asked if I knew that I was wearing two different socks. Talk about being embarrassed.

In these modern times it’s nothing to wear “out of this world” clothes or different socks but in those days, something like that was unheard of. The custom in those years was for boys to roll up the pant legs of their jeans once or twice in case they were too long. Well it didn’t take long for me to roll down my cuffs to cover my grave mistake. Of course by that time, I heard a few snickers from around me. After that incident, I always tied my matching socks together in a knot before chunking them into my storage box.