I Sacrifice Myself For Love

Nearly sixty years later, it remains one of the proudest moments of my life.

For three years I attended the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades at a rural junior high school. It was a remnant of the old days before school consolidation because it had been constructed as a grade K-12 school in the 1930s. Not long before I arrived the high school had been consolidated with the main high school in Richmond six miles away, so that only the three junior high grades remained.

It was two brick buildings, two stories each, with no elevators and no air conditioning. There was a small detached gym with a modest stage along with a detached mechanical arts building where the shop classes were taught. There was an adjacent football field with a baseball backstop in the far corner. There were locker rooms and a cafeteria and kitchen. This school was in the tiny crossroads town of Boston, Indiana, a town with only a flasher light at the center. This sturdy school in a flat part of the heartland was the center of my world when I was aged thirteen through fifteen.

The first year was pretty bewildering. Seventh grade was my first experience outside of an elementary school where we stayed with the same teacher all day. Here at Boston Junior High we were assigned homerooms, then went to different classrooms all day for subjects like math, history, phys ed, music, English, science, Latin, agriculture, shop, home economics, etc. My homeroom teacher was the home economics teacher, Mrs. Wright. She was strict, but kindly, and she presided over a classroom of sewing tables with kitchen ranges and other appliances (but no microwaves!) scattered around the periphery of the rooms. These tables were often strewn with pins, needles, thread, scissors, rulers, and other tools which provided many opportunities for mischief to us boys in the room. That’s another story. I eventually fell into the routine of moving from class to class, dreading the math class with my whole being each day of every school year. By the time a year had passed, I was an old junior high pro, but still intimidated by the older kids. I had made some friends among the other rural and farm kids who lived all across the township. They were a bit rough sometimes but they brought me a salad of salty language which shaped my wit as the third of three brothers. We were pretty rowdy without being destructive, but we all had senses of humor and understood irony. It made for mostly happy days, if one had to spend them in a school.

Summer after seventh grade was another in the agreeable routine that accompanied our semi-rural home. There were five acres of moraine with woods and marsh and a little spring-fed creek for my enjoyment. I learned to use an axe there, camped, caught crawdads and hatched frog eggs, and enjoyed the solitude, particularly after the summer of 1965. I could read all day or doze in a tree house listening to Cincinnati Reds games. I nearly deafened myself one day using a metal bucket as a mortar with firecrackers as the explosive. When my hearing eventually returned I could enjoy the lazy sawing of cicadas in the daytime and katydids at night. There were screech owls and moths and Ichneumon flies at hand for my nature study. I always dreaded the return to school but knew it had to be done.

For me the eighth grade began the first week of September, 1966, just after Labor Day. The school was hot, of course, but open windows helped. For me, eighth grade days began with a stay in Mr. Himelick’s history class, next to the principal’s office on the upper floor. I tell this story as occurring on the first day of class for convenience, but it was actually on the second day of the fall semester. Our baby boom cohort was large, and the room was filled with desks and students all the way to the front, a total of perhaps 30. We had just started class on the second day when there was a disturbance at the door. The principal opened the door to announce that a new student would be joining us. He stepped back to let her in, and in that moment my life changed forever.

Dressed in a skirt and blouse as were all the girls, she had shoulder-length blonde hair with a flip and small charming light-colored cat eye glasses. I was sitting in the back row, halfway between the door and the window. She came in embarrassed to be the object of all eyes, quickly moving toward the second row near the front of the class where Mr. Himelick indicated a seat was available. The chairs were old hat for me from the previous year, but not for her. She quickly went to the open spot, placed her things on the built-in desktop, and sat down, hoping to disappear. She was horrified to discover that she had sat down on the right side of the seat so that the desk support would not allow her to swing her legs to the front.

We all saw it as soon as it happened, and I think everyone in there felt sorry for her, me especially. She tried the stoic way, turned 90° away from her feet to face the front, but less than a minute passed before she had to get up, again drawing all attention to herself, move around the front of the chair, and sit down, red-faced, from the correct side. She tried to disappear again and this time was more successful, blending in with the others in the rows. When the class ended she moved to leave quickly. One of the girls seated nearby, Denise, spoke to her to comfort her, a gesture she never forgot. I stood in the back row but waited to watch her leave. I can imagine I had that expression Wimpy had on his face when he was dreaming of hamburgers. She was the loveliest creature I had ever seen. I was smitten.

We had certain classes together, but she had a different homeroom teacher. When I found myself in a class with her, like in art, I always tried to sit closely. It took a little while, but after a time she seemed to enjoy my attention and my jokes. She had a great sense of humor and was always making those around her laugh. She meshed socially with everyone and quickly became popular and well-liked. To my astonishment, she seemed to like me, and I couldn’t have been happier about it. All through the rest of 8^th grade we grew closer.

Ninth grade began in September, 1967, just after the Summer of Love. My head was full of the magical songs of that year and my heart was filled with love for her. She went away for the summer to music camp in Michigan, but came back to start classes again in September. By now she had regained her poise and never approached a chair from the wrong side again. We had a laugh over it. We never used a term like ‘going steady’ because I assumed you had to be driving to use that. We were devoted to each other, however, exchanging notes out of the sight of teachers and making sure they didn’t fall into enemy hands. We walked closely between classes and sat together on the school bus. We made arrangements to attend school dances ‘together,’ although someone else had to bring us and take us home separately.

There were little dance cards and we would ‘dance’ with others, although for me it was more like rhythmic shuffling. I had never had a dance lesson. She didn’t seem to mind, shuffling with me during those wonderful slow dances when it was legal to actually place my hands on her sides and leave them there for 2 ½ minutes. We sat at tables and drank punch and watched the others, keeping track of where the chaperones were lurking. I remember them as being dangerous occasions, fraught with risks of dancing too closely or attracting ridicule from a rival. Fourteen is a vulnerable age.

The peak of my social career came that December of ‘67 when we were crowned king and queen of the Christmas dance. I had nothing to do with it, of course. I was on the football team that fall, but fell like an idiot from a tree with a back injury as the season drew to a close. She had the presence and the magnetism that drew people to her. I adored her and she let me, and I know she loved me, too. We even began to say it.

After the spring semester began in 1968, we resumed the daily routine of going to classes in the various buildings. Snow was not all that common during my school days, and not nearly as common as I wished. Now and then we would get a snowfall but only rarely would schools be closed. I think it must have been February or even March of that year when a snow came and we were at school the next day. We walked together between classes whenever possible. There were white cedars, evergreens, growing in front of both of the main buildings on the highway side so that we walked along them going from one door to the other outside. If it had been raining, one of us might come to class wet on one side for having been guided into a dripping cedar in an unguarded moment. Usually it was me that got the surprise. It was difficult to get ahead of her when it came to jokes and pranks. On this day, however, the cedars were drooping with wet snow, and there was plenty on the ground in the perfect condition for making snowballs. On the particular day I remember we were walking together and mostly alone from the elementary building to the high school building before lunchtime. We began to throw some snow at each other. I made a snowball and might have nearly hit her with it. As we neared the door, she stooped to make one on the highway side of the sidewalk and lobbed it at me. I ducked so it missed me but it went past in a hurry and hit the rippled opaque window of the science room on the ground floor. 

No harm was done to the window and we thought nothing of it. We went back to class and continued our routine. Sometime that afternoon we learned that the science teacher had observed this attack and wasn’t happy about it at all. He reported it to the principal and the principal found us, the two perpetrators, in the hallway and confronted us about it. We both froze. We looked at each other. We’re in trouble because someone threw a snowball that had struck no one and done no harm? We had no time to think or devise a strategy. The principal demanded to know who had thrown it. I did not need to pause or think about it. I immediately said, “I did.” I fervently hoped that she would not say anything, and she didn’t. The principal nodded and sent us back to our classes. When the last class period of the day had nearly ended, a call came over the loudspeaker in the room I was in that I was to come to the office. I went and was told to follow the principal downstairs to the lower level restroom. He was carrying a hardwood paddle about 20 inches long and about four inches wide. The principal and I went in and over to one side near the windows, by the last stall. I was told to bend over and hold my shins so that the seat of my pants was smooth against by backside. There were three sharp cracks of ‘the board’ as we called it, and all three of them hurt. There was a round red spot on each of my cheeks that lasted about two weeks. I noticed it when I sat down, carefully.

But as I walked back to class I held my head up high, knowing that I had spared my love from the pain and embarrassment of being punished for something so trivial. I wasn’t about to let her get the board for throwing a snowball. Others in the school knew it had happened, too, and I was pretty sure there was a new level of respect for me for having done so noble a thing. Others knew, but no one at school ever made a smart remark to me about it. I was very careful to hide it from the folks, and her folks never found out about it, either. That just made good sense.

From that day until this I thought it was the right thing to do. I’ve always been proud of it. I prevented her suffering an injustice and took the consequences like a man. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

She always said it was the most chivalrous thing anyone ever did for her. Just now when she finished reading this, she smiled at me just like that February day in 1968.