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Coming of Age in America
Part 23


I began high school in the fall of 66. I suppose entering high school is a rite of passage for any young person. It was no different for me. My oldest brother had graduated and gone off to Ole Miss in 1965. My other brother was a senior the year I walked off the bus and entered the school building out on Ivy Avenue as a freshman.

Once again my brothers had set the bar high, and my teachers noticed, one of these kids is not like the others. Whereas they were studious and made top grades, I was not. It was my goal to avoid that bar wherever it was that they had put it. I was just hoping it wouldn’t fall on me.

At night I would lie in bed after the lights were off and listen to the small radio beside my bed. I could pick up Dick Biondi or sometimes Larry Lujack out of Chicago on WLS. When I couldn’t pick up the Chicago station I tried to dial into WWL from the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans.

Why study?

Whenever I was lonely at night I knew I had a friend somewhere out there in radio land. All I had to do was turn the knob and somebody, somewhere was awake and willing to talk to me. As for the music, I don’t remember how old I was when I finally realized that the people singing weren’t actually at the radio station with the disk jockey, but I do remember it was an aha moment.

Fortunately I had good teachers. Some of the math teachers were cousins and the chemistry teacher was my neighbor down the road. Otherwise I may not have graduated.

I exceled in history, English and biology. It’s really remarkable, considering I had flunked English in the eighth grade because I couldn’t diagram sentences. Pronouns, conjunctions, adverbs and all those other terms were Greek to me. My goal was to put a logical thought down on paper. Why did I need to dissect them? However, Mrs. Cunningham thought otherwise.

Someone told me I needed to take a foreign language, so I signed up for Latin. There’s a saying… Latin is a language, dead as dead can be. First it killed the Romans, now it’s killing me.

Boy, was that ever true. The only thing I wanted to learn in Latin was the phrase, I love you, so I could say it to a certain young lady in my class. I don’t think she even noticed I was alive.

It was somewhere during this time period that the bully that rode my bus quit school. He had had to repeat more than one grade and doing it again and again was just too much for him since he was already much older than his fellow classmates.

He left one day to join the army and it appeared the military was a good fit for him. He returned to walk the halls of the school shortly after he finished boot camp to show off his new physique and looked better than I had ever seen him. He had an air of confidence about him I’d never seen before. It wasn’t long after that visit he was shipped off to Vietnam.

I had turned 15 and by that fall my father was ready for me to get my driver’s license. My brothers had gone away to college and my father needed another driver on the farm. Kids could get their license at 15 back then, fourteen if you lived on a farm. My father was wondering why I wasn’t already chomping at the bits to drive. Why? I had a chauffeur.

So he picked up one of those little manuals the state had printed up at the courthouse and told me to study it good. Then we did a little practicing. I already knew how to drive a tractor, so I was wondering what the big deal was.

After I ran over a few cane poles learning to parallel park out by the tractor shed, I finally got the hang of it.

I passed the written test at the courthouse and signed up for the driving test that was to be given at the high school.

They wouldn’t let me take it in our family car that I was familiar with, I had to take it in the school’s driver’s-Ed car. I’d never taken driver’s-Ed before or been in that car. I thought only the wealthy city kids took driver’s-Ed.

The day came for me to take the test and I went out to the parking lot where a highway patrolman by the name of Tommy Wylie was waiting for me. It was another first, I’d never seen the man before in my life.

He was already waiting in the passenger’s seat with a clipboard when I crawled behind the wheel of the car. He smiled, looked over at me and said, “I’m ready when you are.”

I looked things over to see what was located where around the steering wheel, the dashboard and the pedals. Then I started the car.

He told me to go out the front entrance of the school and take a right. I could tell he was bored. He’d already tested a few kids already and seemed like he wanted to call it a day. I turned right on Ivy Avenue and drove up the hill toward the city dump road.

Before we’d gone far he told me to take a left onto a gravel road, stop and go back to the schoolhouse. In my mind I was wondering what on earth I’d done wrong. I hadn’t been in the car five minutes and the test was already over. My mind was racing.

Well, I did exactly as he told me. I turned into the gravel road, stopped, and backed out into the road before going back to the school.

While we were driving back he said, “You do realize you aren’t supposed to back into a highway, don’t you?”

I said, “No, sir. I was just trying to do what you asked of me.”

He nodded and wrote something down on his clipboard. Then he looked over at me and asked, “Aren’t you Harold Algood’s son?”

I said that I was.

Then he said, “I’ve been by your place out on Highway 25, and I believe I’ve seen you working in the fields on a tractor, haven’t I?”

I answered, “If you’ve been by our place, then you probably have.”

“Well, son, if you can drive a tractor you can master a car.”

He signed off for me to get my driver’s license. I didn’t have to break any fishing poles or anything like that. Living in a small community had its advantages.

(To be continued)


The new high school on Ivy Avenue being built. This is the gym.

Bob Cocran

Class of '65

Ken Michael Lawrence

The old stadium. It was dismantled and moved to the new high school to be used for the visitors side.

Inside The Rex on South Church Street.

DJ at WLSM.

Prentis Clark's Grocery on Mett's Street.

Harris Funeral Home.

Buddy Hale at the Coke plant on North Columbus.

Coach Wood. Whenever I had him in Science class and he called the roll, he would call out, Ricky No Good. Ricky All Bad. Ricky No Count, Ricky Ain't That Good.

The old Lodge at Choctaw Lake. Photo by Walter Bennett.

Mule Colt Show. Photo by Walter Bennett.

_______________
Rick Algood
September 9, 2021

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