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Coming of Age in America
Part 25


Not only was I learning photography, I took a typing class and learned how to type on a manual typewriter. Mainly because there were a lot of girls in the class and wherever girls were I wanted to be.

It turned out that I wasn’t the only guy in the class. There was one other fellow in the room and we were the slowest typists in the class.

Our class began just after lunch and one day someone had given us a heads up that we were going to be hit with a timed test right off the bat. The other guy was tired of being shown up by little Miss Fastfingers who was hitting close to 85 words a minute, so he decided to do something about it.

He arrived in class before anyone else and removed the carriage return stopping mechanism on her typewriter.

Just as predicted, the teacher announced we were going to have a pop test at the beginning of class. She said turn to page 57 and get our equipment ready to start.

With paper loaded, backs straight and fingers on home positions, we waited for her to say, GO!

When she did we were off and typing as fast as we could. Just as Miss Fastfingers’ carriage reached the right side and the little bell dinged, she reached up with her right hand and went to fling the carriage back to the left. As soon as she did, the carriage flew to the left and kept going. It didn’t stop until it crashed into the wall beside her.

All fingers froze when the teacher yelled, “Stop!”

She walked over to examined the girl’s typewriter and immediately noticed the carriage stop was missing.

Livid, she looked around the room and said,“I want to know who did this! And I want to know right now.”

Amidst the giggles, no one spoke up. Only two people in the class knew who had done the dirty deed. The culprit and me.

He was pretty cool and played it off to a tee. I guess I looked guilty because I knew who had done it. Just looking guilty was enough for her.

I got a zero on the test that day, even though I was innocent. And thereafter she watched me like a hawk. No one ever told her the truth.

One of my favorite classes was art. The teacher was the mother of a friend of mine and she was a gentle soul. Once again, I found myself in a class of mostly girls and I was loving it.

There was one particular girl in our class that was skinny as a rail and very high strung. She was also cute as could be.

I had noticed that whenever anyone used the paper cutter, we called the one-armed bandit, she always flinched or jumped.

There was always that loud scrapping sound, then a thud when the blade hit bottom. Scrape, thud and flinch. It never failed.

One day I was in the paper room by myself and an idea popped in my head. I took a piece of white clay and formed something that looked like a bone and stuck it on my left middle finger’s knuckle.

Then I took a bit of red paint and dabbled it around the clay and dribbled a little on my hand.

I went over to the paper cutter and did my duty. I slowly raised the blade up and shoved it down ever so slowly to drag out the scrapping sound, then came the loud thud as I slammed it homeward.

At that moment I screamed and ran into the other room where she stood wide-eyed against the far wall.

I held up my hand with what appeared to be a bloody stump of a finger and yelled, “I cut it off! I cut my finger off!”

I wasn’t expecting the reaction that it got. The next thing I knew the girl’s eyes rolled back, her skinny little knees buckled and down she went.

Rats! I was in trouble again.

After attending to the girl, the teacher looked up at me, pointed to door and simply said two words. “Office. Now!”

However, there was that one time I did something and got away with it. It was during my junior year and I had been playing with an old electric clock motor at home.

I found that the motor was wound with some of the thinnest copper wire I had ever seen before and it had a high tensile strength. Meaning it would take a lot of pressure before it snapped. That’s when another brilliant idea came to me.

One day before homeroom I went into class and strung the near invisible wire all around the room. It went from desk to desk. Over the light fixtures and down to the blackboard. From windows, across the room to whatever I could attach it to. In essence, it was everywhere.

That being said, I wasn’t expecting my teacher to be the first one in the room that day. Normally she was always running behind, but that day was an exception.

I was hanging out in the hall to see what would happen to the first kid that walked into my spider web of copper wires.

She found it. First it cut her hose as she tripped the low hanging wires. Then it raked her hair back. Then it left a red line across her face. From my vantage point in the hall, it looked like she was break dancing and that was way before break dancing was a thing.

By the time kids began to file into the room she had tiny red marks all over her and her hose were ruined.

She knew. Ooooh, she knew. But she never said a word. I suppose she was waiting for some kid to fess up or look guilty, but I must have played it off well that day. I never got caught. Later that day I noticed a small pile of copper wire in her trash can.

(To be continued)


One of many Miss Fast Fingers in Typing Class. I didn't do it.

The King.

L. H. S. Review.

WKOR's Butch Luke.

Boddie

_______________
Rick Algood
September 11, 2021

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