School Teacher Interview

My First Teaching Job. I began teaching at 17 years old, bluffing for l8. I graduated from high school in l932. I went two years to McMurray College. So I taught in 1933 and 34 [at County Line School in Fisher County]. I taught with Margery Smith from Rotan. Margery quit in the middle of the year, and I don't remember the little girl's name that took her place. However, she got off to a bad start because when she sent in her application, she said that she could teach the children tap dancing. And that just didn't go over well in that community. They didn't want any tap dancing.

Bob Flournoy was one of the trustees and a city man, and he had a way of getting around people so they hired her anyway. She stayed at the Flournoy's and taught his daughter tap dancing. For some mysterious reason, her paycheck was ten dollars more than it should have been. Nobody knew why and the other trustees would ask me why her pay was ten dollars more than it should be but I didn't know. Nobody would cross Bob. I suspect it was to pay for his daughter's dancing lessons. But I didn't want to get involved one way or another. And I didn't know anymore than they did anyway.

Applying for the Job. When I went for the interview, they asked how old I was. I told them I'd be l8 by the time school started. School had never started before October, but that year they sprung one on me. School started in September, and I had to tell them that I did not have a certificate and couldn't get it until I was l8. But if they would let me go ahead and start, I wouldn't ask to get my money until I got my certificate, and then when I got my certificate they could pay me. They said it was OK, so I got to keep my job.

Preparation for the Job. Nobody ever came into the job as ignorant and unprepared as I was. I had taken two courses in education, and I came out of there wondering why on earth was I there, and what was that about, except I couldn't get a certificate without it. Nobody had even bothered to teach me about lesson plans. I think they brought up the subject once. But nobody showed me what it was all about. So I came in without a lesson plan. Nothing! The County Superintendent had furnished me with a list and sent the books out, for what each book the kids were supposed to have. Then I had to figure out just what you were supposed to do with each of those books.

Mice Get in the Cistern. I got really upset when we began to bring up mice in the water from the school cistern. I just pitched a fit. The mice got in by going down the drainpipe and falling into the water where they would drown. I carried on and argued with the trustees until finally they went over and emptied all the water out and refilled it. When I found out that they had filled it from out of the stock tank that everybody in the county was using and it was pure mud, I hadn't helped myself anyway.

Enduring the Skunk Smell. The worst thing I had to endure the entire year was when Clay and Clyde Garrison and Aubrey Trout trapped skunks on the way to school. They ran their line and would skin their skunks on the way to school. I only had five pupils so I couldn't send them home. I wanted my job. I was making $60 a month and I needed that job. On a cold day with a big fire in that room, to sit and smell those three every day was rough. Salaries were low during the depression. I taught two years at County Line and two years at Lloyd Mountain. My last year at Lloyd Mountain I got $120.

Retaining a Boy. I did one thing that I have worried for years over, and I still feel bad about it. I had this boy [name omitted] who was the sweetest boy, just as clean and neat and polite and nice, and I loved him. But he did not know one thing. I worried and worried and I did not know what to do. I knew that he was older than the other kids and would probably go to school only one more year and that was all. I thought if he would stay in the grade he was in one more year he could learn to read a little more and would learn a little something. I knew if I gave him a bigger book, he wouldn't have a chance. So I retained him. And he didn't go to school another day! I have regretted it ever since. He might not have learned much, but I think he would have gone to school the next year if I hadn't retained him. I really felt bad about it.

Whipping Aubrey Trout. My one discipline problem (I was completely unprepared and was only l8 years old) was Aubrey Trout. He was probably 14 years old. He was bigger than I was. He just had fun. He had made the remark that he was going to run that l8 year old teacher off. He just upset everything. There was no way I could have any kind of discipline in any form. He'd just laugh and stir something else up and keep on. Finally, I said, "Now, Aubrey, I'm not going to put up with this any longer. This is it! You're going to stop it! If you don't you're going to wish you had."
    He said, "Well, what are you going to do?"
    Then I realized I'd gone too far. I said, "Do you really want to know?"
    He said, "Yes, I do. Show me!"
I told him to take off his belt. I didn't believe he'd do it. I was scared to death he wouldn't do it. And I don't know yet what I'd have done if he said no. I told the rest of the kids to go on home. But he took it off, and I literally wore him out. I told him that this was just a sample of what he was going to get next time.

I never did have any more trouble with Aubrey, but I was so afraid that he'd come in mad the next morning. But he came in grinning, just as sweet as he could be, and I appreciated his attitude. But I never let myself get in that position again. It was him or me! I didn't have much choice.

Well, I walked home that afternoon. The rest of the kids were already home where I was boarding. There were five of the Poteet boys who rode up on horses. Jim said, "I want to know what's going on over there at that school. I saw smoke and heard the loudest womp, womp, and smoke coming up over that hill. What has been going on over there?"

I sat down and started crying. The more I howled, the harder they laughed. The more they laughed the harder I cried. They swore that if I ever cried again they would sit down and cry with me. I thought I had ruined myself completely.

Community Personalities. Miss Blanche Adair was an old lady who lived near the school. Aubrey was her step-grandson and lived with her. She would come school hopping down the road past the school. She had her house full of newspapers. She saved them for years and said that she was going to will them to Hardin Simmons University. One day Aubrey came to school without his lesson prepared and I asked him why. He said Miss Blanche kept him ironing papers until ten o'clock the night before.
    I said, "Now, you can come up with a better one than that, can't you?"
    Everybody in the room said, "Oh, No! She did! I'm sure she did! He has to iron those papers all the time."
    She would iron the papers smooth and stack then in tall stacks in one of two rooms she used for that purpose. If she ever missed her paper, then she went over and borrowed the neighbors and they never saw it again.

School Programs. Once we had a Christmas program and there was this young man from over across the river who came. I can't remember his name, but he was pretty simple. He came to the program so drunk he could hardly stand. He was really simple. Tom, my future husband, was visiting, courting me, and Rex, my brother and James Davison, my cousin, were all there. So they put this old boy up to singing. They told him they thought he should sing. So they prodded him until he stood up right in the middle of the program and said, "Now, I am going to sing you a song." He interrupted everything. He sang, "Montana ain't no place for me, Its winters are too cold." He was so drunk. I could have killed the three of them for putting him up to that.

Once we had a play. Jim Poteet was a trapper and he had what he called stink bait, which he used for wolf bait for his traps. It was made from dead animals. In this play somebody was to discover oil. They were to bring the bottle in to me and I was to smell it and say, "It sure smells like oil." Jim furnished the oil, but he filled that bottle with his wolf bait. The lid was on tight. Rex and Tom were sitting back there and Rex said, "I hope she faints."

The whole crowd was waiting for my reaction to see what I was going to do. (Apparently everybody knew about the wolf bait but me.) I took the lid off and took a big sniff. I thought I was going to strangle, but I thought that's what they're waiting for. I said, "This smells like oil." and just keep on going. I could've killed everybody. I knew one person wasn't involved. They all were. It took a lot of them to get that one planned out.

Once when I was boarding with the Poteets, Mrs. Poteet really got mad. She hardly ever got mad but there was this lady named Maggie Seaboalt who lived nearby. Mrs. Seaboalt raised chickens but never bought any chicken feed. Her chickens were allowed to run all over the community and eat other people's chicken feed. One Sunday morning before church, Mrs. Poteet told Jim to go out and get a couple of chickens. Her chickens were white and Maggie's were red. Jim said, "Come on, Bargy. You go with me to get these chickens." Soon as we got out the door he said, "How about some red chickens?"

I said, "I think red ones would be good." He shot a couple of red chickens and he and I dressed them. We skinned them instead of plucking them. When we got finished, we buried the feathers and brought the chickens on back to the house.

At noon something was mentioned about the chickens. Jim would keep egging me on. Jim said, "I think red chickens taste better than white chickens."

He kept on until, finally, Mrs. Poteet said, "Did you get Maggie's chickens?"

Well, he had to admit that he did. She went down to Maggie's and apologized and paid Maggie for the chickens or gave her some chickens or something. I don't know exactly what she did, but she made restitution and apologized ever which way. Maggie never did like me anyway. But after that she would say, "Jim was a good boy until that old Miss Bargy came along." She thought I was the one that influenced him in bad ways.

The Picture of the Little Dead Baby. When I was staying at the Poteets, right at the foot of my bed, in a place of honor, was a picture of "Papa's first wife's little dead baby." There was a picture of a baby, life size picture of a baby just propped up on a pillow. A dead baby, very dead. It was the last thing I saw at night and the first thing I saw in the morning. That picture did haunt me. It was in a place of honor. I got the impression it was a baby about several months old.

Planning to Hang the Teacher. When I was teaching at County Line, this story was told to me by a number of people all over the community. It seems the Hardin boys, and the Helms boys, and Murphrees had a teacher they didn't like. They had a limb on a tree on the canyon just a little way from the schoolhouse. It was an old willow tree, and they would work the limb until they could make it pliable enough that it would spring back. They were going to get the teacher down there at noon, have the rope ready, and get the rope around his neck. They planned to turn it loose and it would spring back and just knock his head off.

The story was that Uncle Pat Murphree had heard the boys talking about it that night after he had gone to bed, and he caught on to what they were going to do. So he spent the rest of the night talking them out of it. My little brother was eight at the time he heard the story and it really upset him. He was so afraid they would hang me.

Kangaroo Court. When somebody wanted entertainment, they'd say, "Let's have a Kangaroo Court." When I was there they didn't have to figure about who the victim would be. I was the victim. You had to be a good sport and go along with it or it would be worse. They'd pick out something to try me over. Jim Poteet was always defense attorney and Lester Hardin was the prosecuting attorney. They would go at it just like a real trial. They'd bring up witnesses and everything.

I remember one that I just cringed over. I would have done anything if I could have gotten out of that Kangaroo Court. They decided to try a man in the community for breaking my heart. I'll call him Sam, but that wasn't his real name. He wasn't too bright. Sam would come down in that little old red car, and I'd see him coming and I'd just disappear and wouldn't come back until he was gone. One Sunday afternoon we were all sitting on the porch and Sam told me I had a head like a stripped watermelon. That was his compliment. I thanked him kindly. Sometimes I wouldn't see him coming and would get caught. Once he just appeared and it was at night. I just got up and took the lamp into the next room and shut the door. Other times when I would see his car coming, I head for the canyons.

Sam had gone to Oklahoma and came back with a little bride. Before they had married the girl's daddy phoned Sam to get up there, because he was fixing to get married to his daughter. He comes back with this little old girl. So they tried Sam for breaking my heart, by going off and getting married. And here sits this little pregnant bride on the front seat in the middle of it. There was nothing I could do. There was no way I could get out of any of it. She never spoke to me again, but I couldn't blame her for that, either. I wanted to kill a few people around there too.

They got me up on the witness stand and said, "Is it true or not true that when Sam came to your house that you took the lamp and went into the bedroom?"

I'd say, "Wait, let me explain." I couldn't say that I was running from him, and there sits his little wife, too.

They'd say, "Yes or no? Answer yes or no."

So I said, "Yes, I did go the bedroom."

Someone else would testify that they saw me break into a run when I saw Sam's car coming toward the house. They'd say, "Is that true? Yes or no?" Well, it would be true only I was running in the opposite direction. That was how they would conduct their Kangaroo Court. It was more fun than anything they had in the community. But I was the goat. There wasn't a thing to do but grin and bear it.

Rattlesnakes. The Church of Christ met in the Lloyd Mountain schoolhouse. That was the only church they had there. One Sunday, a big rattlesnake got under the schoolhouse during church. They knew there would be school tomorrow, and they all had kids there in school, so they had to get that snake out. There was just one opening to go under the schoolhouse. Mozell Roggenstein, who didn't have any children in school, went under the house with a fishing pole with a hook on the end of it. He crawled under there with a flashlight, not knowing how many snakes he was going to find. They just knew that big one went under there and he eventually brought it out. I was impressed by his bravery. I just couldn't feature it. The last house I went under, I met a snake so I've never been under another one.

Attending a Revival at the Church of Christ. Once there was this revival meeting at the Church of Christ in Lloyd Mountain. You went to everything every night in the community. If there was anything going on everybody went. I went to church every night during the revival and was offended and insulted regularly, but I went. One night, Tom, my boyfriend, came up to see me, and we went in to town to see the show. Tom always bought cigarettes to smoke on his dates, but he rolled Bull Durham to smoke for everyday.

On the way home from the show we went home by the canyon road, but he had forgotten to buy cigarettes. So he said he wanted to smoke and pulled over beside the road to roll a cigarette. If we had been sitting there smooching it would have been different. I wouldn't have felt so bad. I looked back and said, "Here comes the preacher." Tom had the lights on so he could see to roll his cigarette. Headlights, dome light and everything. The preacher had a floodlight. He came on by and that was all there was to it. I didn't think anymore about it.

The next Sunday morning, I was sitting in church, half asleep. The preacher's sermon was "The Younger Generation Is Going to the Dogs." He said, "And just last Wednesday night, as I was coming in from church, across those seven canyons, just as I topped the hill, there was a car and I narrowly averted a wreck. I had to turn to the ditch to miss it, and there were two people in that car, but they were so closely embraced, they looked like one." Everybody turned and looked at me. I could have died. If it had been the truth, it would have been different. I hated him as long as he lived.

Sometimes I went home to Rotan on the weekends and sometimes I didn't. I went to church in the community when I stayed over the weekend, or to the goat ropings, or whatever event they had. Actually, I saw more drunks at church than I had ever seen in my life. They had a system that everybody understood but me. I got to understand it as I stayed there. The very religious ones sat in front, and then the sort of lukewarm ones sat in the middle, and the ones in the back may or may not have been drinking.

Similarities and Differences Between Lloyd Mountain and County Line. The similarities and differences both lay in their churches. Nazarene and Holiness was mostly in County Line. The other one was Church of Christ strictly. If you weren't Church of Christ you were apt to be insulted when you went to church. In fact, I quit going there completely. I'd forget if I sat there long enough. When they would stand for communion, I'd forget and stand up. Then they would preach me a little sermon. They would invite all Christian to take communion, but there are no Christians but them, so you can't take communion. They didn't say, "Bargy, sit down," but that is what they meant. It would just embarrass me to death. They'd make these snide remarks about these things. I sat through one sermon, but it was my last one. I didn't go back, but I didn't walk out in the middle of it. But I came closer than I ever did. The preacher talked about all of these "man-made churches" and went on about this and that. He said man-made churches are just like some man leaving children all over the country. They are bastards in the sight of God. I sat there until it was over, but I didn't go back.