Vibrating and bouncing down the road, I
fought back the claustrophobia as I tried to make myself comfortable on the
wooden floor of the wheat truck. Dust in
the glow of the truck’s taillights was visible through the back of the truck
bed where the tailgate had been removed.
A tarp spread over the top of the truck’s side racks kept the wind and
some of the dust off us.
I was not alone. Eleven of my classmates accompanied me. It was a Friday early in September of
1961. We were nearing the apex of our “initation”
ritual that “welcomed” us to high school.
We were freshmen.
In 1961, upperclassmen still “hazed” the
freshmen. We didn’t call it hazing.
We called it freshmen initiation.
We had survived the school day and
football practice for some of us, had had our suppers, had gathered at the
school where we were helped into the back of the truck and were on our way
somewhere out into the country.
The whole thing began as soon the school
year began. Sometime in the first week
of school, we freshmen got our “assignment”.
It was in the form of a handwritten note in my case. It came from Donna Henry.
Each freshman was assigned to a
sophomore. It was that sophomore’s job
to dream up a demeaning costume for the freshman to wear on initiation day. “Dream up” is probably not accurate since
every sophomore had been through the same process, and as underclassmen, we had
all watched the initiation ritual unfold, sometimes with trepidation and dread
of when we had to take our turn in the ceremony. Most of the “costumes” we wore were rehashed
from previous initiations.
In my case, I was instructed to wear a
woman’s dress, hat, and shoes. I had to
carry a purse. I had an onion on a
string that I wore as a necklace. I
think I was spared the duty of wearing makeup.
Fellow students were dressed as babies
carrying baby bottles, as farmers or scarecrows for the girls. During the morning, we had to do, or try to
do, whatever an upperclassman instructed us to do, such as carry her books to
class for her, or take a bite of the onion, or crawl on our knees from locker
to water fountain. These activities took place in the break between
classes. We experienced a respite in the
classroom where we tried to concentrate on the subject.
Right after lunch, we were paraded
downtown where we were subjected to trials on Main Street in front of
schoolmates as well as any of the citizenry that cared to take in the
spectacle. I remember having to roll a
jawbreaker through a trail of pepper.
Try to, anyway. A fit of sneezing
interrupted the process early on.
I don’t remember too many of the other
tortures we were subjected to. I do
remember that one fine fellow had a bottle of alum water that he made us take a
swig of. He was a junior. Normally, juniors and seniors spectated while
the sophomores put the freshmen through their paces.
After the noon spectacle, we were allowed
to take off our costumes and don our civvies.
Still to come were the evening activities, beginning with, the haunted
house. In the meantime, we did our best
to get through the afternoon classes, and for most of the boys, football
practice.
So it was that we had all had our suppers,
had been loaded into the back of somebody’s wheat truck and found ourselves
headed out into the country where the sophomores had found an appropriate old
abandoned house, which they had diligently prepared with haunts suitable to
scare and disgust us.
After a fifteen or twenty minute ride, the
truck slowed, turned, came to a stop. I was
grateful to get out into the open. We
were sequestered and led through the house one at a time. I passed through a door full of “cobwebs”
when my turn came. Early on, I was
blindfolded.
My blindfold was slipped long enough to
show me a bucket of fish worms. The
blindfold went back on and I was told I couldn’t go any farther until I ate
one. So I reached down into a bucket I
couldn’t see and grabbed a worm. I put
it in my mouth. It tasted amazingly
similar to a spaghetti noodle. I had the
good sense not to mention the similarity to my tormentors. (They may have made me eat a real worm.)
Moving along to the next station, my
blindfold was slipped long enough for me to remove a shoe and sock and stick my
bare foot into a bucket of slimy moss, readily available from any of the stock
tanks in the area. My blindfold
restored, I had to reach down and grab a handful of the moss and eat it. I’m not sure, but I think I put my foot in
the pan of wet bread that had been placed over the bucket’s mouth. Anyway, I grabbed a handful and gagged it
down.
After being subjected to other such terrors, I was
shown a ledge of some kind. In the brief
glimpse I got, it looked to be a two or three foot drop. The blindfold in place again, I was twirled
around a few times to thoroughly disorient me and led to the ledge and
instructed to jump. As I landed after
about a six-inch drop, two of the sophomores on either side of me grabbed my
arms and held me upright and I was back outside. The blindfold came off and I was done. I had been officially initiated into high
school.
There were probably other minor tortures
I endured in the haunted house that I don’t remember. But, it was over. When all of my classmates had been through
the gauntlet, we once again mounted the wheat truck and headed back to
school. There the sophomores treated us
as guests of honor (I think we got to go through the punch line first) at a
“sock hop”, a dance with records on a record player providing the music.
It was probably called a sock hop because
walking on the gymnasium floor with street shoes was strictly forbidden. All participants removed their shoes to walk or
dance on the floor. There probably
wasn’t much dancing. We mostly listened
and watched. The usual sock hop
consisted of the boys in one area, the girls in another, and only the pairs
“going steady” danced out in front of everybody. Of course, the lights were turned down so it
was semi dark.
We were now bona fide high school
students. There were still indignities
for us freshmen, like going last to anything that required a line, or getting
the oldest sports equipment, football pads, basketballs, etc., having to clean
up after every sports practice, bringing in the tackling dummies, putting away
the basketballs, sacking and hauling in the bat collection and the
baseballs.
After being cocky eighth graders, we were
put in our place on the lowest rung of the social ladder. Besides keeping us in our place, the
tradition gave us something to look forward to, when we were sophomores.
While I remember a lot about my own
initiation, I can remember very little about the tortures we put our
year-younger classmates through.
The only incident I can remember involved a shy, quiet girl we
considered “weird”. In the haunted house, she had to break an
egg into a bowl while blindfolded. She was
then instructed to put her hand in the bowl with the raw egg, grab a handful,
and eat it. While she hesitated, a
bowlful of cold plain gelatin was substituted for the egg bowl. She put her hand into it, but the thought of
putting the stuff into her mouth was too much.
She knocked away the bowl, shoved her
tormentors away, ripped off her blindfold and generally went berserk. With difficulty, her keepers got her out of
the house where she calmed down. Her
initiation was over. The haunted house
portion of freshmen initiation was over too, I believe.
The principal-superintendent accompanied
us and our freshmen to the site. (There
was a teacher or two with us when we were freshmen, there to see everything was
safe and didn’t get out of hand.) The
principal was appalled by the state of the old house we had chosen to rig up. He
felt everybody, not just the freshmen, was in danger in the rickety old
building. We carried on under his wary
eye, but he vowed that such a practice under such unsafe conditions would never
happen again under his watch.
Thereafter, he would inspect the house
before the sophomores could fix it up for the freshmen. I don’t think a suitable house was found the
next year, or the next, and the practice of the haunted house died.
The truth is there was a dearth of suitable old houses in the
countryside. All the old houses were
destroyed either by the elements or by a farmer who wanted to convert the site
to farm ground. The last old house in
our neighborhood went down in 1989 during the storm that spawned the tornadoes
that ripped through Limon. Today, remnants
of the roof brood over the collapsed shambles beneath it like an old mother
goose protecting its nest even in death.
Like the old houses, freshmen initiation
has passed into eternity.
In
pace requiescat.
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