Sunday, January 3, 2016

Haunted House

     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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