The Chicken Incident

Every high school senior has a dream. Some dream of fame. Others dream of great fortunes. Still others dream of finding the perfect soulmate. My buddy Dave had a dream when he was a senior, but it didn’t involve college gridiron glory, making a killing in the stock market, or any of Charlie’s Angels. No, Dave dreamed of stealing a chicken.

It wasn’t just any old hen that Dave wanted to steal; it was an eight-foot-tall fiberglass chicken that stood outside JoAnn’s Restaurant, at the south end of Main Street in Heber City. Dave and I endlessly dragged Main during the late winter and early spring of 1982 – listening to the music of the Go-Go’s, Journey, and Billy Joel, among others – and we passed that big bird a dozen times a night. As we burned our $1.28/gallon gasoline Dave would stare longingly at the hellacious hen and sigh wistfully, “There has to be something we could do with that chicken.”

Early spring turned into late spring. Soon graduation was just around the corner, with still no resolution to Dave’s poultry problem. I really don’t remember if me, Dave, Dale, Randy, or Jud finally decided that the fiberglass fowl would look pretty great sitting on the high school roof the morning after we graduated. It was probably a combination of all of our deviant minds. Anyway, whichever one of us who initially came up with the idea was a freakin‘ genius and – if there were any justice in the world – should be a multimillionaire now.

Finally, a plan was hatched – no pun intended. Dave and I made a sign to hang around the chicken’s neck. The sign read “Class of ‘82,” in honor of our awesome accomplishment of making it through high school. I guess for me graduation was an accomplishment, but that’s a tale for another time.

Graduation night – Wednesday, May 26, 1982 – finally came and, after all the pomp and circumstance, we retreated to a party at the home of Susan, Dave’s then girlfriend and now wife. 3:00 AM – the agreed upon hour – came agonizingly slowly, but it finally arrived. Our group of would-be poultry pilferers made our way stealthily out the door, so as not to arouse the suspicions of any females at the party who might have objected to our objective. We had already lost one good man for that very reason.

We took a couple of vehicles, including a truck, and proceeded to JoAnn’s Restaurant, the scene of the potential poultry plundering. Main Street was quiet, the silence broken only by the lackadaisical meandering of a bored cop, who was probably disappointed by the lack of action on graduation night. After ascertaining that said police officer was nowhere in sight, we made our move.

Lifting that bodacious bird turned out to be surprisingly easy. Not only was it held in place by just a few large chunks of concrete, it was unexpectedly light for an eight-foot-tall piece of molded plastic. While one of our group scanned Main Street for any onlookers who might have interrupted our larceny, the rest of us put the capacious capon into the back of a truck.

We approached the high school cautiously and made our way to the back of the building. There were garbage dumpsters there, which would make our lifting of the rapacious rooster onto the roof much easier. A few of our group, Dave included, climbed the dumpsters and stationed themselves on the roof in preparation for the placement of the plundered poultry. Two more stood on the dumpsters to relay the ripped-off rooster to the guys on the roof. The rest of us passed the pirated pullet to the men on the dumpsters, who in turn lifted it to the guys on the roof, who set the fabulous fowl by the large block W that stood guard over the main entrance of the school. Finally, Dave placed our “Class of ’82” sign around its neck.

At that moment, my best friend Don broke ranks, casually sauntered off, and hid behind one of the other dumpsters. I followed him to find out what the problem was. It turned out our adventure was a little too nerve-wracking for Don and he was worried what his girlfriend (and her family) would think if he were arrested for chicken rustling. I think he figured he could unobtrusively remain behind the dumpster should the cops break up our little poultry pirating party. After making sure Don was okay and that there wasn’t anything seriously wrong with him, I went back to the group in time to help down Dave and the other guys who had been on the roof.

We rejoined Susan’s party a little over an hour after we left. Our buddy, who couldn’t go with us because his girlfriend objected, looked at us dolefully, and we related the events of the previous hour to him. We spent the rest of the night watching videos, quite a comedown from the adrenalin rush we had experienced earlier.

At dawn the party broke up and all of us headed to a restaurant near JoAnn’s for an early morning breakfast. As we passed the high school, Coach Dan Hansen saw us, and Dave pointed to the rooster on the roof. Hansen gave us a thumbs up, which made Dave feel really good. Dan Hansen was the football coach, which at least doubled the value of his opinion.

We paused for a moment to appreciate the fruition of our night’s endeavors. As the first golden rays of the rising sun bathed the object of Dave’s finally appeased passion – no, not Susan; the ripped-off rooster – we all felt a sense of accomplishment. Not only had we graduated from high school, but we had also placed an eight-foot-tall fiberglass chicken on the roof of the school without getting caught. Life didn’t get any better than that.

Epilogue

I went home and collapsed into bed. Around two o’clock in the afternoon my mom woke me to tell me that I had a phone call. It was Dave. Our former high school principal, John Carlile, had called him to request that we return the chicken to its rightful owner. I’m not sure how Mr. Carlile found out we swiped the chicken; apparently, we weren’t as sneaky as we thought we were.

Dave picked me up, and then we drove to the Heber City Cemetery to retrieve Jud, who worked there on the grounds crew. The three of us went to the high school, climbed to the roof, reclaimed the chicken, and put it in the back of Dave’s father’s truck. We drove the short distance to JoAnn’s, where JoAnn herself was waiting for us. Expecting at least a tongue lashing for our misdeeds of the night before, we were pleasantly surprised when all she did was smile, shake her head, and say, “Thanks boys.”

After we left JoAnn’s, we decided to have a little fun with Don, our buddy who hid behind the dumpster the night before. We had passed Don’s girlfriend on the way to the cemetery earlier and stopped and talked to her briefly. We told her about the events of the previous evening and Don's participation in them. She got a big kick out of the story, especially the part about Don hiding behind the dumpster. I think she liked that Don cared about what she thought of him.

We paid Don a visit at the tire store where he worked. As Don broke down a tire, we told him that the police were now involved in our little escapade. We also told Don that because we had been honest, confessed our role in the crime, and returned the chicken to its owner, we were not being charged with anything. He, on the other hand, still had to answer for his part in the chicken theft. Don noticeably paled and became very nervous. We didn’t have the heart to continue the charade, so we finally told him the truth. I think he swore at us.

All the main participants in the Chicken Incident are now mostly respectable members of society. I’ve taught school for the last thirty years. Dave is an attorney and is a partner in his own law firm. Dale builds sheep camps in Idaho. Randy is a high school guidance counselor. Sadly, Don passed away nine years ago.

The moral of the story? Follow that dream, I guess. Even if the dream is just stealing a giant fiberglass chicken.

I’m a little in awe that it all happened forty years ago.

High School and the Meaning of Life

 

The fortieth anniversary of my high school graduation is coming up this month, so I’ve been feeling nostalgic for 1982. The pictures posted above were taken in my parents’ backyard in June 1982, a few weeks after I graduated from high school, and more recently at a store in Draper, UT. I like the juxtaposition of the two photos – same person, same pose, same attitude, forty-year difference. That’s my 1971 Dodge Charger I’m leaning against in the photo from ‘82. Spring 1982 was a good time in my life. Not only was I anticipating graduating from high school, I had the general expectation of great things just over the horizon that only a seventeen-year-old can feel so defiantly and yet be so oblivious of what life might really hold in store.

 

One memory in particular stands out. I had a P.E. class from Coach Mecham, the wrestling coach at Wasatch High School. Mecham was a fairly young guy, mustached, in his late twenties, originally a farm boy from Montana. He had that compact wrestler’s build and was friendly to a point, but you knew you didn’t give Coach Mecham crap. I didn’t think Mecham liked me very much because I had quit the wrestling team the previous year. At the time I quit the team I was recovering from a severe bout of the flu and trying to juggle academics with a job bagging groceries at Days’ Market after school. Something had to give, and wrestling was what gave. I wasn’t very good at it anyway.

 

Coach Mecham let us have a class baseball tournament the last month of school. He divided us into teams, and we agreed that the losers had to buy the winners milkshakes at JoAnn’s, a restaurant near the high school. JoAnn’s was home to an eight-foot-tall fiberglass statue of a chicken that stood in front of the place. That chicken would play a pivotal role on the night of our high school graduation, which is a story for another time.

 

We spent the last few weeks of our senior year playing baseball during PE class. My specialty was hitting the ball as hard as I could and running like hell to first base. If anyone stood in front of the base, I was just as likely to knock him over as try to get around him. What I lacked in finesse I made up for in brutishness. It worked; I usually got a base hit, even if I didn’t score. What can I say? We were a bunch of lower to middle class seventeen and eighteen-year-old boys growing up in a small town in Utah where education wasn’t a high priority, but sports were. I remember in one of the games I was up at bat and the guy playing shortstop on the other team started to talk trash. I believe the words he used were “easy out.” I hit the ball straight at his head, probably not intentionally, and he had to duck in order to not get hit in the face. Coach Mecham, who was umping the game, admiringly said “Nice hit.” I felt pretty good about that.

 

What makes me nostalgic about the whole experience is that not only was it a lot of fun, but it was also emblematic of a whole different era in education, one that is probably long gone. Nobody walked away angry about the results of the tournament. Somebody had to win, and somebody had to lose; that was life. As I recall I was on the losing team and I gladly drove to JoAnn’s to buy one of my friends on the opposing team a milkshake, during school time of course. Coach Mecham probably didn’t expend a lot of energy in planning the tournament – I’d bet he doesn’t even remember it – but here I am forty years later thinking about it. As a teacher I look back on that time and wonder if anyone will feel nostalgic about being in my class.

 

I wrote earlier that education – at least in academic areas – wasn’t our highest priority in May 1982. Like most high school seniors, we had other things on our minds. One of my friends lost his mother that spring, and another good friend was learning to adjust to life in a wheelchair. We didn’t go to the best school (by modern standards), but then some of us weren’t the best students, either. We did have some teachers who gave a damn, and who persevered despite the lack of money and other resources.

 

Looking back, the majority of us who went to school together in that era are successful. There are teachers, doctors, nurses, artists, attorneys, and newscasters among us. We didn’t have laws like No Child Left Behind to force somebody else’s version of success on us, nor did we have a bunch of right-wing politicians dictating what was appropriate for us to learn and what wasn’t; we discovered success for ourselves, and we actually learned American history, warts and all. I kind of miss that, and I hope my daughters are finding success without some fascist politician or educational bureaucrat defining what success – or failure – is for them.

The Big 2-0

Adams Elementary, Logan, UT, February 14, 1991

This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the official beginning of my career in education. In January 1991, I started Level II classes in the Elementary Education program at Utah State University.  Although I didn’t get my first real teaching job until August 1992, Level II was my first taste of what would eventually become my livelihood. I was actually working in the public schools, and had a few instructional responsibilities.

Starting the first week of January, I drove twice a week to Sunrise Elementary in Smithfield, a small town north of Logan, to observe and to work as a quasi-teacher’s aide for a practicum class. I worked in the classroom of a fourth grade teacher, Terry Olsen, who was very enthusiastic and had a lot of fun with his students. He was a big influence on me. After four weeks I moved to Adams Elementary in Logan, right next to Adams Park, where I worked in a second grade class for another four weeks. Good times.

Looking back at Winter Quarter 1991 makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. It was something of a milestone in my life. I was finally progressing in my academic career, which had felt stalled up to that point. I’ve been rereading a journal I kept during that time, and it has been quite entertaining. My outlook on what I was committing myself to for the next thirty years was awfully naive.

That winter was also an interesting – if tumultuous – time in the U.S. The build-up to the first Gulf War was occurring, and the war would start on January 16, 1991. The night the war started I was sitting in the Salt Palace arena in Salt Lake City, waiting for a Paul Simon concert to begin. Paul came out fifteen minutes late because he and his band had been listening to the first President Bush address the country. I also remember listening to war news on the radio as I drove to Smithfield. That was the era when we all learned about Scud missiles and other slightly surreal words, like Kurds and Basra.

A disconcerting thing happened to me that morning of January 16th. I had an early morning class on campus, and as I scraped the ice off the windshield of my car – it’s too cold to walk very far in Logan during January – I managed to scrape the skin off of one knuckle as well. I didn’t think much about it until two days later when my hand began to swell and a red streak started making its way up my arm. I went to the campus infirmary in the student center and found out I had a raging case of blood poisoning. The doctor lectured me about the severity of the red streak. I’m just grateful I was smart enough to go to the doctor.

So here it is, exactly twenty years later. I’m now doing pretty much what I expected to be doing back in 1991. I’m occasionally nostalgic for those seemingly care-free days, but then I read something I wrote back then and think to myself, “Gosh, I was an idiot.” 

I hope I won’t feel the same way when I read this blog in another twenty years.

Acting Principal

When my boss is out of the building, I have the dubious honor of dealing with the discipline problems that can’t be handled in-class. The older students aren’t much fun under these circumstances; their issues most often involve threatening other students or actual fighting, along with defiance or disrespect to their teachers. Oh, and the girl fights. There's nothing quite like the animosity that can develop between sixth grade girls to keep life interesting.

On the other hand, the younger kids are usually a hoot when they get in trouble. Case in point: this morning the school secretary called me to the office because a kindergarten teacher had kicked a student out of her class, and the student was waiting for me in the time-out room. The time–out room is a small room across the hall from the principal’s office; the room is painted a soothing forest green and isn’t much bigger than a walk-in closet.

As I entered the office the secretary warned me, “She’s cute but don’t let that fool you.” When I walked into the time-out room I found that the secretary spoke the truth. Waiting for me was a little girl straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting: tiny, pigtails, freckles, an impish smile, and feet that didn’t quite touch the floor from the chair where she was sitting. I asked the miniature miscreant her name and what she had done to end up in the principal’s office. The diminutive delinquent – whom I’ll call Sarah, which isn’t her real name, of course – told me that she teased another little girl named Eve. Apparently Sarah thought the similarity between Eve’s name and Christmas Eve was pretty funny. Sarah had also refused to sit on the rug with the rest of her class when her teacher asked her to, which was the main reason she was no longer in class. I had a hard time keeping a straight face with this runty wrongdoer.

Sarah chattered away about various misdeeds she had perpetrated in class, and I began to sympathize with her teacher. I finally asked the tiny terror what her parents would do if they knew she was in trouble at school. Her eyes widened and she whispered, “They would be mad.” I told Sarah that we were going to call her parents. It sounded like there would be consequences at home for getting in trouble at school, which is a good thing. However, my calling her parents didn’t seem to faze Sarah, and I soon found out why: no one answered any of the numbers I dialed. This crooked cutie knew no one was home.

I gave Sarah the standard speech – obey your teacher, how would you feel if someone teased you, blah, blah, blah – but I could tell by the small smile on Sarah’s face that I wasn’t getting through. I took Sarah by the hand – mainly because I was afraid she might make a run for it in the other direction, and the last thing I needed today was to put out an APB on a fugitive kindergartner – and led her back to class.

When we arrived at Sarah’s classroom, I asked her teacher to come out into the hall for a private talk. I reassured the teacher that Sarah would behave (although I privately had grave doubts about the truthfulness of that assertion), and told the teacher to keep Sarah in from recess. The look on Sarah’s face told me that she was still bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and more than ready for round two with her teacher. Suddenly, inspiration struck and I uttered those same four simple words that weary parents have told their obnoxious offspring every December for hundreds of years: 

“Santa Claus is watching.”

Sarah’s face fell, and she quietly returned to class. I congratulated myself on my cleverness.

Sarah’s teacher told me later that my words of wisdom guided the bitty bandit’s behavior for all of five minutes.

Too Tired To Run, Too Aggravated To Sleep

Susan and friend at the Utah State Fair, 9/12/10

The past few weeks I’ve been getting up at 4:00 AM to go to the gym. It hasn’t been a big deal for me to get up that early; I blame creeping middle age. Once upon a time I struggled to make it to a 7:30 AM class at USU. Now I look forward to getting up early to exercise and listen to music uninterrupted.

Yesterday and today have been a different story. We have had parent/teacher conferences at school the past two days, which have required twelve hour work days. As a result, I have still woken up at 3:45, but I have been too weary to get up and exercise. The problem is I start worrying about things, and I can’t turn my mind off enough to get back to sleep, although I’m really tired.

Right now my biggest concern is my oldest daughter, Susan. Susan is tall, blonde, pretty, intelligent, and athletic. Unfortunately, Susan has also become the butt of some bullying by some catty little girls in her class, probably for the reasons I just listed. She’s a little awkward socially and doesn’t relate well to kids her own age; she does better with kids who are a little older than she is.

One day last week Susan came into my classroom in tears and handed me some notes that another student had written to her. The notes were mean; among other things they accused Susan of getting easier work from her teacher because I work at the school, which was ridiculous. Susan is a smart kid and doesn’t need any intervention from me to grease her academic path. She does just fine on her own. The notes were also full of the usual fifth grade invective (loser, stupid, etc.) Like any parent, I took the notes to Susan’s teacher. The teacher dealt with the girl who wrote the notes by moving her away from Susan and informing the girl’s parents of her activities. I agreed with how Susan’s teacher handled the situation and figured the problem was solved.

Unfortunately, the note-writer is just one of a little clique of mean girls who have been hassling Susan. Susan told The Wife last night that the teasing has gotten worse because Susan told me about it. Apparently this catty little bunch didn’t like Susan telling on them. Susan didn’t want The Wife to tell me that the teasing is still going on, but The Wife did anyway, for which I am grateful. I am also pissed off. My daughter has as much right as anyone else to attend school without being harassed, and just because I work at the school doesn’t mean she should have to put up with any crap. My working at the school may not entitle my daughters to any special privileges, but my job also doesn’t mean my kids don’t have the same right to not be bullied as any other kid at the school.

Stay tuned.