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Geoff “one. the Chronicle's man about Waterloo, came up with a philosophical gem yesterday. He does this often. fl Geoff was describing a conversation he had with his son, who returned to school Tuesday - but apparently wasn't too fond of the idea. With 25 students and one teacher, Geoff told him, the teacher should be the one fretting about school, not the students. I must admit, Geoff probably had a good point, but I can sympathize with his young son as well since I always found returning to school a rather nauseating experiinee. Part of the problem was no doubt due to rather un- fOrtunate luck." On my first day at kindergarten, a classmate deposited the remnants of his recently eaten lunch on my lap. Apparently he'd eaten too many peanut batter and jelly sandwiches before recess. After having been barfed upon, my luck continued on a definite downward curve. I was the only one in the class to get slugged with a yardstick because we were all sliding around the floor on our rest mats. We had to take an afternoon nap, you see, and the mats on which we were supposedly napping made excellent vehicles with which to scoot around the classroom. A little pushing with the hands and feet combined with a squirming motion made our kindergarten class If you have never been Involved In munlmpal Poli- tics, you should have a go Run for anything from dog- catcher to mayor If you lose. It will be good for your ego If you wot, It will be good for your humility I speak. as always, from personal experience For two years I served on a town council It was Illuminat- mg. If not very enlightening I was elected. of course. by acrlamation As was everybody else on the council So keen were the n tizms to serve that some years, on nomination eve, wo had to go down to the putr. drag a couple of characters out. and guide their hands while they signed up It's over. Summer, that great outdoor party, is yes- terday's news. And every kid on the continent at some time during the past week has muttered the annual moan, “I don't want to go back to school.“ Of course he doesn't. What a psychological downer to have the carefree days of summer cut short by the establishment legislating you back to the grind. just when waterskiing and hanging around bikinis seemed like a great way to spend the rest of your life. A recent selective survey I conducted personally shows that football players, a small group of brainy kids and 99 per cent of mothers are the only people happy with the whole arrangement. Aside from the minority group of "brains", who are actually anxious to get back to another year of achievement in the academic arena, there are those poor kids who get themselves worked up to the extent they develop "school phobia", a medical diagnosis of a self-induced ailment that attacks the "victim" every day between the hours of 7 and 9 , 30a.m, 1 weekends and public holidays excepted.) Then there was the rest of us who used to moan and get on with it. School was always too close to my idea of what life in pnson or in the army would be. All those corridors and bells ringing every 45 minutes to get you to chan- ge classes at double time, carrying six or seven text- books up and down the three storeys of a sprawling school building, has got to be the craziest way to ap- proach a lecture I bet they don't do it that way at General Motors I didn't aggressively hate school. or anything like that My attitude was more of a convict passively ac- cepting his student-life sentence and waiting for a parole somewhere near the end of the five-to-IO year pnson term A mild case of astigmatism. an aversion to group therapy and a definite lack of interest In playing the role of corporal m somebody else's army were all far- tors m my being “bored of education tr It wasn't all boring though I can vividly remember Miss Austin, my grade 9 English teacher She couldn't When I was elected, I was present as a reporter By Geoff Hoile Howard Elliott Bill Smiley At any rate, she came into the class to find about a dozen little bodies engaged in various stages of con- tortion. I was unfortunate enough to be slithering along right in front of her patnrloafers, and so was the only casualty. All the others stopped their slither- ing in time to avoid the downward sweep of Miss But- ton's baton. rr I should have known then that the only alternative for me was to enlist in the army, but instead I re- turned faithfully to grade 1 accompanied by my pride and Joy - a vinyl baseball glove. Now! had no way of knowing it at the time, but openly carrying a plastic baseball glove was somewhat similar to admitting one liked girls at that time. All the other jerks had leather baseball gloves, and between my glove and my unique ability to drop any ball that was hit, thrown, rolled or handed to me I was quickly jeered from the baseball field trailing what was left of my pi- tiful glove. look like a demolition derby every afternoon. One fateful afternoon our teacher returned in the midst of a particularly grueling race. Her name - be- lieye it or not - was Miss Button and we concluded very early in the year that she obviously ate many lemom for breakfast and lunch. That was the only explanation for her facial expressions and demeanor. What I remember most about Miss Austin (nobody ever knew if she had a first name, and they wouldn't have had the guts to use it if they did) was her utter devotion to Shakespearean plays. She started off the year - standing on a chair so we could see her - reading from Julius Caesar the parts of Cassius. Brutus and members of the crowd with all the verve of a young Richard Burton. You could have taken odds against it at the beginning of the class, but when the bell clanged to change classrooms nobody wanted to leave. By the end of three weeks she had us each learning up to 50 lines of our choice from the play. l can still remember some of them. have been more than four-and-a-half feet tall. but she still managed to control the academic attention of a class of otherwise bored guys. And was she feisty. You got caught fooling around in the halls and she would jump up and grab you by the ear while she told you to grow up. I don‘Uemember too much about public school ex- cept I tirt a lecture one day for banging some kid's head on the pavement Then there was another time a kid sat on me and bounced my head on the concrete for calling him something neither of us knew the Any thoughts of making my first million the easy way as a sports superstar got derailed by a series of broken bones and tom ligaments. It's a good thing I got out while I was only injured; if I'd followed through they might have killed me. At the end of the football season I always wound up wearing a cast and the cleanest sweater on the team. Instead of tackling me in the conventional way Amie Zlugman, a 230 pound lead-footed slob. decided to lie down across the back of my legs and disconnected my knees for good. After that my career in sports veered dramatically towards darts and shooting pool. The sports at school were by far the best part, Only I never could understand how some guys could keep their stuff neatly arranged in a locker that was six feet high and 18 inches wide, when mine was jammed with winter boots, a coat. a dozen textbooks. gym gear, two or three old lunches. a damp towel and as- sorted personal effects thatsall had to be loaded back in each time you opened the dammed thing. I still think of basketball shoes and musty towels whenever I eat a peanut butter sandwich. There were only five other people In the council chambers. so it was decided that l would be elected as the necessary sixth Since I had already served on the executives of various moribund organizations which had died forthwith. l agreed It didn't die. as rd hoped The next year we were re-elected By accla< mation It was pretty heady stuff. at first As a partner in a printing plant. and a newspaperman. I was immedia- tely appointed Chairman of the Printing. Advertising and Public Relations Committee of council This meant that our firm automatically received the con- tract for the town's printing and advertising. which we already had The public relations part meant that l Frim that time on, things Went fairly smoothly. I According to Hana Woo Chmnich, WM, S-ttter s, 1919 . Put , Jack Johnstone was a very short, very wide, very strong kid who was in grade 8 and seemed to object to the fact that someone in grade , was taller than he. After he pounded me into oblivion a few times I learned that the best way to deal with a fight was to either get a head start and hide in the school, or to hit my opponent on the head with a rock. Neither method was overly successful. Although my high school and college years were basically quiet and uneventful, I've never quite gotten over that fear of returning to school. So I'm glad I don't go there any more. F 7, I don't imagine most youngsters have as much rot- ten luck in school as I did, but if there is some poor soul out there who does have, I have a solution that worked quite well for me on numerous occasions. Don't go. learned how to catch a baseball and didn't have to like a nap in the afternoon so I was safe. Until Jack Johnstone, that is. When I was at public school I thought I was a brain because I got good marks without doing any home- work. When 1 got to high school I realised I wasn't a brain because I got lousy marks without doing any homework. They used to give us about two or three hours homework in Botany, zoology, trigonometry, history, French, etc. etc. Total expectation, between eight and 10 hours homework. One biology teacher who shall remain nameless because he was a klutz and I don't want to be sued - practically had us rewri- te the botany and zoology textbooks while he sat cut- ting out the morning smile from the Globe and Mail every day. In grade 5 something rather unusual happened to me. I grew. In fact, I was the tallest kid in school by the time I hit grade 7. _ meaning of at the time. We used to do a lot of head banging on concrete wheneveriwe got, bered. _ The most practical things I got out of my school years were learning to type 55 words a minute and how to three-bank a black ball in the end pocket. We used to take off a row of reds and shoot for the table during lunch. Discipline was the key wordat our school. Our high school principal, an ex-army major. burst into John's Poolroom and Billiard Academy in the middle of a school day and made 18 of us march back to school in “column of two" like a bunch of POWs. The indignity of it all. What was worse. he dumped six month's 8:30 detentions on us. to be served in French literature I've never tried to get in touch with members of the graduating class: I'm not really interested in that kind of thing. I bump into old school friends from time to time though. One is in a very responsible provincial planning job. another is making big bucks with the Toronto Board of Education. Old Punchy Meyers, a guy who gesticulated his way through a conversation and never finished a sentence in the conventional manner. is negotiating oil pipeline right-ot-ways in the Middle East for a large multinational company. The last I heard of Davey Barslopp, he was doing tw0-to- five in California for selling used cars He wasn't working for a used car dealer at the time and ap parently he didn't have any equity in the merchandise I know a lot of people have a lot of fond memories of their college days. but not me, All my good times hair pened after I got out of school. The system must be doing something right though: I know at least two or three kids that are looking forward to going back this year had to stop suggesting in the paper that the town mun ml was made up of nitwits, nincompoops and nerds Another chap, with a pretty good heating and plumbing business. was named Chairman of the ln- terior Municipal Modification Committee Heating and plumbing A third. who had a tractor. a back-hoe and a snow- plow. was appointed Chairman of the Public Works Department He immediately introduced a by-law raising the rates per hour of sueh equipment It (Continued on page 10)