A Hundred Year Story, Part 46

By Elton Camp

The life of a beginning high school teacher in the early 1960s

Four high schools served Columbus, each with a particular cohort in mind: Jordan
Vocational High School for poorer children, Baker High School near Ft. Benning for the
children of lower ranking army personnel, George Washington Carver High School for
blacks of any standing, and Columbus High School for the upper class adolescents.

At Dr. Deason’s suggestion, I arrived a week before my duties actually started.

Nothing justified my being there. The man was obviously shocked when I appeared and
quickly stirred around to find something for me to do. I later learned he’d made that
suggestion to each of the new employees, but I was the only one who complied.

I had thought that I’d use the time to get my room ready for the start of school as
I’d seen my mother do over the years, but quickly learned that I didn’t have a specific
room. As a new hire, I roamed from room-to-room each period. Some of them were
located in the older part of the building and others in the new wing. I had to rush from
one location to the next. With the crowded hallways and only two minutes between
classes, it was barely possible to get there ahead of the students.

So, during that week, I worked in the office, mainly typing and working the
switchboard. The switchboard, with its headphones, cords, levers, receptacles, and
flashing lights, was a new experience. It had four trunk lines that connected with the
outside service. Amber lights announced incoming calls. Two cords with attached plugs
were in front of each trunk line. If a call came in, I placed the left plug into the receptacle
by the flashing light and answered with the headset. If anyone on campus wanted to call
out, the person picked up an extension and dialed nine. That caused the extension light to
flash repeatedly. I plugged the right cord into the extension receptacle and the left cord
into one of the trunk lines. That gave the employee access to a dial tone. By the
standards of 1962, it was high tech.

It was an Old Fashioned Switchboard by Current Standards

My having come early worked to my advantage. Deason had taken on two new
biology teachers. At the last minute, he had to give one up to Jordan Vocational High
School. I stayed and the other one went because I’d been working for a week without
pay.

The transferred teacher was also from Jacksonville State. During bacteriology
lab, I’d mentioned the vacancy in Columbus. She pretended to be glad I was on the track
of a job had asked when I was to be interviewed. Unknown to me, she rushed over
sooner to try to get the job. I hadn’t expected such treachery. It seemed no harm was
done since both of us were hired. She was furious at being transferred to an inferior
school. I saw her go into the principal’s office in a huff. She could do nothing about it
and soon emerged with a scowl on her face. My thought was “It’s good enough for her.”

When the rest of the faculty arrived on the first real working day, they assigned us
menial, unprofessional tasks, especially alphabetizing a seemingly endless stack of cards.
I hated doing that and was inordinately slow at it. It was the type work that should have
been done by support staff rather than the faculty.

The main building had an original three-story section with a large auditorium. A
two-story wing addition, location of most of my classes, was much newer. Within a
couple of years, a similar wing was added to the opposite side of the main building. The
school made no provision for disabled, but we had no students like that.

The library was on the third floor. “Myrtle the Turtle” Blackmon was the
librarian. Miss Blackmon was a fat old spinster and quite wealthy. She and Mr. Thomas,
head of the science department when I went there, had been sweethearts when younger,
but nothing ever came of it. The report was that she was willing but he wasn’t.

The school provided a faculty lounge for female teachers near the principal’s
office. It had beautiful wood panel walls and comfortable seating. The corresponding
lounge for male teachers was off the art room. The art room had, years before, been the
boys’ gym. Our lounge was far inferior to that provided for the women. The walls were
crude, painted brick and the bathroom equally primitive. At least, it furnished a hiding
place where students couldn’t find us. The last year or two, an additional teacher’s
lounge was added which served both males and females. No office equipment was
available, not even typewriters. Comfortable seating was its only feature. Few used it.

The janitor, Mr. Windisch, made copies at his convenience on a ditto machine that
produced stinky blue pages. It was barely possible to get enough copies for a large
enrollment before the print faded to unreadable. If more copies were needed in the
future, the only option was to retype the document. Error correction was so difficult that
it was common practice to “X” out mistakes and continue to type. The faculty distributed
poor quality materials, but that was true throughout education at all levels. We had no
secretarial support. Neither word processing nor Xerox machines had come onto the
scene and wouldn’t for a long time.

Calculators hadn’t yet appeared. Adding up test scores and dividing to obtain an
average to equate to a letter grade was usually done by hand. I finally discovered one
machine in a business classroom that could add and then divide. When I pressed the
divide key, the machine shook heavily and clicked nosily for a while before it printed the
average on a roll of paper. I was amazed at how advanced it was. I could calculate
averages for all of my students in little more than an hour. There was no screen to
display the results, but it operated by electricity rather than manually, as was the case
with most such devices.

Vintage Electric Calculation Machine

The school had a large new boys’ gym. Gender equity in sports wasn’t
considered. Later, court decisions and federal funding imposed the requirement. In
addition to the huge gym, the building had a full basement with excellent facilities for
physical education and sports. It made the girls’ gym, tiny and attached to the main
building, look like the dump that it was.

“There’ll be a pep rally at 3:00 this afternoon in the gym,” the principal
announced over the intrusive public address system each time a competition was
scheduled. Faculty members were expected to attend. The noise was deafening.

The principal my first year was the one who had hired me, Dr. John Deason. I
quickly learned that he was universally detested. I suspect that he wouldn’t have been
employed or even taken seriously except for his holding an earned doctorate even if it
was only a doctor of education degree. Not many principals had the doctor’s degree, so
that gave bragging rights to the school system.

“He’s a smirky smart-alec,” one of the teachers warned me in a whisper. “You

can’t trust him. He’ll cut your throat if he gets a chance. Everybody hates him.”

Deason used an evaluation scheme wherein he showed up unexpectedly to

observe in a class. Afterward he wrote a detailed letter about what he’d seen. Unlike his
actions in person, the letters were quite courteous and professional. No doubt he realized
that, while what’s said can be denied, what’s put in writing is proven.

He also scheduled a series of after-school meetings which consumed far too much
of our time. He was condescending and insulting in his demeanor, even to the faculty. In
a meeting where I was present, Deason slipped in late and sat in the back. The subject
under discussion was one for which the group had incomplete information.
 The chairman looked at the principal and asked courteously, “Dr. Deason, can
you tell us more about this?”

“I’m only here as an observer,” he responded curtly. The entire group was
astonished at his rudeness, but nobody said anything. There was no tenure in Georgia.

On one occasion he publicly insulted the guest speaker at a meeting of the PTA.
The presenter was from Columbus College, a part of the University of Georgia System.
He’d come to tell about a program to be made available to high school students. The man
began by briefly tracing the history of the arrangement. He had barely begun when
Deason rose to his feet and loudly said with obvious disrespect for the speaker, called
out, “Do you intend to tell these people what you have to offer to their children?” It was
terribly embarrassing to both faculty and parents.

To the delight of the faculty and students, Deason left at the end of that year. He
went on a crusade against culottes, a type of girls’ garb that had large, loose separate legs
like shorts, but looked a lot like a skirt. Shorts were in violation of the dress code, as by
extension, were culottes. It was almost impossible to tell culottes from skirts without
manually separating the garment legs in the center.

Deason reportedly came up behind a girl in the hallway and began grabbing at her
skirt to see if it was a culotte. She turned around a slapped him full in the face. A hallway
of students witnessed the incident. It blew up into a major incident and he left.

“I’m so glad that Deason isn’t coming back,” I confided to Ann Dismukes, a
chemistry teacher about my age. So is everybody,” she responded with a wide grin.

The man who succeeded him as principal was Herman Dollar. He had, several
years previously, been football coach at Columbus High. More recently, he was principal
at Richards Junior High that fed students to our school. Dollar’s main emphasis was on
sports. Academic excellence was, at best, a remote consideration.

“No student’s going to fail a course,” he informed the faculty. “I don’t believe in
giving Fs. You can put them on the reports, but they won’t stay. If you try to assign a
failing grade, I’ll just change it.” The statement seemed to me to be unprofessional,
probably illegal, and almost certainly in violation of accreditation standards, but he
enforced it.

To make matters worse, the Muscogee County School District had faculty report
grades on what was called a “Proficiency Sheet.” The faculty member had to list each
student in each class, the grade assigned for each six weeks throughout the year, and the
final grade assigned in the course. Alongside the name of each student, was the question
“Proficiency Achieved?” Boxes for “Yes” or “No” were to be checked. At the bottom,
the faculty signature was required to a sworn statement that the above grades had been
assigned on “the basis of Proficiency achieved” by the students. Dollar made a mockery
of the academic process and liars out of the faculty in the case of the worst students.
 My all time worst student made an “F” at the end of each six weeks. One time I
noticed him openly cheating on a test. I took the textbook, opened it to the chapter under
consideration.

“Here, use this all you want,” I invited. The boy looked shocked at my
instructions. For the rest of the testing session, he pawed through the text and wrote
answers. He made a score of 40 out of a possible 100.

At the end of the year, I reported his unbroken chain of Fs, but put the final grade
as “D.” Acting under compulsion from Dollar, I checked “Yes” that he’d achieved
proficiency. I thought surely somebody, at some level, would say something about it, but
not a word was uttered.

Dollar frequently boasted about his war record. One day, in the teacher’s lounge,
one of the ladies challenged him on it. “Doesn’t it bother you that you’ve killed so many
people?” He paused and turned a bit pale before answering. I surmised that it was the
first time he’d been questioned on the subject. It seemed to shock him. Perhaps the
reality of the horrible things he’d done had never occurred to him. “Not a bit,” he huffed
angrily and stalked out of the room. The incident had one favorable effect, however. We
didn’t have to endure nearly as many of his war stories.

He was much better liked than Deason, but was sometimes unfair in his dealings
with faculty. In a state without tenure, an expensive lawyer and the courts were the only
recourse and so seldom used by aggrieved employees.

The State of Georgia had some strange regulations that had accumulated due to
laws passed by the state legislature. Regardless of subject area, all teachers were required
annually to sign an affirmation that they had spent a certain number of hours per week
teaching students to be kind to animals or some other such things. Of course, we all
signed the foolish documents whether we’d done it or not.

Each teacher was required annually to sign an affirmation that he or she wasn’t a
member of the Communist Party. What made the procedure so foolish was the way the
school implemented the law. The document was brought around during the last week of
the school year. If they’d employed a Communist, he’d have had all year to indoctrinate
students. Of course, an actual Communist wouldn’t have hesitated to lie about party
membership. All it did was insult the faculty, but it was the law and the infinite wisdom
of the legislature must be carried out. In Alabama, there is an adage, “No man’s life or
property are safe when the legislature is in session.” Apparently, the situation was
similar in Georgia.

My first year, I was assigned as home room teacher in room six which was the
domain of Miss Cora Lee Cheatham, a venerable old biology teacher who bitterly
resented me being in “her” room. A heavy-set spinster, she wore small glasses with no
frames, had short, gray hair, and wore hopelessly out-of-date clothes. “Do you mind if I
put my coat in the preparation room?” she asked with obvious resentment. “Of course
not. This is your room, Miss Cheatham. I can’t help that they assigned me homeroom
here,” I replied.

Gradually, I managed to win her over by being extraordinarily nice to her and
asking her advice. We became friends. The following year she had to retire due to
sickness so I was able to take over “her” room entirely. She was a packrat. The office
and preparation rooms were filled with decades of accumulated clutter that took me
weeks to dispose of so as to get the area into an orderly condition. Day after day I piled
junk in the hallway for disposal by the janitorial staff. Mixed in with the clutter was a
small school check made out to Miss Cheatham. I took it to her apartment several blocks
from the school. “I’d been wondering where that was,” she said. I doubt that she
remembered anything about it. By that point, she was pretty much “out of it,” although
she continued to live alone for some time. What finally became of her, I don’t know.
She seemed, to me, a tragic figure.

As I moved up in the faculty, the principal switched me to the far more desirable
room 119 on the second floor of the new wing. It became my permanent room for the
rest of my work at that institution. At the front was a quality wooden demonstration table
with drawers for storage. The acid-resistant top had a sink with hot and cold running
water, a gas outlet, and electric plugs. Above the chalkboard was an extensive set of high
quality pull-down biology charts. The room was wired for cable and contained a
television set on a roll-around stand. The students had individual desks. Along the
outside wall ran a counter equipped like the demonstration table, but with multiple sinks,
faucets, plugs, and gas outlets designed for student lab work. It was far superior to the
typical high school biology lab of the day.

As with all other rooms, a public address speaker allowed frequent interruptions
of the academic program as well as the morning broadcast of “Christian” devotionals
during homeroom. The communication system was disruptive and used far more
frequently than actually needed. The annoyance was greater because announcements
were made toward the end of class sessions, but always ended with a few minutes
remaining in the period. After such an interruption, it was almost impossible to utilize
the remaining time effectively. Ironically, the announcements always started with
“Excuse this interruption...”

The laboratory had an adjoining office with a quality wood desk and adequate
storage. A luxury feature was an arched outside window. Both outer and inner
preparation rooms were provided. Few of the faulty had individual offices, so that was a
significant bonus.

A clip was attached to the wall outside each classroom. The homeroom teacher
was expected to place the names of absent student there. A worker came by and
transported the report to the assistant principal who compiled a comprehensive list of
school absences. At the beginning of each class, the teacher called the roll, listed
absences, and posted them in the same way. This allowed for a comparison of class
absences with those present. If a student “cut” any individual class, it was immediately
evident to Miss Arnold, the assistant principal. The front office called the home of each
absent student to inquire as to the reason the teenager wasn’t in school that day. That
also served to notify the parents if the child wasn’t home.

Homeroom teachers had to keep a Register of attendance and submit it monthly to

the assistant principal for audit. It was easy to do, but a nuisance. The first year, a young
English teacher who had also just been employed, asked me to come to her apartment and
help her understand how to do the register. I foolishly agreed before finding out that the
woman had been married three times. When I arrived, I quickly concluded that I was a
candidate for mate number four. “I guess people would think I’m a poor marriage
prospect because I’ve been married so many times,” she said. I felt that she expected me
to say that wasn’t the case, but I replied tactlessly, “I’ll say!” I left as soon as possible
and avoided her after that.

“Keep the register in ink, never in pencil,” the assistant principal sternly charged.
“Don’t ever list the dates across the top until the actual day. Miss Arnold was an old
fuddy-duddy, but most liked her well enough.

The principal made it a practice occasionally to hold students in homeroom far

past the normal fifteen minutes, always without giving advance notice. That changed the
class schedule for the rest of the day and so disrupted instructional plans. With nothing
to do, the students became restless and hard to control.

A couple of years, I didn’t have an assigned homeroom. That was a big relief as
it eliminated the register and babysitting when the time was extended.

With a former coach as principal, there came to be an undue emphasis on sports.

Football was the biggest issue. I often attended home games in the magnificent stadium
since I knew the boys playing. On occasion I was assigned to a gate to take up tickets,
but we were paid extra for doing that. As I recall, it was ten dollars cash, a significant
sum when a big bag of groceries might run five dollars and a car fill-up was about the
same. Faculty pay was ridiculous, if measured by current standards. At the time,
however, we were thought of as relatively well paid.

Where the Blue Devils Played Home Games

 At a senior picnic at Callaway Gardens the last year I worked there, the principal
stood with a group of the younger faculty. In the distance stood a gaggle of the older
women. “You see that group?” he remarked. “Not one of them makes less than $7000.”
We were duly impressed. The enormous salaries gave us something to shoot for if we
stayed around long enough. Advancement in pay was based mainly on years of
experience and ranged from zero to twenty-one years.

The cafeteria was, at first, on the lower level of the main building. It contained a
private dining room for faculty. We had a supposedly duty-free thirty minutes lunch
break. A separate cafeteria building was later built between the main building and the
boys’ gym. The library then was moved from the third floor into the old cafeteria
location.

Interesting features of the main building were two courtyards that were
completely enclosed by portions of the building. In the year I left, the “Courtyard
Council” attempted to raise money to put fountains in the two spaces. This was in
keeping with a move to install fountains all over Columbus so it could be called “the
Fountain City” instead of its traditional and sensible designation as the “Port City.”
Ordinances required fountains at all new business construction. The school’s fountains
weren’t yet installed when I left.

The faculty had assigned parking. An individual’s parking spot was an indication
of how well he or she was regarded. The principal held the best position and the assistant
principal was directly behind him. I gradually moved from a far corner of the campus,
past even the student parking area, to a shady space alongside my laboratory. I suspect
that the assigned parking wasn’t as a courtesy, but as a means to check up on whether we
were on campus. If so, it didn’t always work with me. I usually walked the two blocks to
school. When I did drive, however, it was convenient to be able to look out and check on
my car. Student vandalism against faculty vehicles occurred with some regularity.

(MORE LATER.)