That Darn Kid

 Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child

Mrs. Stultz's 5th grade class. Michael Richmond was, of course, absent the day of pictures. 

Mrs. Stultz didn’t even look over when Michael Richmond inched open the door to room 20 at Johnson Elementary and tiptoed back to his seat that spring day in 1958. Mike passed down the row, his eyes firmly fixed on the floor. No one looked at him, no one made eye contact. He was the Invisible Boy. Mike had just returned from Mr. Milam’s office - Mr. Milam was the principal.

Half an hour later on the playground all the boys gathered round Mike. “What happened?” we asked.

“I got paddled,” Mike replied, a bit of defiance in his voice.

“He paddled you?” Everyone looked at each other.

“Why?” some brave kid asked. 

“I said ‘darn’.”

“Oh,” was the unison reply.

In 1958, at Johnson School, Michael had uttered the forbidden word “darn” and paid the ultimate price: a sore butt for the rest of the day.

I asked my son on the phone the other night if he ever knew anyone who got a paddling. He laughed. “Nobody ever got paddled,” he said. “That doesn’t happen anymore, Dad.”

It sure used to happen. A lot. I could make a list of the kids I know who got paddled in grade school.

One got paddled for shooting a paper wad that missed its target and hit the teacher.

Another - a girl - got it for back-talking to the teacher.

There were paddlings for climbing over the seats in the auditorium, for accidentally tripping the teacher and for intentionally dropping an ink pen cartridge off the balcony onto Coach Shepherd.

Stab another kid with a pencil - it happened - and take a trip to the principal’s office.

The most amazing paddling offense during my school years belonged to a boy in my sixth-grade class who was spanked for drawing a picture of a naked woman on the arm of the girl who sat in front of him.

Today that wouldn’t get you a whipping. A jail term maybe.

Corporal punishment is pretty much dead. But in my day spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child had not yet been supplanted in Kingsport by Dr. Benjamin Spock’s permissive philosophy of child rearing.

In Kingsport, in the fifties, if you acted up, you couldn’t sit down for a couple of hours.

Tom Milam took over as principal at Johnson from Hugh Pardue for my fifth grade year. It was a position Mr. Milam - I still call him Mr. Milam - held for 31 years. I called him back in 2004 to ask about Michael Richmond. He told me he didn’t remember the “darn” paddling. “But we had a definite policy then. A teacher could paddle or I could but we only did it as a last resort. If the teacher did it, she had to report it to me. And we had a rule that you could only use one of the ball-bat paddles - on the rear - and you could only administer three licks.”

A lot of kids got paddled for a lot of different things during Mr. Milam’s 31 years but he said most paddlings were for the same offense. “One of the main things I was adamant about was a boy that acted like a bully. I wouldn’t put up with that for a minute. If I spotted one boy picking on another boy just to pick on him, I wouldn’t put up with it. I talked to him first and if that didn’t work, I would use the paddle and that usually took care it.” He said he wouldn’t have paddled Michael just for saying “darn.” “It would have been the end of a long line of offenses.”

Paddling took care of Johnson’s darn problem. I never heard Mike say “darn” again. And I, for sure, never said it.

After Mike reported the details of his paddle-able offense, the boys surrounding him had one more question.

“Did Mr. Milam use the electric paddle?”

Mike looked off in the distance, seemingly distracted. “No. No, he didn’t use the electric paddle.”

Whew. We all breathed a sigh of relief, mumbling to each other, “He didn’t use the electric paddle. He didn’t use the electric paddle.”

Half a century later, I had to ask Mr. Milam. “We always heard rumors that if you were really bad, that the principal had the ultimate punishment locked away in his closet. The electric paddle.”

He laughed. “Children can really dream up things.”

Then he added, “I’m 79 and when I was a boy I heard the rumor of a steam-powered paddle.”

 

 

 

Mrs. Stultz, Kathryn Stultz, was a stern teacher but I liked her. She would always read to us for a half hour after lunch. She introduced me to many famous authors but in particular Pearl Buck. I especially remember her reading “The Good Earth.”

On my first report card she wrote, “It is a pleasure to have Vincent in my class.”

By the fifth grading period she had me figured out: “Vincent should be trying to improve his handwriting and make his papers a little neater.” She gave me C’s in Handwriting almost every six weeks. But she wasn’t alone in that respect. She also gave me all A’s in Reading and Spelling.

She died in 1999 at age 81. She had been 39 my fifth grade year.

Mr. Milam retired from Johnson in 1988. He lived in Kingsport until his death at age 85 in 2009.