Who Studied in Study Hall?

 

Truman Smith monitoring D-B's Big Study Hall in 1966.

 What do you major in in college to teach Study Hall?

That was always a topic of conversation as we sat in the back of study hall, trying to make Mrs. Fogelman’s life miserable.

What prepares one for a lifetime of monitoring an enormous hall of students, none of whom wants to study?

Did they teach shushing at teachers’ colleges? 

Kids today don’t even know what study hall is.

Study Hall was what they used to use to fill up your day, to plug that hole in your schedule. Six periods, five classes, what will we do with the little goofs for that extra time? How about: put them all in a big room and make them study?

Yeah, that worked.

Study Hall was the biggest misnomer in high school (and junior high).

Trouble Hall would have been a more apt description.

There were a few kids who studied - you know who you are.

But most everyone else used Study Hall to a) catch up on sleep b) doodle c) cause trouble.

There were three Study Hall teachers at D-B when I was there. Honest, there were teachers whose job title in the yearbook was Study Hall teacher.

There was Coach Brixey, who got the job for obvious reasons; he was the biggest person in the school. Need a little discipline? Call Coach Brixey. We all knew what he had majored in in college: football.  

Mrs. Fogelman monitored the little Study Hall, the second-floor room above the shops. She was an older teacher - we all suspected she was retired and just building up her pension. We tested her.

The third Study Hall teacher was Truman Smith, just about the nicest Study Hall teacher you’d ever want to meet. We really put him to the test.

Coach Brixey had fewer troublemakers in his Study Hall than either of the other Study Hall teachers. He had a few but Coach Brixey just didn’t put up with foolishness so we had to bide our time waiting for a substitute Study Hall teacher. It would happen. Coach Brixey would have to leave early for an away football game. And we would strike.

The substitute would pass around a roll sheet for everyone to sign. He might have gotten three real names on that sheet. Mostly he got Charlie Grant and Buford Leech and Hoyt Kneffel. Then he would read the roll out aloud:

Ima Pigg

Neil Down

Ben Dover

Willie Makit

Betty Wont

Harry Pitts

And those are just the least offensive ones. There were other, more, shall we say, suggestive names, all of which were dutifully read aloud by the substitute.

Mrs. Fogelman was an easier target so she got more pranks than Coach Brixey.

My favorite prank on her was invented by Mark Haggitt. He would go to the pencil sharpener and as he turned the crank he would whistle this shrill sound: squeak squeak squeak. Mrs. Fogelman would hear the squeak, dig her can of 3-in-1 Oil out of the desk drawer and proceed to oil the pencil sharpener. A few minutes later Mark would be back at the pencil sharpener, turning the crank and whistling that high-pitched sound. And Mrs. Fogelman would be back over there oiling it again. This would go on till the end of the period, by which time there would be an oil slick worthy of NASCAR under the pencil sharpener.

We saved our best pranks for Mr. Smith. Because he was so nice.

We played the roll call pseudonym game on him.

We would spin pennies up the aisle. As each penny struck the baseboard with a loud clang he would look around, trying to figure out where the noise came from.

Of course he never figured it out.

The worst thing we did was put crackle balls on the floor at the study hall exit. Crackle balls were little round firecrackers. Step on them and they emit this loud pop and a puff of smoke.

That day as the throng headed out to the next class there was a round of loud pop pop pops. And since the big study hall had an exit at each end there were explosions in front of Mr. Smith and behind him. He started toward one door, then backtracked to the other door. And ended up standing in the middle of that big room, looking befuddled.

 

I dug around on our old Study Hall teachers to see what they really majored in in college: the three from my years at D-B, Coach Brixey, Mrs. Fogleman and Truman Smith, plus a Study Hall Legend from the forties and fifties, Miss Ruth Springer. It turns out – not unexpectedly – that none started out to be Study Hall teachers.

 

From 1948 UT football program. 

Coach Brixey

When Tom Brixey died in 1986, his obituary referred to him as “Coach Brixey.” Because that’s how everyone thought of him, as Coach Brixey.

But if Tom Brixey had never coached a single game of football, he would still be a legend.

The legend started long before he became head football coach at D-B in 1962.

Tom Brixey played football for General Robert Neyland at Tennessee from 1946 through 1949. And he was a legend there, perhaps the only fifth string player in college football history who was nominated for All-American honors. Honest. He never started a single game in his four years. Yet in Nov. 1948 the Knoxville News-Sentinel reported, “Five members of the 1948 University of Tennessee football team are included in a list of candidates nominated for All American consideration and submitted to sports writers over the nation by the United Press. Those nominated from Tennessee are Capt. Jim Powell and Bud Sherrod, ends; Tom Brixey and Norman Meseroll, tackles, and Hal Littleford, back.”

Coach Brixey was nominated because of his prowess on punt coverage. Escar Thompson of the Associated Press called him “a punt coverer of unusual ability.” The News-Sentinel’s Tom Siler noted he was fifth string tackle in games against North Carolina and Georgia but was “sensational on covering kicks.” The Knoxville Journal’s Ed Harris said “reserve tackle Tom Brixey was down the field so fast on punts (against UNC) that All American Choo Choo Justice signaled for fair catches on all but two. Brixey must have been resting on the bench on those two attempts.”

Coach Brixey was a ferocious rusher, here on front page of Nashville newspaper. 

A legendary football player and also a legendary fisherman. In June 1954 the Knoxville Journal‘s Tom Anderson called him “one of the leading catfish anglers of the area.”

And for my generation he was a legendary Study Hall teacher. He would sit behind that elevated desk, tying fishing flies while monitoring miscreants in the aisles. And if you happened to walk near the desk while he was concentrating on his fishing flies, you might get a discourse on the art of fishing: “There’s this certain way the light comes down and strikes the water...” was one of his most famous beginnings.

When he was football coach at Sparta High in the early fifties, he started a club called The Arts and Crafts of Fishing.

But he was a football coach and he was a legend in that, too.

In seven seasons as Sparta’s coach he fielded two undefeated teams.

And he was the coach of Dobyns-Bennett’s 1964 team, winner of the mythical state championship, the last D-B team to win the state.

Coach Brixey had two great tragedies in his life.

The tragedy of his son Vernon Edward Brixey is well-known. Ed was only 17 in 1969 when he was killed in an industrial accident at Barger Millworks on a summer job. The forklift he was operating overturned, trapping him under the machine. He had started the summer job only two weeks earlier.

Coach Brixey's older brother Bub, a football star at Tullahoma High until his fatal injury. 

Few in Kingsport knew about the other tragedy, also involving Vernon Edward Brixey, the other Vernon Edward Brixey, Coach Brixey’s older brother. Coach Brixey was only eight in 1932 when Bub, as his older brother was known, was seriously injured during a football game between Tullahoma and its rival Murfreesboro. Bub was a star fullback, called “the best ground gainer in this part of the state” by the Chattanooga Times as a sophomore. “He is versatile, does most of the punting, can shoot a pass like a bullet and receive one like a baseball player.” In the season opener of the ’32 campaign, Tullahoma overwhelmed Chapel Hill 85-0 with Bub Brixey scoring 75 of the 85. After beating Wartrace High in the fifth game of the season on Oct. 22, 1932, Brixey had accounted for 105 of the team’s points. But something happened in the Wartrace game that put Brixey in the hospital. Doctors orders, he was not supposed to play against Murfreesboro the next week. But he entered the game with three minutes to play and his team trailing by 7, scored a touchdown and kicked the extra point for a 7-7 tie. The next day he was back in the hospital with a spinal injury. He never played another game, in fact he never got out of bed for three years.

On Feb 23, 1938 the Chattanooga Daily Times reported, “Vernon (‘Bub’) Brixey, 24, former Tullahoma High school football star, who received an injury to his spine while playing fullback in a game with Murfreesboro Oct. 28, 1932, and was confined to his bed for nearly four years, died Monday night, his death resulting from the injury. Nearly a year ago Brixey was believed to be recovering, and was able to leave his home. Last summer he bought a small grocery store in Tullahoma, which he had been operating successfully. Two weeks ago he had to return to his bed.” He died soon after.

When Tom Brixey enrolled at the University of Tennessee in 1946, he said he was following the dream of his late brother, who had planned to attend UT and play football. And when Tom Brixey’s first son was born in 1952, he named him Vernon Edward, after his brother.

And both Vernon Edward Brixeys would die early deaths.

Coach Brixey died in 1986 at age 61.

Coach Brixey as D-B assistant in 1960 - others in photo, Bob DeVault, Cecil Puckett, head coach Bill Jasper. 

 

Mrs. Fogleman and Miss Springer

Two of the D-B Study Hall Legends arrived in Kingsport within months of each other in the mid-twenties.

Rhea Fogleman in 1963.

The first was Rachel “Rhea” Byrley, a Clay County, Kentucky native, who was hired by Ross N. Robinson in Oct. 1926 to direct the Music Department at Central School, which would soon be renamed Washington School. She was fresh out of the Cincinnati Conservatory School of Music.

Later that school year LeRoy Sprankle brought in Ruth Springer to lead the Girls’ Physical Education Department at the new Dobyns-Bennett High School and also coach the girls basketball team.

Neither came to Kingsport to be a Study Hall monitor but both would end their teaching careers at the front of a Study Hall.

Miss Byrley, who had married an up-and-comer in Mead’s employment office named Bill Fogleman in 1929, and becoming Rhea Fogleman, was the music teacher at Washington Elementary for three years before her marriage. But at the time Superintendent Robinson had a rule: if you married, you lost your job.

Legendary D-B Latin teacher Grace Elmore, who also arrived at D-B in 1927, told the Kingsport Times News, “Superintendent Robinson told me when he hired me that they did not have any married teachers and were not going to have any married teachers. Nor could I go, if I was asked, to a dance. He said I must tell him the night before if I planned to go to a dance. I asked why was that and he said, ‘So I will know not to expect you to be teaching the next day.’”

Mrs. Fogleman’s successor at Washington, Eleanor Hufford, held the job until 1937, when she married Richard Hull and was out. The next Washington music teacher, Laura Sandusky, married drycleaner Donald Massey, in 1942, the year that Robinson relaxed his marriage rule. He was forced to. The war had created a teacher shortage.

Rhea Fogleman enjoyed an active social life after her marriage, and departure from Washington’s faculty, appearing in the Social Notes of the Kingsport Times almost weekly, for playing piano at a wedding, performing for a civic club or church function or for hosting a bridge party. Especially bridge parties. She and husband Bill were active bridge players and hosted many bridge games at their home in the Reed Apartments on Charlemont.

In ’36 Rhea placed a classified ad in the Times seeking to rent a piano, probably a prelude to offering piano lessons. After the war she returned to head Washington’s Music Department, a position she held for 15 years, when Elery Lay convinced her to move to Dobyns-Bennet for a three-year stint as Study Hall teacher, padding her retirement fund while giving her reign over what we called the Little Study Hall. In ’64 she retired to teaching piano and voice, and died in 1977 at age 77.

 

Ruth Springer in 1936 D-B yearbook. 

Ruth Springer had graduated from The Agency School in Ottumwa, Iowa, her hometown, in 1912. The next year, at 17, she was teaching at Pleasant Ridge School in nearby Washington township, Iowa. She moved around various Iowa schools until 1920 when she was hired to be the Physical Education Director at the State Training School for Girls in Geneva, Illinois. Various sources call it a “school for wayward girls.” In his 1900 book “The Making of Illinois” Irwin Mather described the school as "for the confinement, education and reformation of girls between the ages of 10 and 16 years who have been convicted of offenses punishable at law.”

Miss Springer stayed there for four years, undoubtedly learning many skills that would be invaluable in her later career as a Study Hall teacher. In 1924 she was named an instructor in physical education at Shurtleff College in Alton, Ill.

The Kingsport Times of Dec. 1, 1927 reported, “Preparations for the 1927-28 cage season are under way in the gymnasium at Dobyns-Bennett High School. Under the direction of their new coach, Miss Ruth Springer, the girls are going through excellent practices, with Miss Sally Cogle assisting Miss Springer. Splendid progress has been made by the girls under these two excellent mentors and indications point to the fact that the girls' aggregation this year will be much stronger than that of last.”

Coach Springer and her 1928 D-B girls basketball team.

How did she fare as girls basketball coach? Fair.

That first team in ‘28 went 5-7-1. How do you tie in basketball? The Kingsport Times explained after that 17-17 tie with Hiltons. The officials conferred and ruled, “Girls basketball rules do not permit the use of an extra period to play off a tie.”

Her 1929 team finished 2-12-1. Her third, and last team in 1930 finished 3-10 including lopsided losses to St. Paul 50-25 and Elizabethon 44-21. St. Paul’s center, named Harmon, was 6’3”, “eight inches taller” than any of the Kingsport girls according to the newspaper. The 12-17 loss to the Morristown Roosterettes must have been particularly galling to Kingsport fans because five of Morristown’s players fouled out and they still won.

Miss Springer’s three-year record as girls basketball coach was an unimpressive 10-29-2.

Despite that record, she wasn’t fired. D-B, along with numerous Tennessee schools, dropped girls basketball after the 1930 season.

What?

I can’t find any newspaper article about why D-B dropped girls’ basketball. Granted the last three teams, all coached by Miss Springer, weren’t very good.

Bill Porter, long time sports statistician at Lincoln Memorial University, told me that based on research he did for LMU, “There was a movement at the time led by several groups, including doctors and church groups, that said that women’s basketball was not healthy for the players.”

Bill directed me to a history of women’s basketball where I discovered that in 1923 Lou Henry Hoover, head of the Girl Scouts of America and wife of former president Herbert Hoover, helped organize the Women's Division of the National Amateur Athletic Federation (WDNAAF). One of the first things the group did was lash out at girls’ basketball, calling it “unladylike, inappropriate and unhealthy.”

“Because of that many high schools and colleges, including King, Carson-Newman, Emory and Henry and Tusculum to name some local ones, dropped women’s basketball entirely or made it an intramural sport.”

Miss Ruth Springer, fighting back a smile, in 1947 D-B yearbook. 

With interscholastic girls basketball shelved, Miss Springer concentrated on her other duties as Director of Girls Physical Education, overseeing intramural sports, leading the Girls Athletic Association, organizing The Sirens, a pep club, and correcting posture.

You read that right: every year she went from city school to city school, “giving posture tests,” according a Nov. 30, 1930 edition of the Kingsport Times. “The whole school will be tested. To the school having the most correct postures will be awarded a silver loving cup.”

I would love to see one of those cups.

Miss Ruth Springer, the Study Hall years. 

Miss Springer headed the girls phys. ed. department until 1936 when she was moved to Study Hall. She retired in 1958, as a sort of Study Hall Teacher Emeritus – she did it for 20 years after all. She left to monitor that Great Study Hall in the Sky in 1965 at age 69. D-B named its annual award for Best Girl Athlete the Ruth P. Springer Award that spring.

 

Tricky Truman Smith in 1965.

Truman Smith

Truman Smith was still around when I moved back to Kingsport so I called him one day to get some insight into the Study Hall teacher psyche. And also to kind of apologize for all the grief my friends and I gave him.

For Mr. Smith Study Hall teacher was just a foot in the door, an entree onto the D-B faculty until a teaching job opened up in his subject area, Social Studies.

D-B was his first job, he said. He had spent 18 years working in the coalmines in southwest Virginia before following his dream, going back to college to get his teaching certificate.

He was only at D-B for a couple of years - not because of me or my friends - but because he got a better offer. He went on to teach at Baileyton Elementary, winding up his teaching career as principal at West Pines Elementary in Greene County. He retired in 1980.

Mr. Smith didn’t remember any of our pranks from the sixties. He told me a local minister came to him a few years back and apologized for all the trouble he had caused in high school.

After I talked to Mr. Smith, his wife came on the phone and explained why Mr. Smith had been so good-natured about the tricks we pulled on him.

“They used to call him Tricky when he was in high school. Because he pulled all sorts of tricks.”

Tricky Truman became Kingsport’s longest-lived Study Hall teacher, dying in 2008 at age 94.