This is the wonderful time of the year when once upon a time a tradition of the Sixth Grade at Eastside Elementary School loaded up on two to three school buses for a day-long excursion to Arkansas A&M College.
What a day trip that was.
It was talked up for weeks.
I mean weeks ahead of the anticipated day-long excursion.
We would all get a “free run” on the college campus for most of the day.
There was talk about a guided tour of the new science building where they have jars – yes, big glass jars with some type of murky fluid in them that encased baby pigs, all type of snakes, lizards, worms and yes, it was rumored some early prenatal species of human forms encased within.
The entire school, well with the few exceptions, the previous year back in the 5th grade, had “the sex talk.” So we knew, or though we knew, where babies came from.
The girls, I recall, went to the music room and all us rough and tumble boys went to the auditorium for a movie amid the snickering of low laughter and some stern looks from our teachers in attendance. Our beloved principal, the late Fred Murphy, looked, oh so uncomfortable at all this required hygiene talk in the film to boys aged 10-11.
But back to the upcoming A&M field trip.
We all had to pack our own lunch. That was something I rarely did as the lunch room held some of the best and the worst meals I have ever eaten in a public setting.
I recall some of my classmates were always excused out of class a few minutes each day before lunch to serve as the “servers.” They appeared behind the stainless-steel counter as they dipped up the green beans, turnip greens, creamed corn and other delicacies from the Warren Public School Lunch Program.
This was I learned later in the days prior to the federal free lunch program. Their families seldom had the 25 cents for lunch, so dipping up green beans was a way to earn their hot lunch, courtesy of the Warren Public Schools.
Mostly I can recall, even to this day, having a mild aversion to creamy White Great Northern Beans, which the school system had an overwhelming and never ending supply – or so it seemed.
The cafeteria for the field trip, we were told, had iced down several ice chests of the best Coleman Dairy “lemonade-like” drinks for our ravenous thirst later that day.
The drinks came in two flavors in those tiny wax-colored cartons: lemon and orange.
The bus ride was long for the city kids, but a snap for kids like me who lived way out (back then) on highway 15 almost to the Bradley-Cleveland county line in the Saline River bottoms. Several of my townie classmates had never ridden the bus in such a long time.
We arrived at College Heights, Ark., with the first of the day’s classes set to begin. All us rubber-necking boys were all gaga over the A&M coeds wearing “short-shorts” to class.
And the girls were smoking cigarettes.
I thought we had been sidetracked to some cosmopolitan enclave.
Everyone looked sharp and smart. Nothing like my elementary school back home.
Girls, back at Eastside, were somehow confined, probably by their parents, to wearing “peddle-pusher” pants or “cool-lots” or “skorts” , a combination short and skirt all in one. It was rumored that a girl or two in my class had sneaked a cigarette from their moms and smoked it, but I was still looking for the proof.
The buses unloaded at the A&M Student Union and prepared with a pocket full of nickels, dime and quarters, we began an all-out assault on the vend-o-mat soda pop and pin-ball machines with a vengeance.
These were the days when you put your money in the soda machine, a paper cup fell down and it magically filled with cold, syrupy soda.
It was a treat to the eyes, the mind and the belly. Just how did that machine do that?
The tours of the science building and a roundabout tour of A&M’s campus were led by some members of a student group, probably the Knights. It was informative and no one threw up viewing the pickled pigs or fetuses in the science building.
A famous chemistry professor on campus, who hailed from the Pacific Rim, gave a lecture on the importance of science to a packed hall.
My ears, infrequent to foreign dialects and my attention span of a rat, concluded science was hard to understand and foreign professors were not for me.
After the tour, we all went to what is now Steelman Field House, where an impromptu basketball free-for-all broke out. About all I can tell you is that at least five separate basketball games were going on at the same time.
We all worked up a sweat and now it was time for the picnic spread out on the green and grassy expanse between the field house and what is now Drew Central High School complex.
We ate out sack lunches. My lunch was augmented by at least three bags of chips, assorted candy and a newfangled soda in of all things – a can. This was 1966 and can cokes were still new-fangled and rare sightings in Bradley County.
After lunch, a softball game broke out. All I can recall is that a prominent classmate of mine, a prince of a fellow, slid into second base and much to his surprise, a pile of hidden bovine excrement, attached itself to his face.
The second baseman, also a fine classmate of mine – immediately threw up.
What a show.
We stopped off at the local Coca Cola bottler on the way home. Toured their fine manufacturing facility and swilled down a dozen more free sodas.
We all got home before the school’s bell rang. Tired, sunburned, hungry, bladders bursting and ready for Sixth Grade Graduation, which I think was two days away.
As for the second base slider; the meanest and I mean the very meanest teacher in our group, took him under her wing, and cleaned him up with a roll of paper towels.
She dared any of us to make fun of him for having a little A&M cow-patty smeared on his face.
A Pastime, I am sure, he too, remembers.
