RUSS WE HARLLEE KNEW YOU!!!

This week’s trip down memory lane finds a young JB leaving the safe and calm years of elementary school and near priesthood and on his way to Middle School.

Ahhhh the memories…. And maybe yet more reasons I now need therapy. I was lucky enough to be one of the chosen ones to attend Sara Scott Harllee Middle School. I’m not alone in this luck, both Sandstram and Sal also spent some time inside these hallowed halls. While I can’t speak of their experience, I’m going to give you the hi/low lights of mine.

In my humble opinion middle school is the most difficult time for Childrens. Hair is starting to grow in places you didn’t know it was going to grow, some of the female students appeared to start smuggling different sizes of water balloons in their shirts, some of the boy’s voices started to get deeper or sound hoarse when they speak, you shower in front of your peers for the first time, and you must memorize a locker combination. Another words, A LOT OF FUCKING SHIT!!!

But these are just everyday middle school problems. Harllee had another whole shit show of things to add to these. I know, JB stop exaggerating it couldn’t have been that bad. OK, let’s look, shall we? Most students arrived at Harllee by bus around 7 to 7:15, the school did not open its doors until 8. Meaning all our happy asses had to stay outside of the school until the authorities opened the doors. No matter what the weather we were kept outside. And that damn school had no place to get out of the many weathers events Florida is known for. This huddling outside caused clicks to form among us students. You had the popular girls and boys (i.e. good looking) there were the rockers, preppies, jocks, nerds and whatever the group of weirdos I hung out were called. Games were also invented. A couple that comes to mind is target using golf balls instead of tennis balls. If you are not familiar with target, usually a tennis ball is thrown against the wall and people try to catch the rebound if you drop it, you must run to the wall and touch it while the other kids try to peg you with the ball before you touch the wall. A bit different game with hard ass golf balls. The other game was rare but did happen. Occasionally a kid that lived close by would bring in oranges, lemons and grapefruits and the game was basically dodgeball with fruit. Real great game if you happen to get hit by some fruit first thing in the morning and have to spend the rest of the day smelling like rotting fruit. This leaving the masses outside was also repeated at lunchtime.  As soon as you finished eating you were ejected to the rows of splinter-filled wood benches outside to wait for your teacher to collect you. I can only assume the teaches and staff needed the morning and lunch lockout time to drink shots and do illicit drugs to keep up their energy to teach us derelicts.

Once inside the jail errrrrr school you would find it was entirely enclosed main hall directly down the middle and hardly a window to remember. Maybe this is the reason the wardens errrr teachers let us spend some “yard time”. Speaking of teachers, we had Mr. Bates or as the kids called him Master Bates he was a wacky dude that I was lucky enough to have for 6th and 7th grade history. We had Mr. Casey that taught math and was 180 years old and believed he fought in every major war the US or colonies fought in. It appeared that in one of the many skirmishes he must have had his hand severed off and resewn on. definitely hard to not notice when he was writing on the chalk board. Then there was Mrs. Cadwell. Rumor was she was in either Playboy or Penthouse, but I cannot confirm or deny since I was never able to get visual proof.

 

A few parting thoughts on middle school. I wish I had gotten a chance to meet my good friend Sal during these days, but at this point we were just ships passing in the halls. Same with Sandstram. My sister would soon become friends with this beautiful young lady, but it was not until many years later that I was wooed by her for the first time. But all of this must wait for future blogs.

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