My move to junior high school was, in many ways, more than a mere move. It was a leap. I went from the neighborhood atmosphere of Fair Garden—on Fern Street a couple of blocks away from the Burlington business district and within walking distance of home—to Park Junior High School, several miles away toward downtown.
That meant a ride on the city bus to and from school, either via Magnolia or McCalla avenues. True, most of the kids who were my classmates in grades one through six were still with me. But there were new faces, too, from different parts of town, primarily Park City and the area along the river just east of downtown.
And there were more technical offerings such as wood shop and mechanical drawing—even a plastics class. The grades were seventh, eighth, and for some, ninth. I noticed fairly early that a few of the students were much older. A couple even drove cars to school. The primer-gray early-‘50s Mercury that a kid named Julian drove was particularly cool.
But the real eye-opener came about the third week of my seventh-grade year. I had noticed that the boy who sat behind me in homeroom was older. His surname was Young, and he told me he lived on Hill Avenue above the river. That neighborhood consisted of run-down Victorian houses; a couple of years later it was bulldozed out of existence in an urban-renewal effort. One morning about 8:40, just after the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, two policemen entered, had a quick conversation with the teacher, came down my aisle, and led Mr. Young out. We never saw him again.
A couple of weeks later, the south end of the school was shaken during third period by an explosion. A quick trip into the hall revealed water streaming from the boys’ bathroom. Later, we learned that someone had dropped a cherry bomb (waterproof fuse) down one of the toilets.
The result proved popular—exploding toilets became a regular occurrence, finally leading to a patrolling policeman.
Uniformed officers also joined us on the Magnolia Avenue bus after school. Their presence became necessary after a game developed among those occupying the back bench seat, which went all the way across the vehicle. A handful of the boys discovered that they could push on the bus sides and squeeze the kids who were in the middle.
After the second time that a bus window was popped out by the pushing, the cops became regular riders.
When I took wood shop, I noticed that some of the boys were making Y-shaped sling shots. Then one of the older students shaped a wooden pistol, rigging it up for rubber bands. The weaponry development soon escalated with technical advice from an older brother. The result was a zip gun capable of firing a .22 bullet. The gunsmith, too, was escorted out by policemen and not seen in the hallways again.
In the eighth grade, I became involved in the Black & Gold, a mimeographed newsletter that appeared sporadically and was shepherded by my homeroom teacher. In hindsight, a crime column would have been popular, but I doubt if the idea would have met with the principal’s approval.
Eventually, some of the troublemakers started answering to a skinny kid named Harrison, who had seen a few James Cagney-George Raft features and adopted their movie characters as role models. He had leadership ability (he was probably at least three years older than most of us) and soon had a half-dozen followers.
Harrison and a couple of his lieutenants began stopping seventh-graders in the hall, guiding them to a quiet corner and asking “What would you do if someone just walked up and slugged you in the jaw?”
The wide-eyed response was usually along the lines of “I don’t know.”
Then the “insurance” racket would be explained. “We can protect you from that kind of thing, and all you have to do is pay us a quarter a week.” (This was the late 1950s, when the school lunch was only 50 cents.)
The business started off well and soon became the subject of lunchroom whispers and nervous glances in Harrison’s direction.
But then Harrison made a serious mistake. During the mid-day break, while the lunchroom was crowded, he approached Slack, one of my Burlington buddies, with his proposition. Slack had an immediate response—he cold-cocked Harrison.
The episode was witnessed by enough kids that Harrison became a laughing stock, his entrepreneurial attempt at an end.
Chris Wohlwend's Restless Native addresses the characters and absurdities of Knoxville, as well as the lessons learned pursuing the newspaper trade during the tumult that was the 1960s. He spent 35 years working for newspapers and magazines in Miami, Charlotte, Louisville, Dallas, Kansas City, and Atlanta. As an editor, he was involved in winning several national awards. He returned to Knoxville in the late 1990s and now teaches journalism part-time at the University of Tennessee. His freelance pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and numerous other publications.
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