Escape and Evasion from Jesuit to Morris.

I was never so glad to go back to school as I was during the academic year of 1962-63. This time, my cousin Greg was coming along. If you've already been through the older posts here, you'll know that he was my Uncle Charles' son and Uncle Charles had attended Morris with his twin brother Joe when they were kids. That was sometime around 1928 or 29, maybe the early 30s. I'm just guessing at that because Uncle Charles was born in 1917 and Morris started with the 5th grade and only went to the 9th.

In any event, some of the older Franciscans there remembered Charles as a kid and from that, Cousin Greg was viewed in a different light than the other students. So was I. Greg was a second generation Morris kid and in a sense, that was a very special thing for the Brothers. He would probably say : "Yeah, they kicked my ass more than the average student", but the fact still remains that we were viewed differently and that was a good thing.

I remember running around school seeing some of the guys I'd met during my first year. I remember going to a huge swing set ,next to the tennis court, that was located behind the gym. One of the first guys I saw was Saparito. Despite the fact that he had relentlessly bullied me during my first year there, I had been gone for over a year and was much taller than he was when I returned. I'll never forget the look in his eyes when he discovered I was now bigger than he was. That look came just before I jumped him and proceeded to kick his ass to my heart's content.

Brother Robert was there and witnessed the entire episode. He knew Saparito was a bully and that he'd picked on me during my first year, so he let me take my revenge or deliver my message that the days of picking on kids were over for him. I remember telling Saparito if I ever caught him picking on any of the little kids, I would kick his ass till his nose bled. It was great.

Greg was younger than me and he fell right in with the underclassmen. Even though I was repeating the 8th grade, the story of how that unfolded at Jesuit became somewhat of a legend with the other kids as they viewed that as me taking a knock out punch and immediately getting off the floor and confronting Punkin Junkin.  There were no examples of bullying me from then on. Seeing some of the foreign students there was also cool and Greg fell in with all of them. The Haddad boys, The Cabral brothers and many other South Americans became part of our little brotherhood and they always picked Greg and I whenever we were choosing sides for a game of kickball or basketball. It was great fun.

Greg was real strong when he was kid. Built like a brick and able to climb mountains better than me. He became the "climber" when we went squirrel hunting and he was always the first to jump off the ledge of the cave into the water at Letona Bluffs when we went there to camp. The jump to the water was probably only 30 feet or so but it looked like 100 to most of the kids. That year was completely different than my first year there and Greg, the son of a former Morris graduate, was hugely responsible for that. We had it made from day 1.

When squirrel season came along, Greg, without any climbing spikes, made it to the top of a tree and caught a flying squirrel. I had another baby fox squirrel and we both went back to school to equip the cages in a way to insure their survival. We had really small baby bottles and plenty of milk from the dairy. Taking care of them was a really cool thing and when they were big enough for us to let them out to play, Greg taught his how to fly. It was the nuts.

We did well with our grades and were given passes to go into Searcy on weekends to see a movie or go bowling. During holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas or Easter, we sometimes rode the Continental Trailways bus from Searcy to Texarkana where Uncle Charles would pick us up. Even that was fun. One year we were stuck in Little Rock because of a snow storm and Uncle Charles wired us the money for a hotel room that looked over the Arkansas River in downtown Little Rock. Little did we know at that time, it was one of the hotels that Bill Clinton would make famous with some of his wimminz.

During that year, I spent more time in the library reading more books about the strategists from the Second World War. I'd already done a ton of reading about the fighter pilots but new books were there about bomber pilots from our side and the Japanese. I loved military history and couldn't get enough.

When the year came to a close, we went back to Letona Bluffs for the annual camp out. This time, we had to hike the 8 miles to the camp ground and even though that sounds like one hell of a haul, even that was fun. Some kid named Kelley fell off the side of a mountain and he had to be evacuated to somewhere in Oklahoma for hospitalization. It didn't really matter because the school year was over anyway.

When time came to go home for the summer, Greg and I both asked if we could stay for the summer vacation. We had already been working in the dairy but we were told by Brother Robert, Edward and others, that IF we stayed we would be able to ride on the truck to the hay fields on the east side of the school and they would let us pick up the bales of hay and stack them on the flat bed so the dairy cows would have a healthy stockpile of hay for the winter. Yeah, we learned our lesson and never volunteered for that again.

We had already been working in the dining hall as servers, buss boys and dish washers, but Brother Leo, the baker, let us work in the kitchen. You can ask Tim Jr about my baking skills as he still talks about my pink cakes and home made bread.

To sum it all up, except for my 10th grade year at St. Gregory's Boarding School in Shawnee, Oklahoma, that was the most fun I had ever had in school. I'm pretty sure it was the same for Greg because he asked to come back for another year. Little did I know at that time, my boarding school experiences would prepare me for military service as an officer and helicopter pilot preparing to go to Vietnam. I wasn't the only one from Morris that went. Sam Perkins did and was killed in action.

In any event, this may be a dull read for some of you but try to keep in mind that I have a point to make about all of these experiences and each of the items here are presented for a reason. I'll get on with the last year at Morris tomorrow and my eventual transfer to St. Gregory's. Till then, thanks for listening.