Every year when September nears, my mind is flooded with memories from the Sixties, when I attended brand-spanking new Cleveland Elementary and spent a lot of time in Mr. Sullivan's office.

I was known to talk too much in class, make the girls squawk, and maybe take the obnoxious boy thing to unacceptably high levels.

So it was not that uncommon for me to get into trouble.

Depending on the teacher, and the seriousness of the offense, the punishment usually started with staying after school.

Some kids had to sit at the desks and do their homework. Not me.

I would have already done my homework, so I’d get to dump all the trash cans into the big wheelie bin the janitor pushed around on the breezeway.

You’d think that would be a reasonably straight-forward and quiet punishment. But many times those grey or dark green metal trash cans would roll down the driveway and slam into station wagons driven by angry mothers.

I blamed the wild Oklahoma winds, but my teachers blamed me.

So my punishment would escalate. I’d have to walk from classroom to classroom collecting all the chalkboard erasers.

If that’s all I had to do, BORING. But if I also had to pound the chalk dust out of them, I was in hog heaven!

Usually two or three kids would be escorted to a specific area along the U-shaped pickup/drop-off driveway.

We were instructed to beat the erasers right there.

Nowhere else. Not on the cars or buildings or bikes or each other.

Just right there on the curb and the pavement.

To be crystal clear, we were NOT supposed to inhale the dust, chuck the small erasers at other kids, or use the big ones to pound out messages on the pavement.

“Linda has cooties,” comes to mind.

If you did that, and you forgot to erase it – because maybe you were involved in a full-blown eraser war – you’d be sent to the Principal’s Office.

Which is one of the reasons I found myself in Mr. Sullivan’s office on a semi-regular basis. Now, we all loved Mr. Sullivan. But at the same time, we were scared to death of him, for good reason.

He was as big and hairy as a grizzly bear, and had giant arm muscles that could have snapped your neck like a twig.

We knew he had played college football on scholarship. And rumor had it that he’d fought in the Korean War and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of communists.

So when you got sent to Mr. Sullivan’s office, even if you were a "star" football player and had been there many times before, your stomach would gurgle and start to hurt. At least mine did.

I was usually sent to his office by myself. But on one occasion, every boy in our class got sent to Mr. Sullivan’s office because no one would fess up to some heinous boy crime, like possibly popping a girl’s bra strap.

Clearly, Cleveland Elementary's bra-popping epidemic had pushed our teacher over the edge, and she wanted Mr. Sullivan to kill us all.

Fair enough.

There were too many of us to sit down in his office, so he made us stand in a long row at the front of his huge desk. Like we were about to be executed and buried in a mass grave, or something.

And he gave each one of us THE LOOK.

It made your flesh feel hot and your lungs squeeze shut, as he gazed into the depths of your very soul, amen.

You also knew that Mr. Sullivan could read your mind, so lying to him wasn’t even an option.

One by one, he asked each kid if he had done the heinous boy crime of the day. Seems like about half the miscreants were guilty.

Amazingly, I was completely innocent of this particular crime.

Mr. Sullivan said that all the innocent boys could go back to class. Their feet did not touch the ground as they shot out the door.

But before I could vamoose, Mr. Sullivan looked hard at me and said, “You stay. You need to hear this.”

Now, I was terrified because Mr. Sullivan had a way of talking to you that I had never experienced before, and would never experience again.

He would lean back in his desk chair, steeple his huge hands and lock onto you with his eyes.

As he talked, he’d take you through a huge range of emotions: from worry to fear to outright terror; from wanting to cry to wanting to laugh your head off; from slight stomach rumbling to feeling like you were about to projectile vomit.

He was truly a master at pushing whatever buttons each kid needed pushing to get them to straighten up and fly right. And that’s all he ever wanted from us. To do our best and fly right.

It was a completely different thing when you saw Mr. Sullivan on the playground; on those occasions, every kid wanted his full and undivided attention.

He would call us silly names, or tell us jokes, or send us out for impossibly long passes and still throw the football 50 yards over our heads, like Superman or something.

The only time you didn’t want to see Mr. Sullivan on the playground was if you were being a complete knucklehead and bothering other kids.

If that happened, he would turn his huge Oklahoma University ring upside down and thunk you on the head as he walked by, without saying a single word.

Getting thunked hurt bad enough to make you rub your head. It also made you know that you’d done wrong, and that you had best stop it right now.

Or else.

The thought of getting “or else” from Mr. Sullivan was too terrifying to contemplate. So you straightened right up.

Make no mistake: the world was a much better place when there were school principals like Mr. Bill Sullivan.

Having him as my grade school Principal for five years was a major blessing in my life.

I even cherish all the divots his ring left in my big fat head. I deserved every single one.

(From: "MORE Memories of an Okie Boomer; Growing up in Norman in the 60s and 70s", available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.)#septemberschoolmemories

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