There's gonna be a War

Third grade was one of the worst grades ever. Mrs. Kauch had this neat trick of grabbing a kid and throwing him under her desk. Sometimes she’d pinch your cheeks with her lobster claw, sometimes she’d grab your earlobe. But you always ended up under her desk. Mrs. Kauch was a 50-something lady who looked like Maggie in the Bringing up Father comic strip. Some days she had a longer fuse than others, but if you lit the short one, watch out brother.

Most of the time, Mrs. Kauch just seemed perplexed and annoyed at our class. No doubt we were trouble. We ranged from dopey bad to precocious bad, and we usually gave Mrs. Kauch the full range all at the same time. Take Beth Ann, for example. Beth Ann lived in my neighborhood, about a block east of Johnny Kotlarczyk. Like me, she had a tendency toward smart mouth. One time in first grade, we goofed around after school, singing in the hallway, taking our time getting to the bus stop. I have no real idea why, but we were singing that old song, “Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage.” And the next thing we knew we’d missed the bus. My mom was called and probably she had to borrow a car to come pick us up. In other words, she was not pleased.

Anyhow, Mrs. Kauch usually ran out of gas about 15 minutes before dismissal. So she’d ask if anyone wanted to sing a song. Beth would always volunteer and sing some damn dumb song she’d learned. We hated it, but at least we didn’t have to work. So one day she starts singing “Oh Boy, that’s where my Money Goes,” which I think was a song about a prostitute. But without any explicit lyrics, Mrs. Kauch could only sit there and listen to the umpteen verses Beth had learned.

One of the coolest things to ever happen to me at Oxford happened in Mrs. Kauch’s class. Mrs. Shay, the librarian who would later turn against me, announced some speech contest around the topic of “the wonderful world of books” or some similar librarian lingo. Kids were supposed to prepare a five minute speech on this, and they’d choose one finalist from each class. My chief competitor in Mrs. Kauch’s class was everyone’s would-be sweetheart, Barbara Hanson. At the first practice session, there was little doubt she had the best speech. I was becoming more and more a lazy ass kid in school, with little interest in doing anything I wasn’t interested in.

But a funny thing happened the night before our final try-out. I found an old Archie comic book with a 3-page thing about why reading Archie Comics was better than watching TV. It had about 4 or 5 good gags, and all I had to do was change “Archie Comics” to “books” and I was all set. I cracked up everyone in the room, got picked to represent our class, and made Barbara Hanson cry. No, that’s not true. Barbara was always a good kid and a good sport. The next day I delivered the talk on the auditorium stage in front of all the kids in grades K-3. They howled and howled. Even Mrs. Shay laughed. I won the contest and won a book—a first edition copy of Henry and the Clubhouse, by Beverly Cleary.

One sunny October morning, I walked into Mrs. Kauch’s class and saw the boys gathered around Ronnie Baronowski, a real emotional kid with a good sense of humor, a big mouth, and a thin skin. Anyhow, as I walked over to where they were jawing near the windows, I could hear Baronowski claiming, “We’re gonna have a war with Russia! There’s gonna be a war!”

Now, I knew there was something going on in the world because the night before I’d sat watching TV with my parents and noticed a lot of news bulletins about Kennedy, Cuba, and missiles. I was a pretty “news aware” kid for my age, and would always be so. But if there was really “gonna be a war,” I knew my parents would have told me. So I told Baronowski he was crazy. Suddenly he and some of the other guys turned on me.

“You don’t think there’s gonna be a war?” demanded Baronowski.

Sam chimed in, “Ha! Shouse doesn’t think there’s gonna be a war! What an idiot!”

Well, as we all know, there was no war. But I did end up having to fight Sam again. I just never learned to keep my mouth shut.

Coming soon: Why fourth grade was a little better; learning the F-word; Nov. 22, 1963.