January 10, 2007

Elementary Escapades & Cloakroom Capers

Cloak rooms.  Do today’s schools still come equipped with cloakrooms?  Back in the way ancient history of grade school at Cambridge Elementary the cloak room was my at school “home away from home”. 

I’d forgotten about cloakrooms until laughing through Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid,  a hysterical tale of growing up in Des Moines during the sixties.  Bryson, as with other students whose personal agenda seemed at odds with what teachers considered good deportment, spent many an hour banished to the cloakroom.  And neither he nor I could ever figure out why educators considered exiling a miscreant to the cloakroom punishment.   

The cloakroom, for those raised in a climate devoid of winter, was the small, hook lined room, adjacent to the class, where coats were hung and sack lunches stored while school was in session.  It was also thought to be an area of solitary confinement for students whose behavior was termed outside the acceptable norm. 

Banishment to the cloakroom could be a result of something as minor as having an Archie and Jughead comic inside the language arts text one was supposed to be studying or as serious as engaging in a staple fight.  Decades ago every elementary student’s school supplies included a “Swing-Line” stapler.  While some used the small red device to actually attach papers to one another, no slave to neatness individuals quickly realized the “Swing-Line” had a hinge allowing the stapling part to swing free of the base.  Once the base was dropped, all one had to do was make a throwing motion and at the height of the throw release the staple, which would be projected anywhere from ten to forty feet.  With practice came surprising accuracy.  Naturally the objects of my fire couldn’t leave themselves un-protected so also developed Swing-Line propellant skills.  The stapler was kept ready in the palm out of sight below the desk until a teacher’s back was turned, at which point a staple “fire fight” ensued.  Sometimes girls were caught in the crossfire causing them to do what girls do best.  Tattle. Guess who was blamed?   “Dick Maynard, you could put someone’s eye out. Go to the cloak room and think about what you’re doing!” 

Not the cloakroom!  Not the place where sack lunches sat un-attended, un-watched and available to anyone interested in searching out a Hostess Twinkie or Snickers to pilfer.  Not the cloakroom where you could stretch out on the floor and devour comic books.  Not the cloakroom where when the angle was right and the teacher not in view disruptive faces and obscene gestures could be made at classmates through the door window.  And, when overtaken by boredom, one just selected the softest, fluffiest, most pillow-like coat from a hook, placed it on the floor and drifted into dreamland. 

The cloakroom environment was ideal for those born to snooze. As Bryson so accurately states, “in winter, schools were heated to roughly the temperature of a pottery kiln”.  Early in the year teachers became quite agitated finding one supposedly contemplating his foul deed curled up on the cloakroom floor but come the second semester seemed much more at ease having me out of the classroom and not sneaking around the halls (another benefit of cloakroom exile.) 

Cross Orchards is dedicated to keeping alive the lost skills of yesterday.  Think they’d be interested in my teaching a class in Swing-Line staple throwing?  Call it “Putting an Eye Out 101”.