Corporal Punishment in the 1950’s

Maybe you’ll remember the Iron Range schools of the 50’s; maybe not. And of course if you were a goody-two-shoes during your school days you were probably never exposed to the creative disciplinary techniques that existed in, at least, the Range school that I attended…

I really liked the girl sitting in front of me during the early fall of first grade. So to get her attention I saturated the end of her pony tail with mucilage (a thick but tasty glue for our grade school art projects).

The teacher interpreted my actions differently than I did. She sent me to the office with instructions to tell the principal what I had done. The principal told me that she was tired of seeing me in her office. “This time,” she said, “I have something in mind that’ll take the starch out of you.” She told me to wait in her office until she prepared my punishment.

For my punishment, she had the janitors unroll industrial sized toilet paper rolls all the way down the hallway of the top floor, down the stairs, down the hallway of the middle floor, down the stairs, and down the hallway of the bottom floor. The hallways were very long.

She told me I had to re-roll that toilet paper so it was as straight and perfect as it was when it came from the factory. So I got down on my hands and knees and started rolling the paper.

Meanwhile, she had a note sent to all the classroom teachers that they were to bring their students out as I passed their classrooms. As I crawled by, the kids and the teacher gleefully rubbed their right index finger across the top of their left index finger in the “shame on you” sign of the 50’s. They chanted, “Shame, shame, double shame. Everybody knows your name.”

The worst part of it was that I couldn’t finish the re-rolling job by the time school got out. I was just over half way done. By about 4:00 I had made it all the way down to the start of the bottom floor when my dad showed up. After he listened to my side of the story he pulled his big leather belt out of the loops on his pants.

Then one winter morning I became insatiably bored and snuck out of the school building at about 10:00 to go to the store to buy some candy. The storekeeper called the school, and when I snuck in through the back entrance, the truant officer was waiting for me. “You’ll stay after school for two hours for skipping out,” she said.

So I stayed after school. The janitor was supposed to be supervising me. He caught me sneaking out of the room after only half of my time was served. He hefted me back into the room, plopped me back in the desk, knuckled my head, and told me to sit until he got back.

When he walked back into the room, he had a rope. When my dad showed up just after 4:00 I was tied to the back of the desk chair. The janitor had told him he didn’t have time to sit and watch me because there was work to be done. My dad untied me and removed his belt from the loops on his pants.

To make April 1 a memorable spring day, I brought a “fart pad” to school and slipped it under the cushion of the teacher’s chair. When the teacher sat down, the pad emitted some very hideous noises. “Who did this horrible thing?” she screamed. Everybody in the class, red in the face from laughing, turned accusingly to look at me.

“It’ll be the spanking machine for you,” the principal said. She made both classes of sixth graders line up in the hallway of the top floor. I was to crawl down the hallway between their legs and they were to spank me as I went through. I crawled as fast as I could, but by the time I made it to the far end of the hall, my buttocks were on fire.

One day during my third grade year I decided to cause a flood in the school. I believed that a flood would help relieve the boredom of those days that I thought would never end. So I pretended that I really had to go to the bathroom and the teacher excused me from the classroom.

I went to the lavatory and plugged all the toilets with wads of brown paper toweling. Then I flushed them again and again. There was a river of water running out of the lavatory.

I hurried away from the scene. But I had reserved one big wad of paper toweling so I could plug the slop sink in the janitor’s room. I turned on the water in the slop sink, dried my feet on the janitor’s throw rug, and doubletimed it back to the classroom, splashing through the water that was running down the hallway.

It didn’t take them long to find out who was in the bathroom just before the flood. I was sent to the principal’s office. In our school, the principal was also the sixth grade teacher. There was a glass wall between her classroom and her office. I went into the office, sat down in her chair, and put my feet up on her desk.

The kids in her class saw me sitting in the office. They started sniggering. Their sniggering drew the teacher/ principal’s attention away from the chalkboard and she glanced into the office. I saw her face get color-crayon red. She stopped her classwork and waddled into the office. “Get your feet off my desk,” she screamed, “and get out of my chair.” In the same tone she asked, “What did you do now?”

She took the perforated wooden paddle off the hook on the wall. The paddle was nicknamed “The Board of Education.”

“Bend over and touch your toes,” she said. Then she beckoned her class to stand by the glass wall to watch. I suppose she thought every student in her class would have the chance to learn vicariously not to make the principal angry.

She gave me ten wallops and once again my buttocks were on fire. “Now what do you think?” she said.

It was unmanly to cry in front of sixth graders, especially in front of the girls, so as bravely as I could I told her I didn’t think I’d be able to sit down on my classroom chair. I asked her if I could go home.

“Oh, no, no, no, NOOO,” she said. “I have the perfect place for you if you can’t sit down.” She brought me down to the furnace room and had the janitor lock me in the pitch-black coal bin behind the fireproof metal door. The whole coal bin was full except for a small space by the door where the janitor had shoveled coal for the furnace.

Every so often during the course of the afternoon, students would come down to the door and clang it with the metal klinker pokers. The whole time they would scream out, “Bloody bones under the cellar door.” I stood terrified in the total blackness of the coal room.

After what seemed like an eternity, the heavy metal door opened and I saw the face of my father. He took one look at me, and with resignation this time, he took the leather belt out of the loops of his pants. He only gave me one unenthusiastic hit with it. Then he took me uptown and bought me a bottle of Root Beer.

…it was to be years before I realized that I had more of an attitude change while I was sipping that Root Beer than I ever had from facing the Board of Education, the coal bin, the spanking machine, or the belt.

Joseph Legueri is a retired teacher. He lives, writes and engages in productive puttering in rural Gilbert.