Life is theater and from the time I was Tiny Tot King, I knew I was meant for bigger things. I don’t remember who sponsored Fort Mill’s “Tiny Tot King and Queen” pageant but local mothers stood in line to get their kids involved. All said and done, a seven-year old me emerged into the spotlight with white shirt, bow tie, shined shoes and a Paul McCartney sad-eyed sort of smile. At the end of the evening I stood flanked by my Tiny Tot Queen, Dianne Dobbins and wearing my glitter-covered cardboard crown. There was no looking back. This was my time as a beauty king, a marker event in any seven-year-old’s life. My prize was a tiny gold ring.
Our house on Gregg Street had a central furnace with a big grate in the center of the hall. As I walked in to change clothes from the pageant, I dropped the ring and it fell into the furnace area. My parents never saw the ring and so my only proof of royalty is the photo of me and my queen, Dianne Dobbins. I don’t remember the picture being taken but I don’t look suitably overjoyed.
Elementary school holds two deep-heart memories for me. The Fort Mill Elementary School principal was Lee Carothers. When I knew him, Mr. Carothers was a balding man with a quick smile and a middle-age paunch. He bore a striking resemblance to Winston Churchill, who also occupies a shelf in my pantheon of role models.
Before I knew him, however, Lee Carothers had been a member of a Boy Scout troop that had walked the one-hundred and eighty miles each way from Fort Mill to Chimney Rock. And later the scoutmaster of that troop. He was a World War II Veteran whom my father admired. Dad said Lee Carothers was the best pistol shot he had ever seen. Later, when Lee Carothers passed away, Dad proposed that the elementary school be renamed in his honor and it was.
In an effort to help my daughter Kate understand my past, I felt she needed to walk for a few minutes in the places I had walked. We had walked through the cemetery as I pointed out this or that relative and we had walked fields where we found stone artifacts from the Catawba tribe and even earlier inhabitants of the land. She was five and when I saw the headline in the Fort Mill Times, “Carothers School Scheduled for Demolition.” My old elementary school had long outlived its usefulness and attempts to find an alternative use had failed. Soon the site would provide much needed parking for the First Baptist Church. Kate and I had walked past the school many times but had never ventured inside the low fence. I decided that the next afternoon’s walk would take us inside.
The remains of the school were depressing. Most of the red exterior bricks were already beginning their return to dust and a fine red powder stained the ground around the walls. Every pane of glass had been broken as though by the spirits of truant children. The doors were no longer chained and everything of possible value had been removed or stolen long before. The hallway we entered was dusty enough that the most amateur sleuth could have tracked us. We were careful of the glass on the floor and the tiles that here and there hung down from the ceiling.
I told Kate about Mrs. Drakeford’s first grade class and about my dressing for the title role in the second-grade play, “Belling the Cat” and as Rudolph in the fourth-grade Christmas Play. We looked into the tiny library where Dad would sometimes come after school to read some of his favorite childhood stories to me. Once I was interested in a book, we would check it out for me to read on my own. Tom Sawyer and Riders of the Purple Sage are two that stuck with me.
Before I could tell Kate about the joys of stomping milk cartons or learning my first really bad word from a worldly eight-year-old first grader, I saw the office door and remembered why the elementary school called me back.
A little harp music here…It’s a flashback
We were important fourth-graders; top guns in an elementary school hierarchy. We were the Safety Patrol. Our badges gleamed silver on our scrawny chests and the white “Sam Brown” belts gave us a jaunty air of authority. There was a morning shift and an afternoon shift with a Lieutenant in control of each. I was chosen Captain and proudly worked both shifts. I remember that the Lieutenants were Charles Hancock and Donnie Shaw.
The corner of Monroe White Street and Confederate Street was our turf. We were there every morning, rain or shine, heat or cold, waiting for the first student to cross over onto school property and we were there when the last detainee straggled his way toward home after “staying in” for some minor offence.
The afternoon was the time I loved. Stowing the rain gear or belts away beside the school auditorium, we would walk down the hall and talk quietly of baseball or playground events until we reached the office door. At that point we would slow our pace and raise our voices just enough to be heard inside the Principal’s office.
Lee Carothers would often be seated at his roll-top desk looking like a medieval monk complete with tonsure. There were principals in our future whose very names struck fear into our souls but Lee Carothers was not a man who ruled by fear. I can’t read “A Visit from St. Nicholas” without casting him as the title character. His eyes sparkled with a mischief rarely seen in adults and his curiosity was as boundless as his patience with our playground insurrections.
No inner sanctum separated Lee Carothers from the everyday life of the school that would one day bear his name. He sat in full view of anyone passing his open door. Some days he would remain hunched over his desk and would not acknowledge our passing. We never interrupted him. The man at work carried an air of importance. The best times were the ones when our slow walks paid off. Mr. Carothers would look up from his desk and smile as though we were a welcome relief from paperwork. “Come here a minute,” he would say. There was a perpetual tone of wonder in his voice, one that Newton must have had when contemplating the apple.
An invitation into that office was a summons to a mystery. Lee Carothers seemed never to understand why anything worked and always had to ask us for an explanation. Why, he asked, when he opened his desk drawer quickly, did a piece of paper on top slip toward the drawer? Why did the little black and white flags inside the lightbulb-like thing spin around when he placed it in the sun?
Once he produced a small glass triangle from his desk and held it up for our inspection. He called it a “prism” and gently corrected me when I repeated “prison”. “The strangest thing happens,” he began and we waited for the magic that we knew was coming, “When I put this on my desk, nothing happens but when I put it in the window, a rainbow appears on the wall across the room.”
Our curiosity was palpable. Again and again he would place the prism in the window and always the rainbow would appear.
“Stand over there, “Mike,” He said. “and maybe you can see it better,”
As I moved across the room, a flash of light dazzled my eyes and in that same moment the solution came to me. “It’s the sun!” I exclaimed triumphantly. The light goes through the prism and makes a rainbow.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Mr. Carothers said, his curiosity satisfied. “That must be it. The prism must divide the sun’s light into the rainbow colors.”
He was perpetually puzzled over some such mystery, yet somehow, after he asked a few questions, we would figure it out to his satisfaction. We would leave, shoulders straighter, proud of having solved another problem for him.
We didn’t suspect he had ulterior motives. It was years later that I realized what the man was up to. He wanted to give us an education greater than anything in our math or reading books. He wanted to light the fires of curiosity and reason in our young minds. I saved the memory of his technique and believe I used it as a model for my teaching career.
I told Kate the story as we walked down the empty hallway. She peeked into the ruined library where I had learned to love books and she touched the walls as if trying to grasp the memories we shared. When we came to the office entrance, Kate squeezed my hand.
We walked very slowly past the door.
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