Dave, did you ever get in trouble at school?
| S:2 E:2This week’s story may sound all-too-familiar if you’ve ever attended a Catholic school… elementary-school pranksters vs. strict and stern nuns. It’s not just something that happens in the movies! Dave Conover shares his memories of getting in trouble at school.
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Speakers: Krista Baum, Dave Conover, Brian Conover, Mark Conover & Brett Castro
[Music Playing]
Krista Baum:
Hi, welcome to the Storyworth Podcast. We're glad you're here. I'm your host, Krista Baum, co-founder of Storyworth. On this podcast, we feature true stories written by Storyworth writers. If you're new to Storyworth, we help people write their life stories, the big stories, and the small ones.
Once a week we send our writers a question to help inspire their writing. They reply to the email with an answer or a story that comes to mind. At the end of the year, we print what they've written into a beautiful keepsake book. Every story written using Storyworth is private, but for this podcast, the writers volunteered to share their stories publicly with you.
This week's story may sound all too familiar if you've ever attended a Catholic school: elementary school pranksters versus strict stern nuns. It's not just something that happens in the movies. Dave Conover, the author of this week's story, is here to share his memories of getting in trouble and sometimes avoiding it.
But before we talk to him, we're going to hear Dave's story as read by voice actor, Brett Castro, as Dave answers the question, “Did you ever get in trouble at school?”
Brett Castro:
Have you ever noticed how many vivid childhood memories are linked to getting into trouble? I was considered a good child, respectful, courteous, and I generally followed the rules adults imposed on me. That said, I had my moments and I got into mischief in school and at home, and around the neighborhood.
I attended Holy Redeemer Grade school in Kensington, Maryland from kindergarten through eighth grade. It was the school associated with the Catholic church my family attended.
To set the scene, there were two classes of about 30 students each for every grade at Holy Redeemer. We were taught by either lay teachers or by the Sisters of Charity, the nuns who lived in a convent next to the school.
Holy Redeemer served as the backdrop for much of my childhood from 1955 to 1964. That translates to a lot of time spent with the Sisters of Charity, who despite their name were not known for their leniency towards troublemakers.
Times were simpler back when I was a kid, and there weren't the same influences and technology that there are today. We weren't exposed to the pranks and dares on YouTube or Tik Tok, nor did we have social media or phones to recruit buddies or pull off wild stunts.
I think there were also higher standards for behavior back then, and certainly, the consequences were different. Corporal punishment, such as a belt or ruler across the knuckles was the basis for law and order in Catholic schools, something not generally acceptable in schools today.
My main challenge was paying attention during class, it was easy to get distracted during the long lessons. At some point, I tried to initiate a conversation with a buddy and luckily, there were plenty of options for pulling this off.
Sometimes we'd scribble out notes on scraps of paper and pass or toss them to their target, or we'd use a system of sly hand signals or facial expressions, and the most bold students would dare to actually whisper in class.
The secret to our success was timing. We would have to time these exchanges while the teacher had her back turned or while she glanced down at her notes or the rare moments, she was pulled away to discuss an issue with a fellow teacher. I’m sure during meals in the convent, the nuns talked about the problem students in their classes.
I suppose my name came up from time to time but I’m certain there were a few other boys who were higher up on the naughty list. Note that I say, “boys.” I don't recall any of the girls ever getting into trouble. The nuns could be brutal at times.
They wore black habits and robes with a thick leather belt that wrapped around their waists. One end of the belt looped through a metal buckle and then hung down to the floor. Some also wore a loop of rosary beads with a metal cross at the end.
Talking during the lesson could result in a command to hold out your hands, followed by a belt slap on your palms. A couple of times, I may have seen the rosary beads used, that must have hurt.
The other preferred method of corporal punishment involved the use of a pointer stick. Each teacher had a wooden pointer about three feet long, with a sharpened black rubber tip on one end and a metal loop for hanging it up on the other. The pointer was an alternative to the belt, and could quickly be diverted from a tool to teach a geography lesson to a makeshift weapon in seconds.
After a while, I guess we became immune to the belt, the pointer, and even the rosary beads, or we got wise enough to weigh the risks and rewards associated with talking in class. In the upper grades, punishments evolved from physical to mental.
We were told to write, “I will not talk in class” dozens of times on ruled paper. Parents got a note from the teacher and that meant instead of playing outside when we got home, we would need to write that phrase 25, 50 or 100 times. We had to get our parents' signature on the pages to bring to our teacher the next day.
I recollect doing these writing assignments about once a week, so I guess you could call me a serial troublemaker, if causing trouble is defined by actually getting caught. But to my credit and juvenile ingenuity, I turned this chore into some extra cash.
I simply got in the habit of writing a page or two of the lines every day on the school bus or when I got home. Over time, I built up a pretty good stash. So, when I was caught misbehaving, I could pull a page out of my stash and hand it in. I realized the value of having a few pages on hand at school.
If friends were given the standard penalty, they knew for 5 cents they could buy a page off me and save themselves the hassle.
Luckily, for my business, the nuns not only punished for talking in class, but for talking in line for the bathroom, or for the cafeteria, or for the afternoon bus, or for talking during assemblies or school events, especially the ones with higher up church authority, like the archbishop. There was always demand for those pre-written pages.
But there was more trouble to be heard at Holy Redeemer. One regular prank took place in the school bathroom. Restroom breaks were well-supervised, but some of the daring boys would throw a wad of wet paper over the stall divider onto an unsuspecting sitter. It was great fun if you got away with it, but not if you're caught.
I don't recall the exact punishment the few times I was bold enough to pull this stunt, but I know a note was sent home, and I'm sure my dad and his belt were involved. It wasn't pretty, and I soon turned my focus to another form of entertainment, the classic spitball.
The spitball is an art form involving just the right amount of paper and saliva and careful formation in your mouth. Once you mastered the art, the challenge was the delivery, how to launch the spitball stealthily without being caught.
You couldn't just pitch it like a baseball, nuns could detect any wayward limb in the entire classroom. But the availability of cafeteria straws in seventh and eighth grades was a game changer. You could save a paper straw from your lunch milk and presto. You had a premium spitball launcher once you reentered class.
But those straws were only good for a few shots at best, before the end got two soggy and wet like the spitball itself. But as luck would have it, at this point in time, BIC pens hit the market, and I hope it's not sacrilege to say they were a godsent for boys of a certain age. A few small alterations to the body of the pen, and bam, you had yourself a sturdy plastic spitball launcher. Even the perfect device couldn't save me from getting caught on a few occasions.
I recall a few instances where my eighth-grade teacher caught me, and I had to stay after school. In retrospect, the punishment was brilliant. I was tasked with chewing more paper, pages of it, in fact, enough to make 10 rows of 10 spitballs on the linoleum floor of the classroom.
Then my mom came to pick me up. Imagine my mother walking into the classroom to find me and my handiwork on the floor. That punishment cured me of spitballs. Having my mom pick me up and then dealing with my dad later was secondary to chewing so much paper, but it could have been worse. I found out later that someone I knew was driven home by four nuns in an old church station wagon for a discussion with his parents as a punishment.
One last prank that comes to mind is drumming on our desks. We had those vintage desk chairs with the wrap around arm rest and desk platform with a hollow metal area under the seat where we stored our books.
Putting your hands between your knees, you could start a beat on the front of that metal area. What can I say? Bongos were big at the time. While the nuns had great hearing, the sound and acoustics in the classroom made it hard to pinpoint the exact source of the Bongo beat for about 10 seconds.
Hopefully, within that timeframe, another classmate would jump in with their own beat, relieving suspicion from the original drummer's desk. If you were caught, you likely got the belt, the beads, or the pointer.
I drummed a few times and I have to say I had some percussion potential, and I could have gotten away with it, except for one thing: I couldn't keep a straight face. My boldness to start a Bongo session in class would quickly dissolve into stifled laughter, a dead giveaway to the teacher.
There was one incident in eighth grade, I still remember that may have been a turning point for me. It helped me realize we were getting too old for childish pranks and class disruptions. A very tall student named Patrick was talking in class. As generations of students can verify, the key to talking in class was to learn the sideways method.
Imagine a sly ventriloquist delivery while facing the front chalkboard that was talking sideways, which gave the student the appearance of paying attention. Patrick sadly hadn't mastered this method. That meant he made the fatal error of turning his head far enough to lose peripheral vision of the front of the class, and the nun in charge.
It's necessary at this point in the story, to mention that being such a tall kid, Patrick barely fit in his chair with the attached desk. He was mid-sentence when the nun teaching that day appeared to silently glide down the aisle toward him.
I saw it with my own eyes, and it looked as if she were riding an invisible hoverboard. The look on Patrick's face as she grabbed him by the collar, was of pure bewilderment. You could almost hear the equations taking place in his head, trying to figure out how that nun had appeared within a split second from the front of the room to his desk.
She then dragged him and the desk toward the door of the classroom. Poor Patrick was too big to escape that desk chair. We had never seen such a sight as he fumbled to stand upright, yet hindered by the bulk of wood and metal.
In a feat of stoic strength, the teacher successfully pulled him out the room and down the hall to the principal's office, and even now, almost 60 years later, I can still hear the sounds echoing along that empty hallway.
Patrick's loud protests in a cacophonous duet with the racket of that metal desk he was stuck in, clanging and scraping all the way down the hall. It was a level of humiliation that we routine troublemakers took note of.
[Music Playing]
I don't know the exact tally of my infractions at Holy Redeemer over those nine years, but it's likely more than 50, and we'll say less than 1000. Somehow those experiences getting into trouble and occasionally escaping it, evolved over time into fond memories.
I'm certain the sisters kept accurate behavior records on all the students, including me. And those records are likely still sealed in a secret vault at Holy Redeemer hidden in the church somewhere. Or, maybe, by now they've been uploaded to the cloud or St. Peter himself keeps them at his fingertips.
Dave Conover:
I'm Dave Conover, I'm the dad of two of the folks on the call and I'm in Great Falls, Virginia.
Mark Conover:
Mark Conover, I'm Dave's oldest son.
Brian Conover:
Name's Brian Conover, I'm Dave's younger son.
Krista Baum:
Dave, when you were doing all of these pranks in school, did this get it out your system or do you still have this kind of mischievous streak?
Dave Conover:
Oh, I still have a mischievous streak now.
Brian Conover:
The streaks continued and he had his different process of letting loose per say in college with his mischievous … that would be for my dad to tell. Guys would apparently run across a drill field at Catholic University.
Dave Conover:
In the late sixties and early seventies, there was a fad called streaking. I can remember somehow came in possession of about 10 plastic pink flamingos, those things with iron legs that you would put in your yard, and would take pleasure in going late one night and putting them along some neighbor's front walkway, and they'd get up in the morning and there would be these pink flamingos. And it got to be a neighborhood joke where “Who's got the pink flamingos?”
Mark and Brian, they, they may have picked up some of these traits from me. They had a pirate. They had a statue of a pirate that was 12 inches or whatever. And I remember Mark and Brian when they were in college and after college, one would visit the other and Mark might leave it at the foot of Brian's bed somewhere down in the sheets. And Brian, would be surprised when he got in bed and there was the pirate.
Then Brian would hang on to the pirate for a couple months and go visit Mark, and then Brian would leave the pirate somewhere at Mark's house as a surprise, and the pirate just went back and forth. So, it was all good, clean, fun stuff.
Krista Baum:
So, the nuns never compared signatures on these sentences you had to write. Did they never compare handwriting?
Dave Conover:
Well, actually, as I said, I wrote some of them on the bus, some of them when I got home, and I had got a little bit creative in being able to change some of the letters and change the slope of the writing so that it couldn't be traced.
But teachers had so much to do back then, I don't think they had extra spare time to sit and compare one page of “I will not talk in class” to a page a week or two later. It wasn't like I had an internet business going and people would eBay these, give me 10 sheets for a dollar.
It was rare, but I would have extras. I did make the extras and if somebody else needed them, they could take it home and get it signed, they just didn't have to do the writing.
I don't need to be writing letters apologizing for something I did 50 years ago or 60 years ago, as far as talking in class and all that. I'm sure that a lot of that was sent up to St. Peter and as I said, when I end up getting my final judgment, I'm sure that some of that writing will go in my favor.
Krista Baum:
I love how you reflect on this, like fun memories.
Dave Conover:
They were fun and they were all harmless in a way. Back then, if you did something bad on Halloween or whatever, a toilet paper at somebody's house, it was fun and the standards were a little different.
Krista Baum:
I did seem have this kind of air of like innocence to it. Well, I really enjoyed your story, thanks for sharing it. You have published your book. I know your boys said they're reading. Was Mark that gave it to you for Christmas?
Dave Conover:
Mark and his wife Caitlin gave it to me, my birthday's three days before Christmas. So, all of 2021, I spent writing it and I get the question each week. And Mark teed them up, Brian added questions. I kept up with it.
It was actually something good for me to be able to do and I never really got behind. I would always have it edited in final draft by Friday, because I knew a new one was coming Monday. So, all those questions came from Mark and Brian, it was a lot of fun.
Krista Baum:
Well, I'm glad you get a gold star for never getting behind.
Dave Conover:
You don't want to get behind because you'll have to write 25 times. I will keep up with my stories in a timely manner, and then you have to send it in. You don't want to have to do that.
Krista Baum:
No, absolutely not.
Dave Conover:
But I will be happy to write some of those sheets and I'll have them on eBay in case any of the other subscribers need them. But it's more than a nickel a page these days.
Krista Baum:
I love it. Alright, we'll have to keep that in that offer live on the podcast. We'll put your contact information and you guys can negotiate your price.
Dave Conover:
Yes, exactly.
Brian Conover:
The Storyworth thing was really cool. I think it's a really great thing as thinking forward to always have that book to look back and cherish the things that he wrote and the memories that are there. So, reflecting on my dad's experience, which I wasn't privy to in the Catholic school.
I don't know what I would've done with that much pent-up energy and having to sit stoically and not have an outlet for that. My hat's off to him in the sense of getting in a little bit of trouble and finding a way to keep things lively and energetic and get away with it. I'm kind of like more power to you.
Mark Conover:
It was nice to have more of the details written out. I feel like probably like he said in his chapter, it's probably good that they didn't have Tik Tok and YouTube, I think. And sometimes I guess I feel lucky that I didn't have that documentation of any of the little bit of goofing off I did as a kid as well.
[Music Playing]
Dave Conover:
It's my favorite go-to story. It's on page 343, my kindergarten picture. I've got a nice little sweater on, I look like an angel at a desk, I have a hop along Cassidy, a wristwatch on …
Krista Baum:
I love it.
Dave Conover:
Does the picture of that kid look like somebody that would do those kinds of things?
Krista Baum:
You look like an angel, no one would suspect.
Thanks for joining us today. If you want to get started writing your life stories or want to give the gift of Storyworth to a loved one, head over to storyworth.com. And if you'd like one of your Storyworth chapters to be considered for the podcast, go to storyworth.com/podcast.
In our next episode …
Speaker:
My immediate instinct was to turn and run from the embarrassment of that scene, but I reasoned with myself; if I had been a total stranger, I would've stayed to help.
Krista Baum:
Taking a chance on love later in life and a deeply awkward first date involving butterflies, sleep deprivation and lost consciousness … oh dear.
Storyworth is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, hosted by me, Krista Baum, and produced by Hannah Rae Leach. We get production help from Jill Greenberg and our mix engineer is Sean Rule-Hoffman.
We'll see you next time.
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