Salvaging Our Only Ball

4. The tobacco accounts written in the last two entries may rest for a while. The tobacco must hang in the barn for curing. Thus  I will return to our little one room school. We had little play equipment. There was a seesaw, one basketball hoop with a ring but no net, a bat and an old tennis ball.  Creative games can be and were worked out.  It helped that Miz Harrison was too busy with lesson plans and grading to interfere with our games,  past settling the serious squabbles .  It was to our advantage to avoid squabbles since her way of settling them was –“End of recess- get back to the books”. For the most part we played creatively  and cooperatively.

Cooperatively and creatively certainly applied the day we lost our tennis ball. The play yard was in front of the school house. Two outhouses—boys to the left—girls to the right were behind the school. Recess time.  Tennis ball version  of baseball or softball or some kind of ball. Two chosen teams faced each other. Bigger better hitters got to go first. Estel Oakes was up—Marvin Goss was on first base. Estel hit a doozy—into the side of the school house—off to the right—into an oak tree—into the girls’ outhouse- down the hole.

Forlorn disbelieving pupils filed to the outhouse. Marvin Goss, shucking aside the fear of entering the girls’ outhouse investigated. The ball, he reported, was floating in the cess pool.

It was as if the world of recess had ended- we had no ball.

But we come from a survival people and we all knew it. We had seen our fathers fashion tools for a task. We had experienced mothers turning fertilizer bags into bed covers. We could solve this. Tomorrow- for today recess was over.

The next morning Cordell came to school with our salvation. He had attached a Pork and Beans can to a tobacco stick with a roofers nail. He had made a great long handled dipper.

Recess—the great ball retrieval began. Cordell with an adeptness not typical successfully fished our tennis ball from the cess pool. Grungy, stinky and a ‘Now what do we do’ situation.

What we did was clean it up. It was the only ball we had.  Willie Davenport just across the road from the school had a rain barrel. All pupils, without garnering Miz Harrison’s attention managed to carry their water glasses (full of water) from the barrel to pour over the slime stink soaked ball. The next morning the ball smelled of lye soap and was stain free.  So mush for fooling Miz Harrison.