Grim news about the kids who police say deliberately planned to blow up Roy High School. Fortunately, someone alerted authorities and foiled their plot.
When I heard the news, I was concerned about the secondary victims in the plot — not the people who would have been injured, but the ones who may get trampled in the overreaction.
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I’m lucky my formal education occurred during the 1950s and ’60s. If I were a teenager today, I’d probably be locked up and/or forcibly medicated for the rest of my life.
The problem was simple: I hated school. I didn’t necessarily hate the people in it (although some teachers, to be sure), but rather I considered school more a vile prison than an educational institution.
In 1962, angry over something I don’t recall but that probably involved homework, I made plans to blow up my school. I’m talking serious research, or at least as serious as any 9-year-old can do. Pictures, diagrams, notes — the works.
Mrs. Hall nabbed me before the plan was put into effect. She kept me in from recess to discuss a picture I had drawn in art. The crayon sketch, which I still have around somewhere, showed Garfield Elementary exploding.
I was quizzed about various elements of the illustration by an increasingly alarmed Mrs. Hall. That? Oh, that was a mangled bicycle. And that? Flagpole on fire.
Mrs. Hall: "And these red dots all over the sky?"
Me: "Teacher parts. There’s your foot."
The graphic drawing and candid confession earned me a trip to the principal’s office, where a whole bunch of my art was already on file.
This included a diagram of Mrs. Archer being mauled by two bears, a story about Mr. Houk being quartered by a train, and a sketch of what Wolfman poop would look like had it eaten a girl in my class named Ramona.
Long story short, I saw a counselor. Psych-therapy being what it was back then, the diagnosis was both summary and spot-on. I had a nuclear-level imagination, a growing contempt for authority and not nearly enough to do.
They tried to fix all that with extra homework and assorted drubbings, but nothing worked. Eventually, I fixed the problem on my own. Whenever possible, I just stopped going.
Looking back, I see a kid trying to cope with an environment he wasn’t designed for. Fantasizing about the demolition of that environment was what got me through the day. I never would have made it through math had I not been able to imagine the room on fire.
This is the important part. It never occurred to me that I should actually do any of that. For one thing, it was impossible for a fourth-grader to round up some bears.
But the main reason was because it was wrong in a big way. Setting fire to the school was the sort of wrong that would factor heavily in my being sent to a worse place than regular school — reform school.
I didn’t even want to think about what they made kids do there. Hours upon hours of reading %*&#@ Dick and Jane books was my best guess. It made my skin crawl.
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