The Chair/Desk Escapade — Chapter 7 (Found Out….)

The day of chaos at Cisco High School, Wednesday, February 12, 1964, defied description. The chair/desk escapade caught everyone by surprise; its effects, emulating from the success of its execution the night before, far, far exceeded the expectations in the minds of a particular four Seniors. My memoirs recall two of the four minds’ first impressions upon arriving at school that morning, we acting as “normal” as possible:

According to Adling, “The next morning I got up easily — could have arrived at school early, but wanted to come characteristically late — wanted my arrival to be no different than usual. I parked in my same spot, walked toward school and noticed nothing unusual until I got near the door and heard some guys call out to me; the desks were still there — I wasn’t sure if the administration even knew where they were or not.”

I had gotten up unusually early so I could return my things to my house from Cole’s before going to school. As I drove up and parked in my usual spot, I saw the unusual sight of several students running around the school building in a great deal of excitement. I smiled to myself. As I walked to the entrance of the gym, the place we had to stay before classes began, I made sure that I did not look up at the rooftop. I was greeted by the late Ervin Addy, who rushed out the door to me.

“All right, Hastings,” he said, “why did you do it?” Realizing it was said in jest, I casually inquired into what he was talking about. “Look!” he said, pointing to the roof. The edges of the great mass of chair/desks could be seen by moving a bit away from the school building toward the flagpole. I did my best astonishment act and asked Ervin who had done it. “No one knows,” he answered.

So began several school days in which everyone seemed to “examine” everyone else; the students’ reaction was as we had hoped — a vast majority of them, especially the boys, thought the prank was “unreal” and “neat,” to use but two descriptors. Laughter over the chair/desks atop the roof was contagious and irresistible. The whole mood and demeanor of the school was so different on February 12 compared to the whole school year prior; we had permanently altered the course of our senior year.

Nothing could compare with the chaos of that first day. What was the school going to do without chair/desks in most of the classrooms? When it was clear the school day was not going to be cancelled, first period for Adling, Berry, and me was Mr. Bint’s chemistry class, wherein, like all the furniture-less classrooms, the boys had to sit on the floor and the girls had to sit on the low windowsill on one side of the room. I sat down by Robert Mitchell on the floor, who asked me quietly what I thought about “all this.” I said I thought someone had pulled off a pretty slick job, and I was wondering just who had done it; he agreed. Mr. Bint, trying with great frustration to teach in these conditions, was having little success getting any information over to us, the low laughter, giggles, and snickering filling the air with a constant din. Adling recalled during this class becoming “uncontrollably giggly at points,” despite his being called upon by Mr. Bint to work a problem on the chalk board, which, of course, he could not do. I struggled with “uncontrolled giggliness” when I spotted Anthony Strother (Recall he played basketball at Hamilton the previous night.), stretched out prone on floor, falling asleep!

Immediately after this first period, we had to use our alibis, as everyone on the faculty and many of the students, became “detectives” trying to solve the mystery before everyone’s eyes — a role the four of us took on also as cover. Mrs. Mulliner (Play Rehearsal Night, With a Side of Greased Flagpole [May 2013]), who lived next door to the Coles and therefore knew that I had stayed overnight with Cole at his house, thought she had us “dead to rights,” deliberately and cleverly questioning both of us separately about what we had done the night before. Her enthusiasm collapsed, however, when our stories of our aborted bowling trip corroborated. She had questioned Cole at the end of first period, and she later questioned me fifth period, at the start of speech. I guess she did not think that Cole and I probably would have a few stolen moments alone to talk with each other between these two periods.

The administration had to attack the chaos of the first period, so just as second period teacher Mr. Hughes was assuring all of us sitting on the floor again that who did the deed would soon be found out, our principal, C. B. Midkiff, requested the services of Mr. Hughes’ “boys” to help get the chair/desks off the roof. Mr. Hughes volunteered us right away. Students’ pick-ups were backed up to the edge of the school roof on either end of the building into which chair/desks were to be loaded; eventually all the boys in the school were “volunteered” to help get the chair/desks down; Mr. Mitchell’s custodial ladders were used to get us up on the roof, and I was amused that no one seemed to notice they could get up there also using the hand rail by the main entrance. It took all of second period (45 minutes) for about 175 boys to get down what four of us had gotten up in about 3 hours! (That shouldn’t be surprising, as getting out of second period classes “mandated” taking one’s time.) At one point during the “take-down,” Berry and I passed each other going in opposite directions atop the flat roof out of earshot of anyone else, one of us carrying a chair/desk and the other returning to get another. I whispered to him out of the corner of my mouth while still moving, “Does this seem familiar?” Adling recalled that this second period school-wide work force, compared to the prank the night before, “wasn’t a whole lot of fun.”

At the start of third period, the chair/desks were off the roof, but back-jammed in the main hall (like they were the night before) to be sorted back to their “proper” rooms — classroom teachers flattering themselves they could recognize all “their” chair/desks. I particularly remember Mrs. Bailey, Mrs. Cotton, and Mrs. Mulliner going up and down the hall pointing out “their” items to boys carrying them. The four of us were privately amused to see that these and other teachers were claiming chair/desks we knew (It was amazing how many chair/desks we individually recognized, having handled them the night before.) had not been taken from their rooms!

When all the chair/desks were back in place, so to speak, near the end of third period, the chaotic “melee” of that school day continued on; attention of the students could not be drawn away from what had happened. During lunch, Mr. Hughes, who took up our lunch money at the end of the cafeteria line, announced he would inspect the hands of all the boys, something that startled me at the time, as I had not even looked to see if I had any callouses on my hands. Before I got to loading my lunch tray, I peeked to see no obvious sign of “chair wear” on my hands, and I passed Mr. Hughes’ inspection, thankfully.

For a week after the prank, all self-proclaimed “detectives” seemed to have their own ideas about how the deed was done, none of which was accurate. Mr. Bint thought the chair/desks were put up on the roof through the skylight windows of the classroom; no one thought of the simple lifting at the front entrance. The most common pattern of speculation was that several people had to be involved — at least 8 and as many as 15. Girls were suspected as well as boys. Students like Danny Clack spoke for a lot of students when he said he considered whoever did it to be heroes, and that he could not wait to “shake their hands” when identified. All these speculations were much to our delight. Not to our delight, two days after the prank, Cole and I were going to get a podium for speech class during fifth period. (Recall Adling and Berry left speech class after the first semester — Play Rehearsal Night, With a Side of Greased Flagpole [May, 2013] — and were in Mrs. Lee’s room as her student assistants.) As we passed the office area we saw Chief of Police Parkinson (The Flag Escapade — Phase II [August, 2013]), Principal Midkiff, and Supt. Roach (Chapter 3) talking together!

After we passed, Cole whispered, “Did you see what I saw?”

“I sure did!” I replied.

I added we should act as if the presence of the police was not upsetting to us. When we reported this sight to Adling and Berry, we all were concerned, but still confident there was little or no evidence of a committed crime; evidence for even breaking and entering was merely circumstantial. Our confidence was “on the right trial,” as it soon became common knowledge the school was not wanting to make it a police matter, but, rather, wanted to make it an “internal” matter. The “high moral plane” upon which we saw ourselves carrying our the chair/desk escapade was paying off: it bore the marks of a prank, not a crime, and the school knew it.

But the “high moral plane” was a “double-edged” sword for us. It played no small part in our being found out within a week by the process of elimination applied on a small sample of possible suspects. The facts that there were 1) no evidence of any kind of foul play, 2) no damage to or theft of school property, and 3) merely circumstantial evidence that did not prove breaking and entering, indicated that only certain students with certain characteristics did the deed. Using, unapologetically, the stereotypical judgments placed, justly or unjustly, on all four classes of that school year, by both the students themselves as well as by the faculty and the administration, the following logic was applied: The freshman class did not have the nerve to even try something like the prank; the sophomore class did not have the skill and experience to successfully execute the prank; the junior class was not precise or careful enough to perform the prank — they would have probably added some damage in their wake; the senior class had some members that just might go to all that trouble, seeing it as a challenge. Only the administrative speculation of that time, gone forever, could tell us, but it is also possible the administration was cognizant of the pressure being put on Senior leadership (Chapters 1 and 2), making the prank an act of some kind of retaliation by that leadership. This “whittled” down the number of suspects to that of the boys in the Senior class, about 30, as girls were not seriously considered, though some faculty members, like Mr. Bint and Coach Bates, thought otherwise. It became a matter of listening to what was being said about this population, especially the leaders of this population. Yet, it must have been difficult to believe those leaders would risk as much as they would to pull off this prank. As I said in Chapter 2, they probably only thought they understood those upon whom they were beginning to focus.

One day during the week before our “ID-ing,” Anthony Strother (of sleeping in Mr. Bint’s class floor “fame”) blurted out jokingly he knew exactly who did it — Adling, Berry, Cole, and Hastings, as he remembered seeing them all together at the truck stop after the basketball game (Chapter 6). Those of our quartet who heard this laughingly acted like we were caught, and we thought that was the end of it. But the more Anthony thought about it, the more it made sense, so, on another day at the gym during sixth period, he cornered Adling and Berry and began grilling them on details about the basketball game, which, of course, they could not answer directly. Anthony immediately shut up about his idea; he knew he had stumbled upon something the school would love to know, and he was not going to “rat” on anyone. At about the same time Anthony was grilling Adling and Berry, Cole was being grilled by Mr. Bint after school. He asked Cole if he, Berry, and I were involved (I think he already suspected Adling, given his “calling out” of Adling to work the chalkboard problem the “morning after,” mentioned above.). Cole refused to incriminate anyone, and Mr. Bint let him go. It was clear the number of suspects was getting small indeed.

When it came time in this week for final preparations for the Coronation, we candidates for King Lobo (Chapter 3) met to choose our accessories to wear during the program. After the decision, Mr. Hathaway (Crashing the Cisco Beauty Pageant — Night of the Long Knife [June, 2013]) said we had decided upon ties, but it had not been decided if all of us were going to be in the Coronation! Sylvia was becoming worried I was involved, due to, of all things, the orderly arrangement of the chair/desks on the roof! Not wanting to jeopardize our relationship and with things looking like they were going to “bust open,” I wanted her to hear from me that I was involved, assuring her there was nothing criminal in the prank, yet asking her to talk to no one about what I said. She was asked about my involvement before we were found out, but she would only say that I had some idea of who had done it. This was the first, but, unfortunately, not the last time I was afraid I was going to “lose” her because of my involvement with the group who was to become the M-4. Mrs. Bailey began to suspect Adling, Berry, and me because of the tremendous amount of planning and work that went into the prank, as well as the deed’s neatness and completeness. Like Sylvia, Mrs. Lee was impressed by the ordering of the chair/desks on the roof; this made her think of Berry, who, in her words, “always had to have things just so.” She began to believe that the day “after,” we had acted too much like “little angels” instead of the “little devils” we always seemed to be; she too seemed to be zeroing in on the four of us. One afternoon at the community gym Coach Turner found me alone and asked me, with that broad grin of his, what I was going to do when the authorities “came after me.” I acted surprised he would say that and dodged his questions concerning what my parents were going to think.

We were being trapped by our uniqueness and our success!

Because of all this “heat,” it was becoming more and more difficult for the four of us to be together to talk, but when we could talk “prank” to each other we agreed that a) things were getting “hot” for the four of us, and b) we still could flat deny everything, as we saw no evidence they had any evidence on us. If anything was constant, it was our confidence we had carried the prank out without a flaw and that we had “covered all our bases.” We were not happy we were being cornered as if we were criminals; we were consoled by the fact we were not. Adling contacted in secret Bobby and Larry, making sure nothing was going to come out from them, and assuring them that whatever happened, they would never be “fingered.”

That weekend after the prank was the “time of the parents,” for the whole town seemed to be talking about who did the chair/desk escapade, and my parents were asked about me, as was Mrs. Adling asked about her son. My parents confronted me with the “64-dollar question,” and I unashamedly told them I was involved and was one of four executioners/planners. My mother was very upset, of course, but what concerned me was her thinking I was unduly influenced by “bad friends,” instead of recognizing I could be a major cog in such an enterprise. My dad, I think, could very well see me doing the prank; he had been a teenager like me once, after all. But, understandably, he could not break the solidarity my parents wanted to exude. That solidarity came in the form of being “grounded” in the future, regardless of what was going to happen to us at school. I accepted not on the basis I had committed something “wrong,” but upon the basis I had been deceptive in my actions. Meanwhile, Mrs. Adling (Mrs. Lois Adling, Mrs. Edward Lee, and the Big Afternoon [June, 2012]) became so frustrated she could get nothing direct from her son regarding his having anything to do with the prank, decided to call up Bobby Smith to ask him if Adling and Berry had indeed been at the basketball game that night! Commendably, Bobby, knowing the situation at school, told her, as hard as it was for him to do so, that indeed those two had been at the game. Mrs. Adling was momentarily satisfied. (When we were found out, she knew that Bobby was culpable, but she, like the four of us, never “ratted” on Bobby.)

Our being found out became tangible on Monday at school, six days after the prank. All four of us were in Mrs. Hughes’ trig class, and Suzette (Hagan), second-period office girl, came as requested that the exacted four of us were to report to the office to see Mr. Roach, and, we presumed, others. As we walked en masse down the hall to the office, Adling whispered, “All right, let’s deny everything! They can’t prove anything!” Cole commented in a low voice that we better see exactly what is going on here and that we should “play it by ear.” All of us wondered if they had something on the four of us, or if “fingering” the “right” four was just a lucky coincidence. (As we later concluded, it was a bit of both; the process of elimination outlined above and the circumstantial evidence of our two “groupings” that night were enough upon which the administration could “go” with the four of us before the Coronation occurred; they were on a “tight” time schedule to settle this matter!)

We walked into the office to line up, like a police line-up, facing Mr. Midkiff’s desk, behind which he and Mr. Roach stood. Without being able to say anything at the start, we were told that they knew the four of us were definitely involved in the chair/desk incident; if we denied that we did it, we would be expelled from school permanently and would not be allowed to attend any other high school in Texas — no graduation from high school for us! Unbelievably, we were being treated as vandals for a harmless prank! They acknowledged no damage had been done, which sounded like they did not consider it a crime, but then, the next moment they repeated the ultimatums as if we were criminals, or, at least, the worst of juvenile delinquents! They demanded an immediate answer to confirm the knowledge of our culpability they said they had, and we were to answer individually.

I was standing on one end of the line-up, and, because of this or for some other reason we will never know, for both these men are now deceased, I was commanded to answer first….

RJH

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