EXPLANATORY NUTZ NOTES

(Run originally 2/26/04 on our old site)

Don Thompson

SHS's newspaper ran many years as The Lion in some form or another. I have a copy of the 1953 version where it's called “The (logo of lion).”

Also, here are some annual pics to pass on for the http://groups.msn.com/SearcyMemories . The 1948 and 1949 annuals were called The Cavalier. The 1950 and 1951 books were called The Lion's Diary, and then The Lion to the present (I guess).

After looking at those annual pics more carefully, I noticed that the 48 is The Cavalier and the 49 is The Cavelier. Someone didn't proofread 49's cover very well.

EDITOR’S NOTES: I notice that the newspaper was a yearly exercise, probably intended as an update to the Annual, which was, of course, “put to bed” several months previous to graduation.

Of special interest was the closeup of the masthead showing the Editor to be no less than Perrin Jones. After graduation, he hied himself off to the U of A, then came back home to take over the reins of the Searcy Citizen. After the paper was sold, he remained Editor Emeritus, while moving on to the Arkansas Attorney General’s office. He still does a weekly column in The Citizen, though. –tlp-

Roland King

Anita asked about where the money came from to buy the jackets and when did the girl friends get them.

To tell the truth, I don't remember where the money came from or who paid for them. So it must have been from the school? Roger Vaughn, Bill Barger, or Elmer Dale might remember. I know I got six letter jackets in football (three in jr high and 3 in sr high) with the same number of letters in track, and I didn't have to pay anything.

We did have a booster club, but I don't know if they raised money. Anyone earning a letter was initiated into the S Club, which required the ones being initiated to do wise and fun things such as swallowing an oyster tied to a string (after the appropriate sound effects were made) and then having it pulled back up. Of course, the person was blindfolded while this was happening. The other fun thing we did was to carry paddles around and anyone who paid us a dollar could hit us. This was one way we raised money which, as I remember, we used to buy the coaches gifts.

I think most of the time the girl friends got the new jackets.

It was 15 years before I could ever eat an oyster.

Initiations were always exercises in tastelessness and, in some cases, outright meanness. “Belt lines” were one such excess: the upperclassmen in the group (in my case, the FFA) would form two lines in the street in front of the school, and then the hapless initiates were required to run between the lines, while the upperclassmen swung the belts from their pants at the departing fannies.

Sometimes, you were told to walk rapidly, don’t run.

This particular piece of excess came to a screeching halt the day someone decided it would be cute to hold the tail end of the belt, so that the buckle was at the business end – where it tore a gash in the palm of my hand as I went by.

In this day and age, of course, my family would’ve sued the school and each individual FFA member for an aggregate $1,000,000 in damages. In 1952, though, the school just eliminated belt lines from the acceptable list of initiation sadisms, which was fine by me – I didn’t even have to suggest it. –tlp-