Runaways

Someone once asked me about school.  I told them that I hated school.  I love to learn, I just hated school.  I loved math and history, tolerated science, hated English and spelling.  Then they asked me about my grades.  I said that I hated school so much that I made straight A’s, was a Beta Club member, and president of the Beta Club my senior year of high school. 

When students told me they hated school I inquired of their grades.  Usually, their grades were bad and most had failed or taken summer school.  I would say, “You must really love school to fail and take the class again.” I said if they really hated school they would make A’s.  They would quiz, “Why?”  I replied, “You graduate quicker.”  

I often spoke at high school Baccalaureates, college students, civic organizations, and preached since 1983.  When introduced as Dr. Hopper, I got rounds of laughter and sometimes ovations.  I would tell them that the D R stands for Documented Redneck.

I would tell students that I started school in 1959 at Beloit Kindergarten in Beloit, Illinois and graduated Beeson Divinity School at Sanford University in Birmingham, Alabama in December 2002.

Hopper tradition proves we deplore school.  Mom went to the seventh grade and quit to hoe and pick cotton. Dad went to the eighth grade and quit to cut and load, by hand, pulpwood.  My younger brother, Glenn, and I we were school runaways.  My sister Diane and other brother David were not as bold and daring as Glenn and I were.

When I started kindergarten in Beloit, it was mandatory, and I loved it.  My teacher was a beautiful young blonde and reminded me of Beaver Cleaver’s teacher on the television show “Leave it to Beaver.”

I got to finger paint, go to the creek, and catch tadpoles.  The best part was it was only a half day.  There was no homework, tests, or any pressure.  It was wonderful until I started the first grade a Beloit Elementary.

In first grade I had the oldest and meanest teacher.  She had to be at least a hundred years old and was a robust Yankee tyrant.  This first grader from central Alabama did not speak as did the other students.  I was a shy introvert, and she was a fun making bully.  She shamed my Southern drawl, criticized my reading, and analyzed by inability to skip with both feet.

After school started, I saw my teacher at a sporting event.  When I saw her in that old gangster car, an old Buick with bullet hole fenders, I was terrified.  Momma worried and warned us about the evil ninety miles to the east in Chicago.  The St. Valentine Day Massacre happened many years before, but momma still fretted.  I thought that that
Gangster Yankee teacher was going to kill this little Johnny Reb.

We lived three or four blocks from the Elementary school.  I would walk to school and eventually I got fed up the “Attila the Hun” and sometimes I would enter the breezeway of the schoolhouse and return home crying.

When the snow came, I would walk to school in the snow.  On extreme snow days day would drive me to school.  He would put me out and I could beat him back to the house hiding under the kitchen table for long periods of time. 

In March of 1960, we moved back to Alabama the Beautiful.  My cousin Floyd took me to school in Jemison.  My teacher was a Ms. Shirley, and she looked a lot like the one in Illinois.  I was terrified.  She made fun of me because after three years up North, I picked up the Yankee brogue.

To complicate matters, I asked to be excused to go the restroom.  Welcome to the South and outside toilets.  I had an outside toilet at home, so it was no big deal although the inside ones in Illinois were nice.  Returning to the classroom, Attila the Hun’s sister asked me a quest on the subject I missed will in the toilet.  I could not answer her, and she made me sit on a stool in the clothes’ closet with a dunce hat.

The school is six miles from home so I couldn’t walk home.  But the school bus circled with a quarter mile of the house so I would get off the bus and walk home.  We had only one vehicle, so I got to stay home claiming various ailments.

After being threatened within the inch of my life by momma I did not pull the ailment scam.  I did get off the bus where I normally escaped but it was on the way home.  I felt sick but I had cried wolf so many times did not believe me. 
Turns out I had the mumps.  Momma sure did feel bad.

I honestly do not know had I got in the second grade, but I did.  I had Mrs. Nellie Glasscock for second grade, and she was like a sweet grandmother.  In the third grade we did not a permanent teacher until Christmas break.  God blessed us with a beautiful blonde angel named Mrs. Avis Harden.  I went to making excellent grades.  She was inspiration for the rest of my schooling.

My brother Glenn was a first grader when I was in the ninth grade.  Most of the teachers we had had taught mom.  They were old.  Glenn would run away from school.  He made across the railroad tracks or a mile or so from school like an escape convict appended and returned to prison.

My fondest memory is ninth grade civics class.  Danny Pike, a friend sat behind me.  Mrs. Miller was cousin to the Huns and was very strict.  Danny had a special touch to get my attention fearing the wrath of Mrs. Miller.  He whispered, “Your brother is at the door.”  There was my little brother with saddest face and expression that said, “I want to go home.”  I was his last hope.  Glenn will be sixty-five this October.

Glenn was head and shoulders taller that his first-grade cell mates.  When his ancient teacher threatened to give him a baby bottle he was not as quick to make an escape.  We finally told momma years later about her baby runaway.  I think she was more sympatric than angry.

 

Jesus’ parents were relieved when they found him in school.  He ran to school where the Hoppers were runaways.

 

Every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Passover.  When he was twelve years old, they went up to the festival, according to the custom.   After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it.  Thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends.   When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him.   After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.  Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers.   When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.” Luke 2:41-48   KJV

WINTER STORM WARNING

The National Weather forecast for the American Southeast for January 10, 2025, predicts a winter storm.  There is not anything more devastating and initiating panic for people in Alabama to hear than WINTER STORM WARNING.  Alabamians just do stupid stuff and create shortages, chaos, and waste.

 

Having lived in Illinois on the Wisconsin state line, I experienced snow, lots of it.  When I started kindergarten in 1958, I experienced a snowstorm for the first time.  I opened the car door to have violent winds blowing snow.  Daddy had gotten me a bag of cheese curls for a snack and the wind ripped the bag from my hands and scattered those delicious cheese curls in the snow.  The yellow against the white was etched in my mind.  It was beautiful and overwhelming at the same time.  My bag was gone with the north wind and my little heart broken.  I started to cry.  Daddy said it would be okay and handed me another bag that he had bought for him.  I figured that the Abdominal Snowman had a yellow treats in the snow that was very deep for a small boy.

 

When I started the first grade, momma received a list of things that were required for men to attend South Beloit Elementary.  Momma had never been out of Alabama.  The list was foreign to her.  I had to have a snowsuit and snow galoshes.  Believe it or not I walked to school in the snow.  First time I wore my new galoshes someone stole them and replaced mine with an old worn pair.  Momma was not happy with those Yankees.  Snow was part of living up North.

 

Back in Alabama, snow, which is more ice than flakes paralyze.  Stores run out of milk, bread, and cold cuts.  It was 1985 when a winter storm paralyzed central Alabama.  It was a Wednesday night, and I was returning home from conducting a Prayer Meeting for a pastor friend who was out of town.  The rain fell and temperature dropped as rain turned to sleet and ice.  I can close my eyes and visualize the windshield wipers as they moved pushing the frozen Slushy.

 

Nothing really accumulated and we went to bed.  Around three in the morning there was an eerie silence.  The electricity was off.  I heard from time sounds as a shotgun shooting in the woods.  I looked out the bedroom window and it bright white.  Going to the back deck of the house I stepped into snow, about a foot deep.  The sound was limbs from a pine ticket breaking under the weight of the snow.  As daylight came, my neighbors and I discovered that electric power lines were down everywhere.  It was not good for all of us with total electric homes, but I did have and use a fireplace to help heat the house.

 

From Wednesday night to Sunday afternoon, we had no power.  We mattresses and cover to the great room where the fireplace was.  I used it to cook meals.  My son Andy and daughter Angel loved it.  They said it was like camping.  I moved all the refrigerated food to the snowbank on the back deck.  County water continued and I heated water in five-gallon buckets by the fireplace.  By Sunday power was back.

 

That Friday night I decide I would take a bath.  My wife asked how I would do that.  I told her like I had for most of my life.  We did not have and inside bathroom until the spring of my senior year of high school.  My family washed in a foot tube with water heated by the potbellied stove.  She laughed until I appeared clean, shaved, and hair washed.  Saturday night she asked if I could heat her some water.

 

The next year, 1986, we had another winter storm.  It was almost the same scenario but worse.  Fearing another winter storm people went crazy.  We had an extra frig in the basement.  Living in the country you buy enough food stuff to last a week or longer.  I asked if we needed anything, and my wife said a gallon of milk.

 

One again it was a Wednesday night, and I went to the local Wally World (Wal-Mart) to buy a gallon of milk.  I went the store, and I encounter pandemonium.  People panicked. There were people pushing a buggy of milk and pulling another full of break.  I stopped amazed and puzzled.  The store was out of milk.  Pushing and shoving everywhere.  Frighten people ran and screamed.  I thought just what it will look like if the world was ending.

 

Suddenly a man yelled, “Winn-Dixie has a truck load of milk!”  I imagined it looked as did the Hebrews when they left Egypt.  I went to the car and drove to Winn-Dixie where a tractor-trailer loaded with milk was unloading.  It was the same as Wal-Mart.  I got a gallon of milk, out my index finger in the handle, threw it across my shoulder, and proceeded to the checkout line.

 

I man pushing a full buggy of milk and pulling a buggy of bread stopped me and asked, “That all the milk you gonna get?”

 

I replied, “Yep, all I need.”

 

He reminded that there was a winter storm coming.  I told him that this is Alabama and how long does snow stay on the ground especially since the ground is not frozen, three maybe four days.

 

It did last for four days.  A neighbor went to check on folks in our country community.  He found a family that had made fun of our country/backward way of life.  The Birmingham transplants did not have any electricity due to down lines, no water because the pumping stations had no power, and no heat trying to burn green logs in a fireplace.

 

My neighbor invited the family to his house where his wife had a hot breakfast with biscuits, hot coffee, and a warm house.  After thawing out and returning home, my neighbor gave them some dry wood, showed them how to start a fire with kindling.  From then on the Birmingham transplants had a different attitude toward county folks.

 

Nowadays I question what has happened to common sense?   I like what a fellow Alabamian said, “A country boy can survive.”

 

 "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease."  Matthew 24:22