Cooties Revisited

I was at the gym earlier this morning when another Key West Realtor entered the door. He swiped his membership card and walked over to hang up his keys. He came over to where I was working out to say hello and asked if I have been busy. Not I said. It's been dead. He said the phones have stopped ringing.

I asked if he had checked his cooties at the door. He smiled. He is 25 years my junior. I asked if he even knew what cooties are. Yes. Then he added his wife is a school teacher. She said her kids are playing Corona-Tag. So much for explaining the virus to them.

That made me think back to when I was in elementary school. I wrote about this before but since the real estate market is slow, I'll repeat my story for anyone who may be interested.

It was fall 1959.  I was in the sixth grade at Mountain View Elementary just a few miles east of the front range of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Mr. Albert Morrison was my sixth grade teacher. He had fought in World War II. He was a member of the Kiwanis Clubs and got his organization to provide our school with yellow rain slickers, Army surplus helmets painted yellow, and white safety belts which the sixth grade boys wore while on safety patrol. Mr. Morrison also assisted Dr. O'Day who was our Boy Scout troop leader. Mr. Morrison took our troop up to Eldorado Canyon (Colorado) for a three day weekend camping trip where I saw him smoke and heard him swear. He was mortal. I was shocked.

I guess every school has a kid that is a bit different. Our kid was Tommy Myers. He always looked and smelled like Pig-Pen. He was never really scrubbed clean like the other boys. I am certain he had cooties. Really!

Mr. Morrison did not like Tommy. Not one bit. One day Mr. Morrison got so mad at Tommy that he suddenly walked from the front of the classroom to Tommy's desk where he grabbed Tommy by his dirty little arm and yanked him out of his desk and dragged him through the classroom like a rag doll and kicked him out the door! We were shocked. We had never seen Mr. Morrison or any teacher ever treat a student like that. Mr. Morrison was three or four times the size of that kid. He had been in the war. He could have killed the kid. Yeah, he smoked. He swore. He beat up a little kid. Today he would have been arrested. Nothing like that happened back in 1959.

One time Tommy gave me a twenty dollar bill to bribe me to be his friend. That night I was ironing my money so it would look crisp. My big brother saw my stacks of ones but got really bossy and demanded to know where I got that $20. That got my mother in on the conversation. They probably thought I stole it from them. I never did anything like that. I told my mother that Tommy had given it to me. She made me return the money to Tommy's mother. Twenty dollars in 1959 would be worth $174.78 in 2020. I would have been rich if I hadn't been such a neat freak or my brother had not been so bossy.

Cooties. If only life was so simple.