Sixth Grade Was a Blast!

 

I finally made the cut that year and started selling programs for the New Orleans Saints at Tulane Stadium. My dad would make me take the bus Uptown to go to work. I would make $5 per box, and would get the free pass to enter the stadium to watch the game. 

As I did during the Tulane games, I would always just walk right past the security guards and onto the field, as if I belonged there. I would stand behind the Saints players, who were sitting on the benches, and occasionally I would bring Gatorade to them. I pretty much acted like I was a water boy or something. 

Towards the end of each game, I would go up to the Saints players and ask them if I could have their helmet chin straps, and they would always tell me ‘yes, but just wait until the game is over.’ I realized I wasn’t the only kid doing this, so once the game was finally over, it was a mad dash to collect as many chin straps as possible. I had quite the chin strap collection. 

I also collected Mardi Gras doubloons, mostly because my friend Stephen Ehlinger had a doubloon collection. While Stephen didn’t have a chin strap collection, what he did have was the elusive 1960 gold Rex doubloon which, even to this day, I still have never found.

Sixth grade was a blast, full of girl/boy parties with my friends Trey Nicholson, Nicki Manale, Buddy Bell, Amy Kelly, Cindy Catalanoto, Lance Landry, Melanie Morris, Heidi Senner, Michael Heinrich, Karen Dressler, Lisa Daigle, Doug Montgomery, Tina Ray, Guy Ginn, Shelby Trail, George Farber, Suzy Hickham, and so many others. I also met a new friend that year named Skip Montgomery, whose family owned a local convenience chain store called Time-Saver. He was a surfer looking dude and enjoyed taking risks as well. And the girls loved him, so he was a good wing man for me.

While sixth grade was indeed fun on a social level, and I sometimes felt like I was the life of the party, my grades suffered terribly. I sometimes felt my highs were super high, but my depressions was super deep. 

My main teacher, Ms. Conway, and I didn’t get along at all. She actually told me many times during the last quarter that she could easily fail me, and had the power to force me to repeat the grade, but that she was going to “let me pass so that she didn’t have to teach me for yet another year.” I couldn’t stand her either, and I remember feeling her comments were both mean and spiteful, almost meant to actually hurt me emotionally, which she did. 

One Sunday evening, just before dinner, my friend Guy Ginn and I had been playing at Skip Montgomery‘s house on Haring Court. It was getting close to dinner time, so we decided to head home. We jumped over Skip‘s backyard fence into the James Madison schoolyard. As we were cutting through the schoolyard, I mentioned to Guy that the back door of my sixth portable building classroom was unlocked. We decided to go in and look around. We thought it would be funny to throw all the desks on top of each other, and to throw the class books on top of the pile, and then to scatter the powdered paint all over the place, hoping to shock everyone on the following Monday morning. It worked. The following morning I came to school and Ms. Conway was completely beside herself. Everyone looked shocked and I went along with it, acting shocked, as well. They started calling students to the principal’s office, Mrs. Sabrier, to ask them if anyone had known anything. While I was waiting outside of the classroom I told my good friend Greg Donnelly that Guy and I had done it the night before and to not tell anyone. He promised he wouldn’t tell. A few minutes later he was called to Mrs. Sabrier’s office. And then a few minutes later, Guy Ginn and I were both called to her office. As we were walking towards Mrs. Sabrier‘s office, we walked past Greg and noticed he was crying. When I ar- rived at Mrs. Sabria‘s office, she told me and Guy Ginn that we were officially expelled from James Madison school. Our parents had already been notified and were on their way to come pick us up. On a side note, Mrs. Sabrier allowed me come back to school after three days to officially graduate with the rest of my class, so I’m pretty sure it was just a suspension, and not an actual expulsion. Ms. Conway was furious at Mrs. Sabrier’s decision.

While my punishment from my dad was pretty severe, I was still allowed to attend summer camp at Sam Barthe. My brother Pete and I were both on the Pistons team that year. Yes, the Celtics were the team to beat and my parents always showed up to the nighttime baseball games, my dad with his drink and always ready to socialize.

When I wasn’t punished on the weekends, I would spend my nights hanging out with friends at the Beach Club, where I was first introduced to smoking cigarettes, True Green, if I remember correctly, and drinking Miller Ponies.

Two of my school friends, Melanie Morris and Joann Scott, both worked at the Beach Club stables, and that’s where I rode my first horse. I remember once riding bareback with Melanie Morris when the horse took off running down the levee. I was holding onto Melanie as tightly as I could but I started to fall to the right and I pulled her off with me. We rolled for what seemed about fifteen feet and then came to a stop on the ground. I was checking for broken bones when Melanie stood up and yelled at me for pulling her off with me. She had no idea how afraid I was. Truth be told, I really liked both Melanie and Joann, and I know they liked me, but both told me I was always in too much trouble.

We had a group of about ten of us who used to hangout on the park benches at night, and sometimes a couple of us would wander up over to the other side of the levee. I learned a lot about life that summer, and I was ready for the new school year to begin, and the opportunity to meet new friends.

© 2022 Jeffrey Pipes Guice

My Wonder Years: A Book