Cigars, Thurber, and a Bucket of Water

She was old when she taught my mom English some twenty-five years earlier, so I guess that made her older than old when I sat down at my desk in her eighth grade English class in Blencoe, Iowa. The old wood floors, the musty lockers, and the smell of fresh #2 pencil shavings set the stage for this paragon of academia.

Mrs. Akin was a tough old (well, older than old, as we've already established) teacher who knew how to take a class by the reins and lead it through the acrid marshes of Faulkner and Joyce as well as the more pleasant high ground of Bradbury, Poe, and Tennyson.

She did it all -- we read the masters, we took painful stabs at trying creative writing ourselves, and we learned how to diagram sentences until I was convinced that I could diagram my own grandmother.

I say she was tough -- she was as tough as the backside of a barn -- but she wasn't mean. She had a streak of playfulness that kept the class guessing.

I say she wasn't mean -- she wasn't any meaner than an old rooster about to be dethroned from the coop -- but there was no testing her authority, not if you wanted to live to see the next sunrise.

Mrs. Akin, without fail, always gave us ten or fifteen minutes at the end of class to read. She would use the opportunity to leave the room and go to the ladies room to smoke a cigar. If it was supposed to be a secret, it wasn't a well kept one. I suspected at the time that perhaps she allowed the secret to "leak" because it added to the mystique of her professorial persona.

Anyway, one fine warm spring day as we were reading something by Thurber, Mrs. Akin decided the room was too warm. We of course had no air conditioning, so she opened the window of our second floor classroom.

This was a fine idea and it provided relief temporarily, but it so happened that the second graders were on recess during that time and the playground was located on our side of the building. Some of the kids were playing directly below the window, against the red brick wall.

The rambunctious kids got noisier and noisier down below, and finally Mrs. Akin stuck her head out the window and yelled, "Shut up down there!"

That worked for perhaps five minutes, but then the volume increased so that it was even louder than before.

"I said to shut up," she yelled again out the window.

The naive second graders, of course, didn't have much of an idea who this elderly lady yelling at them out the window was, so they continued.

In a huff, Mrs. Akin muttered, "Be right back," and she stormed out of the room. I figured she was fed up and needed her cigar.

Three or four minutes later, though, she walked back into the room carrying a five gallon bucket that she had filled to the brim with water.

It was obviously heavy, but that wasn't going to deter her from achieving her goal.

The kids were still noisy down below.

Mrs. Akin looked out the window, then turned and gave us a wink and a smile, and she lifted the bucket and dumped the water out the window and onto the children below.

Their playground laughter turned into shrieks.

"I warned them," she said triumphantly.

She picked up where she left off with Thurber. And not a peep was heard from the playground outside for the rest of the class period.