My Lucky Break

Sometimes I get to a point where I start believing I never have any luck at all. For example, I've never won a lottery, oh, except for the draft lottery. I won the hell out of that one. At times like that, I remind myself of the really big break I caught the year I spent teaching school.

This was back in the 1970s, and I was teaching seventh grade in an urban public junior high school, as they were then called-not "middle schools." The school was not the easiest environment in which to teach. Once that year, there was an armed robbery (of the cafeteria till), and, another time, someone may have stuck up the school store at gunpoint.

I will not go into a long litany of how difficult it was to teach in such a school, but, before you get the idea that I was thrown into a den of unspeakable monsters, I should point out that, when I returned to the school two years later for a visit, there was not a one of the students who did not greet me with cheerful enthusiasm. Still, the year I spent teaching was a tough one. So where did this lucky break come in?

I will get to that, but first, let me introduce our principal, Mr. Lloyd. He would have been more aptly named "Mr. Malaprop," because he had an unfailing facility for sticking his foot in, whenever the opportunity presented itself.

One cold winter morning, bearing in mind that the school's ancient HVAC system was painfully slow to react to events like the beginning of another school day, the students showed up for their first period classes, still wrapped in their outdoor garb. For some reason, this enraged the principal, who got on the PA system and thundered over the squawk box: "I want all students to report directly to their coats and put their lockers away immediately!" On another cold morning, a few days later, after Principal Lloyd had finished making his rounds, satisfying himself that his edict was being obeyed, for the most part, he got back onto the PA system to congratulate the boys and girls on the tremendous "improval" they had shown in putting away their coats.

Eventually, the cold, coatless winter passed and the school was enjoying a balmy spring day, ruined, to my way of thinking, only by the fact that it was Wednesday. I hated Wednesdays. Not only did I have the most classes scheduled on that day, I did not have my two smartest sections, but I did have my five slowest and unruliest. By all odds, I should have been standing up in front of a class of barely-controllable students, struggling to maintain my dignity and some semblance of order when it happened. By the rarest stroke of good luck, I was in the faculty lounge on my one lousy free period of the afternoon.

Shortly after lunch, one of the reading teachers, a lady in her mid-30s, named Miss Randolph, got permission to leave the school to go get some needed classroom supplies. Apparently, on the way back, some fellow driving behind her did not mash his brake pedal quite hard enough at the approach of a stop light, causing the front of his car to slightly nudge the back of hers. She was not in the slightest degree injured. It was your typical "fender-bender," but it was enough of an affair that she was going to be late getting back to school. She dutifully got to a phone and informed Principal Lloyd of what had just happened.

As we who had a 45-minute respite from duty sat slack-jawed and dazed in the faculty lounge, awaiting the bell to return once more into the fray, the familiar static that preceded an announcement from the PA system began to crackle.

"Let me have your attention," commanded the voice of Principal Lloyd. "I have a very important announcement. Miss Randolph got banged this afternoon."

For a moment there was absolute silence in the room, as though we all had to let the words register, just to make sure we actually heard what we thought we heard. Then pandemonium.

Even someone as oblivious to his own bumbling as our principal must have realized something may have been amiss. Apparently all three of his secretaries were either on the floor or heading in that general direction, convulsing with laughter. Realizing that, whatever it was these people thought was so damned funny needed to be straightened out, in no uncertain terms, Lloyd got right back on the air.

"I want to clear up any misunderstanding about what I just said," he indignantly explained. "What I meant to say was that Miss Randolph got banged in the rear!"