PREFACE
By David Flick

I suppose Mrs. Miller would be proud of me now. I’ll never know, however, because she’s long gone into eternity where all good English teachers go. There was a time when I wondered whether or not she would go that direction. She was also my fourth grade teacher. And from my experiences in that grade, I was dead certain that she was headed straight for the dwelling place of the Devil himself.

Quite frankly, I hated her when I was in grade school. She was a hard woman on a lazy fool like myself. She made me do my homework and pestered me when I didn’t get it in. She was given to using that ruler, which she kept in her desk drawer, on my tender hand. Many a time I was summoned to the front of the room to receive those stinging swats of the ruler on the palm side of my hand. Really, I was more embarrassed to have this done in the presence of my peers, who surely were laughing their heads of inside.

I hated spelling and that’s why I am forced to use the spell check program on on my computer when I write. I hated penmanship, which is why I can’t write a lick today with a pen or pencil. I hated arithmetic and that resulted in my total inability to even balance a checkbook today. My lovely wife does that. I hated reading and didn’t learn to read with any measure of comprehension until I reached college. It was sink or swim in college and I had to learn how to read there.

I hated everything about fourth grade and Mrs. Miller. This silly hatred for my teacher caused me to enter fifth grade on probation. I later learned that Mrs. Miller and Mrs Cowherd and made a deal with each other for me to enter fifth grade on probation. Mrs. Cowherd was a bit more patient with me than Mrs. Miller was. She evidently believed that she could make something out of me. Or at least she thought she could get me through the next grade. But I still hated spelling, arithmetic, penmanship, and reading. Even Mrs. Cowherd didn’t change those things about me.

Then, as fate would have it, Mrs. Miller jumped around me and met me face to face in freshman English. My lack of love for her had not subsided one iota during the my freshman and sophomore years.

She made us memorize and recite the Gettysburg address before the class. How does that go? "Four score and ten years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, dedicated to the proposition that.. that..., that...." Shucks, what was that cotton picking proposition?. She also made us memorize a piece out of Shakespear’s "McBeth." How does that go? Let me see here. "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this life a steady pace..." Well shoot! A steady pace of what?... I can’t even remember that either. Ask John Smith and Bub Murdock. Both of them memorized these passages in one day. Me? I slaved for days trying to memorize these things while milking the cows and digging silage.

Anyway, it was a long time before I began to like Mrs. Miller. It was so long that I was in college when I began to realize how she impacted my life. I realize I had indeed learned a few things under that dreaded teacher. I remembered how to diagram a sentence. I remembered some of my parts of speech. I could tell the difference between a noun and a verb. Mrs. Miller rose in esteem a whole lot after I graduate in 1959. That was then. This is now. I have tremendous respect for the lady and her memory. I know that she taught me a bunch. Probably it was by osmosis for I certainly didn’t learn anything from her intentionally. She’s probably turning over in her grave right now, wondering how in the world I managed to achieve any semblance of success.

I love thinking about the past, especially those years from Mrs. Robertson’s first grade all the way to May 11, 1959. I have a ton of memories and enjoy recalling them.

Time has a way of putting experiences of life into another world. That other world is always there in our minds and hearts. Our thoughts visit that other world and interact with it often. We recall again and again those things and events which happened in that distant world to which we will never physically return.

Occasionally I will recall to mind things which happened in that distant world of years ago. Some occurred many years ago. I will pull those experiences up on the computer screen of my mind and recall how things were. I think my interest in recalling things of the past came from listening to my Grandpa Howard Flick, who often recall the experiences of his distant past at family reunions. His recollections would cause me to fantasize and wish with wonder that I had seen, with my own eyes, the things which he frequently recalled. I have wished many times that I had the same recall abilities that Grandpa had. He had an incredible capacity to remember people and events. He always told the stories with amazing consistency and made me feel as though they were a recent occurrences.

Recalling has some shortcomings. Recalling life situations and accurately recounting them can occasionally be different between two people, depending on how the two perceive things. What really happened in a given event can be different from the perspective of two sets of eyes. The way I perceive something may be recounted in a different way than the way someone else who saw and experienced the same event. Such is the case in the story "Upside Down Tractor." I saw it happen one way and my cousin, Bub Murdock saw and experienced it somewhat differently.

Recollection is something similar to beauty. It's all in the eye or the mind of the beholder. Since I am beholder of my own recollections, the manner in which I have recalled things may differ a tad from others who experienced the same event. But these are my recollections and they are very real to the part of me which reaches back into the distant world of my memory .

The primary focus of these stories is on the Class of 1959. All, with the exception of one, are about selected members of our class. They are not exhaustive. They couldn't be exhaustive, because our Prez doesn't have enough space in this little booklet to hold an exhaustive account of my feeble recollections.

Thanks to Bud for allowing me to include these stories in this booklet. Thanks to the individually named class members for unknowingly allowing me to tell stories about them. I still say the Class of 59 is the greatest class to ever come out of Hammon High School. Remember our school song? "Stand up and cheer. Loud and long for Hammon High School..." I forget the rest, but you get the picture. Enjoy.