Reminiscence

by Cecil de Vada

As the only child of parents who were midwest farmers it was quite natural for Billy Beane to be a shy and easily ashamed boy. One of his earliest memories is that he wore girl's shoes because boy's shoes were too 'hard leathered' for his tender feet, until he was seven years old, when he started going to school in the little white-painted schoolhouse situated on the one-acre playground at the crossroads a quarter of a mile from his parents' farm house. And considering the short distance to the school, the ample bedroom space in the house and that Billy was the one youngster who could disturb the teacher, it fell to his parents' lot to always board the teacher. With the teacher boarding at his home it made it handy for his mother to impress upon the teacher that she should exercise a special watchful interest in Billy because, as his mother put it, 'he was something of a delicate and bashful being-his mother's boy.'

With its pot bellied stove that was fired with soft coal, (the coal which was kept in a piano-sized crate box on the school's south side to keep the coal from being buried by the winter's blizzards), the school's capacity was twenty-six pupils, their grades ranging from primary to the sixth. They sat at double desks, girls with girls and boys with boys.

In the days of Billy Beane's early boyhood, farm sloughs and smaller potholes were dotted with numerous muskrat houses. Other fur bearing animals like minks, badgers, foxes, weasels and skunks were plentiful, and there were even a few roaming wolves left, so that trapping was a ready means for the older boys to earn spending money. Because of this no boy was thought of as brave or had the distinction of being something of a hero for having ventured up to a skunk until he came to school 'smelling skunk.' Often it was that the older boys would skin a skunk or two before coming to school in the morning. Sometimes they'd change their clothes following the pelting; sometimes they'd only wash their hands.

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