During school time, with the pot-bellied stove glowing red, windows and doors tightly closed, the smell of skunk made conditions so bad that the more sensitive of the girls would start retching and raise their hands with the first two fingers extended upwards which was the sign to the teacher that the would-bevomiters wanted to leave the room. When several girls would react thus, the teacher would dismiss the worst of the skunk-smelling boys by simply telling them to go home and change their clothes. After the smelly ones' exodus she would open a couple of windows and even the entrance door. Sometimes the dismissed boys would come back by forenoon recess; at other times they wouldn't be back until the next day. Compulsory school attendance laws weren't on the statue books in those days.

It appears that Billy Beane's dormant sexual instinct started its awakening after about six months of schooling, when he had learned the rudiments of primary writing. His first puppy love affliction came to him through a neighbor's girl named Eva who was two years his senior in age. Her family lived a half mile farther down the road running past his parents' farm and invariably Billy walked home from school with Eva and her two younger brothers who were near Billy's age. Often it was that in the morning Billy would co-ordinate his school going so he'd meet Eva and her brothers where the driveway leading off his parents' farm joined the rural road to the school, this so he could walk in Eva's company.

One day, as a part of their grammar lesson, the teacher had an older class of the pupils write letters to one another for the purpose of tutoring them in the art of social correspondence. These letters were then to be given to the pupil they were addressed to and when the class was called up front to recite, the recipients were to read their letters out loud.

Though he was not a member of Eva's grammar class, Billy became so enthusiastic with the letter writing idea that he took it upon himself to scrawl a lead penciled note to Eva. Not yet having learned to spell most of the words correctly he got the older boy with whom he was sharing one of the doubleseated desks, to spell the words for him. What Billy wrote stayed verbatim with him through the years:

Dear Eva: I love you. We should get married so we could sleep together. Then we could play hen and rooster and have a baby. I would like to do that. Would you like to do that too?

Fate designed it that the teacher should come down the aisle between the seats and see the neatly folded note. Prompted by the interest she had been asked to exercise with Billy, she asked: "What have you been writing, Willie?" It was Billy's older seat mate who giggled out the secret: "He wrote a letter to Eva."

Not suspecting the note's contents, the teacher condescended to say:

"That's very nice of you, Willie," Thereupon she picked up the folded note. "I'll put it in the letter box and give it to Eva when we have grammar class and then she can read it out loud." With that she whooshed in her long dress, fashionable at the time, to her desk on which stood the white cardboard shoe box serving as a mailbox. Before pushing it through the slot, the teacher's curiosity moved her to unfold the note and read it. Then looking straight at Billy, she said chidingly: "You don't want to write that kind of a letter to Eva, Willie," and she put the note into the pocket of her apron.

The one-fourth mile walk home that evening was a bit of an embarrassing one to Billy. With girlish curiosity the ten-year-old Eva started prying: "What

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