COLUMN: Drafting class and other high school memories

I had no business even taking drafting class as a senior elective; I no more wanted to be a draftsman or engineer than I aspired for my acne to last well into adulthood. I took drafting for the same reason I took typing as an elective course – a requisite and good place for my clown buddies and me to try out new material on an unfamiliar audience.

I kinda enjoyed typing, especially when the teacher would time us in a speed drill. Fellow clown Mark Livingston thought it hilarious when the teacher turned her back, to reach up and crinkle up my typewriter paper. I likely coulda held the rookie words-per-minute record had Mark sat in a different row.

This behavior carried through to drafting where Dave Koba, Tucker Dayoob and myself were the only seniors. Our class project was to design and build an automobile out of cardboard paper. Burly Mr. McFeathers had number formulas written on the blackboard, but it looked like Chinese to me.

I had an ace in the hole, as I befriended a super-nerd sophomore named Bobby Dunmeyer, who looked exactly like the Addams Family kid and I enlisted his brainy assistance throughout. Luckily McFeathers often left the room. Knowing my easy route, Tucker and Koba took every opportunity to sabotage me and just like Livingston in typing, someone was always reaching over my shoulder with a #2 pencil or tube of glue.

Bobby would present my car with a newly designed front seat and splat! There’s a big gob of glue in the seat or a pencil lead piercing through the hood. One day I lay in wait for the next woodhick to try something, and here it came. In my peripheral, I noticed the thick, hairy arm slowly approaching Bobby’s design. It had to be 350-lb Tucker, I knew. Closer … closer ... NOW!

With a shrieking, “Hi-AH,” I jumped up and karate-chopped that wrist with all the ferocity my 145 pounds could muster, turned around to see McFeathers holding his arm with eyes afire. In seconds I had been yanked up and flung into the hallway and met with that hellfire stare again. I immediately went into my wounded child routine, nearly crying as I explained how much that car had meant to me and how my peers had been sabotaging it. I named names.

It worked. Back inside, he gave those boys a tongue-lashing with a warning to the “next guy who interferes with Blough’s project.” I was assaulted with pig squeal noises every time McFeathers left the room, but finally Dunmeyer was able to roll my finished product off the assembly line.

At graduation, I passed that cardboard car with dried glue and holes throughout around and every graduating senior signed it. Well, I never became a draftsmen or a high-paid secretary, and sure enough, my acne did linger.