More School Stories

Sometimes, just having a school-related job makes you a target. My husband was principal in higher-education schools, which always upped the possibility of shenanigans. (Elementary kids can't drive.) One weekend night in Pontiac, IL--long after dark--someone knocked on the kitchen window, which totally freaked me out. My husband launched from the house to try to catch the culprit--and he did. He tackled the kid. Was on top of him, pounding his adolescent brain into the ground, with the kid begging for him to quit. "Mr. McNary! It's me, Jason! Stop!" He did stop, but word must have gotten around because nothing like that ever happened again. 

Switch venues to Cloverdale, IN, quite a few years later. It was Halloween, 1988. We were living in a rented house along the main drag on the way to the school. For reasons known only to God, my husband was out sitting on the front steps of the house in the dark when a loud, souped-up vehicle came by and bounced a pumpkin off our mailbox. The pumpkin made a mess and maybe a dent in the mailbox. It was intentionally aimed at him. How do I know? A few days before, someone painted "McNary is a dick" with an arrow pointing to our house on the asphalt roadway leading to our house! Nothing was said, but two days later, a couple of teenagers were out raking leaves in our yard, doing penance for having been caught vandalizing the Principal's mailbox. How did they get caught? My husband did parking lot duty at the end of each school day and recognized the sound of the souped-up vehicle. Busted!! Thereafter, one of the adult clowns in the maintenance department would always say, "Heeeeere's Richard" whenever my husband (named Joe) approached. 

Another time in that same school district, we were sound asleep at 2:00 AM, when the phone rang. My husband answered it. I heard, "Yeah. Uh-huh. Okay. Where?" Then he hung up. By this time, I was awake and asked, "What was that all about?" His response was "School bomb threat", then he rolled over and went back to sleep. In retrospect, I had to laugh. If the bomb threat was expected to interrupt my husband's sleep, the caller obviously didn't know my husband! Perhaps "they" expected him to call the authorities, rush to the school, and throw his body on the bomb to protect the school, but that's not how it went down. He went to school at the regular time the next day. He did call the authorities, of course, but the school day progressed without a minute's loss. So much for that!!