Why were we sitting in a tree?  Well, we had nothing else to do — no Academy Award celebrations to attend, no board meetings to chair.

We were in one of the trees that lined the northern border of the playground at our school, Oak Park elementary, in Woodward, Oklahoma.  That put us about a block east of where one of our classmates, Ted Luthi, lived, (15th and Oak street) and half block south of where another classmate, John Martin, lived (west side of 14th street).

The RD in this story is Robert Dean Smith, a friend and classmate of mine and, of course, every other member of the Woodward high school class of 1968.  The year of this story was around 1961 or 1962, so we would have been 10-12 years old.

At this time Woodward had four elementary schools.  It only had one high school and one junior high school, both of which were at the corner of Oak street and 9th Street, which was six blocks directly east of our tree.  Since it was almost completely downhill, if it weren’t for the slight rise from the MKT tracks, you could see the football stadium and both schools — the high school and junior high school — from our tree.  (So you had a clean line of sight almost all the way to the high school and junior high school.)

This well-dressed man comes walking down the sidewalk toward us from the west.  I don’t think the man even saw us until he got almost right below us.  That’s when RD said,   “Hey, look, there goes that shit-for-brains, Kenneth Walker.”

The man looked up at us and said,  “What did you say to me?” and RD said  “You heard me.  I said you’re the bastard, Kenneth Walker, who’s the principal of the junior high school.  Is it true what they say, that you’re a complete shit-for-brains?”  (RD had already guessed, correctly, that the man was not much of a tree climber.)

At this, the man became completely enraged, and yells out  “You boys, both you boys, get down out of that tree, right now.  You’re going to be sorry you were ever born!”

Up until that day, I had no idea who the junior high school principal was.  [Author’s note: among the innumerable cognitive abilities possessed by RD were those involving multiple processing stages for parallel routes of personal data — i.e., he remembered people’s names, faces, relatives, and other  important  personal  information  about  them.]   I,    however,  had

not a clue about this personal data stuff, nor did I really care.

But if I had any sense, I probably should’ve cared, at least in this case, if for no other reason than because adults of that era, especially authority figures, had a boatload more power over kids than they do today.

And I want you to know that I’m quoting both RD and the principal directly, word for word, which I can do because I remember it word for word, exactly as they said it over 60 years ago, so it must’ve made quite an impression on me.  These days I can’t remember what I had for dinner yesterday.

Anyway, as to who and what this particular authority figure was, I had suddenly become just as aware as RD was of this man’s full identity and what he represented.  So, with just the exchange of those few words, neither RD nor I had any doubt whatsoever what this man would and could do to us if he managed to lay his hands on us — it was as if we had Hitler himself standing below our tree, mad as hell and yelling for us to get down.

And so, if I’d had my choice, I probably wouldn’t have chosen to pick this guy and this place to pick a fight.  After all, we were completely trapped up in our tree.

But RD and I had an ongoing conflict even more problematic than what I just described to you.  All things considered, and putting it mildly, neither RD nor I cared much for authority figures. 

Equally obvious, as I’m sure you’ve already deduced from our short dialogue with the principal, RD and I had a bad habit of getting ourselves into tight situations such as this;  we’d done it before and we’d do it again.  It was what my mom called our ‘Adventurous Knucklehead Mode’.  Of course, our moms never had any idea how deeply we had actually thrown ourselves into some of these adventures.

So I think it’s fair to say that when you read this story just as it’s written, you’re going to say to yourself,  “this story is about a couple of damn little kids that were at best juvenile delinquents, or at worst, probably should be headed to the penitentiary.”

I’m sure the vast majority of you will have made that judgment already.  And for the most part, it’s been my experience that trying to convince anyone to change their minds about anything for which they’ve already formed an opinion will probably not work — but  I'll  try.