Mr. Herndon — By Tommy Purser

This sudden snap of cold weather got me to thinking about my sixth grade teacher, Mr. Herndon. At least that’s what I recall his name being. Sixth grade has been a long time ago for me.
Mr. Herndon was a tall man, and the only male teacher I had before I hit high school. He made the mistake one day of announcing to our class that he could take a joke. Bad thing to say to a bunch of pre-teens. The next few weeks he was bombarded with practical jokes and, like the good man that he was, he took the jokes in stride … until, that is, when I played a joke on him that didn’t sit right with him. That was the second practical joke I played on Mr. Herndon … and the last.
The first came one morning as our class was about to begin. The students always got to class before Mr. Herndon because he always had some kind of teacher’s duty that kept him busy until the first bell rang. So we students were already in the classroom, sitting in our desks and studying when he walked in each morning. Of course, that’s a lie. We were never sitting in our desks and studying. We were running around, laughing and playing like a bunch of normal sixth graders.
The morning of my first joke, I was standing at the blackboard behind Mr. Herndon’s desk pretending to be working on something as he walked into the room. As he got to his desk, slid out his chair and prepared to sit down, I quietly slipped a “whoopee cushion” into his chair.
As he sat down, the cushion did its job and the class erupted into ear-splitting laughter. Mr. Herndon took it like a man.
My second, and last joke was made possible by the fact that Mr. Herndon always wore a white shirt and tie to class. As he sat down at his desk, I was standing in front of him and emptied a vial of jet black ink onto his white shirt.
He looked down at his shirt and then up at me with a look that would surely have killed me if I hadn’t quickly blurted out, “I-I-It’s disappearing ink.”
“It better be,” he said, with that if-looks-could-kill stare still in his eyes.
Thank goodness it was, and I lived.
Why did the cold weather remind me of Mr. Herndon? Because he told the story once about how, as a boy growing up in Kentucky, he would sleep during the cold, snowy winters in his bedroom under a couple of thick quilts that kept him warm in his unheated bedroom. Each morning, his father would go outside, dip a glass of cold water into an ice-covered bucket, come back inside and pour it on the young Mr. Herndon to wake him up. But one morning he tricked his daddy and pretended to sleep as he heard him go outside to get the water. When he returned, as he threw the freezing water at his son, Mr. Herndon quickly pulled the quilts back over him, sparing himself from the freezing water but soaking the quilts. His dad was not amused.