AUBREY, THE POLICEMAN, SPOILED OUR FUN
(My brother and I were only testing our marksmanship)
Screen 1 of 2"I'll bet I can break more window panes with ten rocks than you can," I bragged to my brother, Will Gooch.
"You can't either," he answered with disdain, as only older brothers can do. "Just because you think you are a hot-shot basketball player on that little old Y.M.C.A. team doesn't make you a better marksman with rocks than I am." He was eleven years old, and I was only nine or ten; but I resented the way he was belittling my athletic ability.
I remember we were in our makeshift temporary home, an old abandoned wooden gymnasium on the campus of Western Kentucky State Normal School, where our mother taught music. This gymnasium had been used for several years by Western's basketball teams--both men's and women's; but now the college had a new and much better gym, and this old frame one was being used as living quarters for the families of some faculty members and students.
What had been the playing floor was now divided up into "rooms" by sheets hung from wire stretched across the big space. We had a small "living room" and two "bedrooms" about the same size, all of them separated from each other and from similar spaces used by other families only by ordinary bed sheets sewed together. The kitchen and toilet facilities were located along one side of the building where the showers and dressing rooms had been earlier.
The whole arrangement was certainly not a very comfortable or convenient home for any of us, but for the few months we lived there it met our basic needs well enough--even though the uncontrolled noises, the silhouetted figures showing through the sheeted partitions, and the frequent over-heating were sometimes hard to put up with.
This old frame building had scores of windows in its outside walls, each one divided into many small panes. Of course, having so many windows was intended to let in as much natural light as possible for the basketball games, most of which were played in the afternoon. But to two teenage boys, all that glass conjured up different ideas. It presented a silent challenge for us to prove our marksmanship in throwing small rocks.
It was late afternoon when my brother and I were talking, and we were all alone in our gymnasium home. A good time, we thought, to carry on a little target practice aimed at the windows, never thinking about what the consequences of accurate throwing might be.
After some more boasting and criticism of each other's ability, we left the building and picked up some small rocks from the gravel roadway leading from the old Training School back to Potter Hall, a girls' dormitory named after a former regent of the school, J. Whit Potter. We then marched solemnly to the nearby trench of an old Civil War fort. It was as though we were preparing for a formal duel. We were loaded with our ammunition and were dead serious about the whole thing.
After agreeing on the launching site and setting up a scoring system for "hits," we began throwing the small rocks at the windows, taking turns so we could keep accurate scores. I remember we received a bigger score for a "hit" if we had announced in advance the exact window we were aiming at. It was all great fun, but it didn't last long.
When we had broken several windows, and with the score about even, we were surprised from behind by a large man in uniform with pistol in hand.
"Will Gooch and Chester," he called out angrily. "What on earth do you think you are doing?"
It was Aubrey Hoofnail (this was his real name), the campus policeman. Everyone at the college knew Aubrey well, and he was acquainted with all the people living in the old gym and most all the faculty members and their families.
"Deliberately breaking windows: Shame on you." He scowled as he put his pistol back in its holster. We didn't answer. There was nothing we could say in response to his outburst. So we remained silent and scared--almost in shock.
Aubrey (of course we called him "Mr. Hoofnail" to his face) threatened to take us immediately to the jail downtown and charge us with destruction of public property, but he didn't. Instead, he caught each of us under the arm and almost lifted us off the ground, as he took us back to the gymnasium to face our mother, an encounter we dreaded.
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