I have been going through boxes and boxes of crap today that has been sitting in my attic. I found old newspapers and magazines. I found all of my old baseball cards. I found all of these old pictures of people back from when we were in high school. You get the idea; I found lots of junk.
One interesting item I also found was this amazingly juvenile group English class project that I got in a bit of trouble for my contribution. It was back in my junior year at MJHS in December of 1990. I was sitting in Mrs. Angle’s class which, although I may have been a disruption from time to time, I pretty well enjoyed. By the way, I did also find my 11th grade annual and scanned pictures for use in this story. Isn’t technology the greatest?
(Mrs. Angle c. 1990)
Mrs. Angle had assigned us a project where we had to get into groups of five. I am pretty sure that we had to push our desks together amongst students that were near ourselves. As a group we had to take turns. The first person had a worksheet that had shapes or lines on them and draw pictures from these shapes or lines. The remaining team members took turns writing a story using these pictures. Our artist for this project was Chris Ewin. The writers were Henry Irvin, Cam Shirley, yours truly and Phillip Holland:
Here are the pictures that we had to use to write our story:
(Click to embiggen.)
Henry started out writing our story:
It was a dark and stormy night. I was lying in my room and suddenly heard creaking on the stairway. I got nervous because I was alone in this large mansion with no protection whatsoever. As I listened I decided I must do something.
Okay, so I think we only had a short time for each person to write. Not a bad beginning. Cam then took the paper and continued on with the story:
I came out of my house which was white with one door and one window. It was not dark, nor light outside. There was no color to the sky except a big white. Something scary was going on.
Alrighty. Cam came with the descriptions of blandness. I still am not sure what the heck was up with that sky line. Oh well, nice try bro! Now this is where the story goes terribly wrong. Why? Well because it was my turn:
My house was nestled in the tops of the Nippel Mountains. Only one road leads to the house. I looked out of the window and saw a six foot long, worm-like creature with a ballish shaped head at the tip. Its mouth was at the very tip and periodically released a white, milky substance in which it slides upon.
This section of our story earned a great big red “X” to be scribbled across it by Mrs. Angle. To quickly finish up this great masterpiece of literature, Phillip put pen to paper and got this:
The man was so scared by the worm that he jumped in his car and raced down the autobahn. The worm jumped in his car and chased after him. They were both hit by a drunk driver and lived sadly never-after.
I am pretty sure that I was informed by Mrs. Angle that my portion of this story was inappropriate. In hindsight I would tend to agree with her. For the rest of the school year and the following one we did make jokes about this story with Mrs. Angle and I did manage to mature a little (just a little) and do not remember writing any more stories this juvenile. As graduation approached so did my birthday. Mrs. Angle handed me this:
It was our story from the previous school year. Apparently, she wasn’t as peeved or perturbed at me as I had thought. It was nice that an adult could take a joke. This story still sometimes gets told by me when I hang with G-Man and I bet he really appreciates reading it again. Ahh, those were the good old days.
