A little over a month ago, an old friend got in contact with me. He was my best friend in grade school, when I was living in Houston. This is someone I last saw over 26 years ago, and fell out of contact with maybe 22 years ago. We’ve been emailing each other constantly for the last few weeks, and two things are readily apparent from our exchanges:
1. We both have incredibly vivid memories of our friendship and that period of our lives.
2. We were both incredibly weird kids.
Strangely enough, one of the main topics of many of our emails was someone I’ve been meaning to write about for awhile. The emails have inspired me, so if you’re reading - this one’s for you OBRAD.
I attended Hancock Elementary, a school in the suburbs of Houston, for my entire grade school run – kindergarten through 5th grade. Like many kids that age, one of my favorite classes was PE. I don't think I knew anyone who didn’t enjoy that class – dodgeball, parachute, kickball, exercising to that stupid
Chicken Fat record - we loved it all. For my first five years of grade school we had really cool, well liked PE teachers. Hip young guys with Bruce Jenner haircuts (hey, it
was the 1970’s) who always made the class fun and related well to the kids. It was the one period of the day that we all looked forward to.
This all changed on the first day of 5th grade, when we met our new PE teacher – Coach Phil Laskowski. We couldn’t help but notice that he wasn’t like our previous PE teachers. Instead of the hip shaggy hairdo, he sported a crappy looking comb over. Both of our previous coaches were athletic types who looked capable of any of the games or sports they were having us play. Laskowski didn’t look like the sporting type, in fact he looked kind of dumpy (not overweight, mind you, just dumpy). Worst of all, however, was the man’s voice. He talked in a slow Texas drawl that was irritating even to fellow Texans. He didn’t talk to the kids, he talked down to them, and we all immediately began mocking and imitating him behind his back. Also, I couldn’t remember his name at first and referred to him as “Coach Luckabox.” This name (and a few variants such as “Lugabox”) stuck for the remainder of the 5th grade school year – nobody I knew referred to the man by has actual name.
More than anything, Luckabox was into disciplining his students. If you smarted off, didn’t listen to instructions, or talked in line you’d be up for some punishment. So, he’s a PE teacher, you’d guess discipline would be something physical – perhaps running laps, or something like that. Maybe he’d have you organize the sport equipment in the supply closet. Nope, Coach Luckabox would make you…write sentences. I think he may have been the only PE teacher ever to employ this method of discipline. If you were doing something wrong, and he caught you, he’d come up to you and say “Bud, you will WRITE!” Often, he’d say this while poking you in the chest lightly with his index finger. I recall one incident, as the students walked into the PE room in a single file line, he just started pointing at kids and saying “you will WRITE!” As the students filed in, more of them started laughing at him when they saw what was happening (this was the kind of respect the man commanded), and he repeatedly pointed his finger and gave the command to write sentences. That day, I think there were about 15 or 20 kids sitting in the corner writing sentences. Shockingly enough, I only recall having to write sentences once. I even remember what I had to write: “Santa frowns on those children exhibiting talk-itis.”
Once, I got the idea of looking up Coach Luckabox in the phonebook. He was listed, and I proceeded to write his name and number on about 20 small scraps of paper. I handed them out to friends the next day at school. Some of them asked “what do I need this for?” My response was “to make a prank phone call!” (In the days before caller ID, you could get away with such shenanigans.) Over the next week or so, most of the guys I knew started sharing stories about the calls they’d made to ol’ Luckabox. In about two weeks, he’d taken his phone off of the hook. I don’t remember him ever bringing up the prank phone calls in class, but he must’ve figured out some of the kids who were involved.
This next incident is something I hadn’t thought about since the day it happened, and I don’t think I’d ever told anyone about it until my recent email correspondence with my old friend. In 5th grade I was on the safety patrol (i.e. the crossing guards), and we’d meet everyday before school in the PE room. One morning, my friend Sam was the first one there and discovered several bottles of booze stashed outside in the bushes next to the PE room door. I was the second one there and he pointed the bottles out - we actually debated putting the booze in the cabinets behind Luckabox’s desk. Then we thought we could make an anonymous call to the office that he kept booze in his office, or hope that another teacher would come across the bottles and it would get him in trouble. We decided that was too cruel of a trick, even for Coach Luckabox, but the very fact that we even came up with such an awful idea demonstrates how intensely some of us disliked the guy. (For whatever reason, we dumped all of the booze out in the bushes after nixing our evil plan. As other people showed up, a few of them commented “something smells funny out there.” We had to stifle our giggles.)
One of our regular activities in PE was doing exercises to records we’d bring in. The movie
Grease, and its accompanying soundtrack album, were at the height of their popularity that year. We convinced Luckabox to play
Greased Lightning one day, which you may recall has a few lyrics that aren’t exactly “kid friendly.” Anyway, Luckabox tried to “censor” one of the offending lines by turning down the volume. His timing was off, however, and he turned up the volume extra loud just in time for the line “You know that ain't no shit, we'll be getting lots of tit!” (My friend remembers it being the line “You know that I ain't bragging, she's a real pussy wagon!”) About half of the class fell down laughing at that point. I think Luckabox was too embarrassed to make us write sentences that time – his face was red! One of the things we’d do during exercise period was start mimicking the people leading the group, and basically jumping around like spastics (we called this “retarded exercises” – yeah,
I know, really un-PC, but we
were kids). Luckabox made note of this, and had my friend David go up and lead exercise period one day. The whole classroom was filled with kids jumping around like idiots and rolling on the floor – it ended up being a big hit. Go figure.
Despite us not liking Coach Luckabox, we still managed to have a pretty good time that year in PE. Not surprisingly, most of the fun was due to us making fun of him behind his back and generally attempting to undermine his authority. Maybe he knew this, but he seemed genuinely clueless to us kids at the time. Sadly, PE classes were never really fun for me anymore after that year. I came to find that most gym teachers were jerky guys like Coach Luckabox – he was the norm for that profession, not a strange aberration. If you had told me that at the beginning of 5th grade, I wouldn’t have believed you. At least we had a fun year of bad behavior to ease us into this eventual, and disappointing, reality.
(Below is Coach Luckabox’s photo from my 1979 Hancock yearbook. Wow, I called the man a “fairy”…)
