(January 5, 2023 at 11:51 pm)Fireball Wrote: True story. Back in the '60s teachers were allowed to physically punish children. My eldest younger brother left school after being struck by his teacher, before school was out. My dad went to the school, located that teacher, and had him by the throat, backed into a janitor's closet. "Boom-boom" Baker (college football player) outweighed my dad by a good 60 pounds, who weighed 160, soaking wet. The word was out- don't strike a Fireball family member- just send home a note, they'll get it worse at home. BoT, if we told my dad (if it happened) that a priest had done something, life would have been over, for that priest. My dad was a quite violent man. I still marvel that he didn't go to jail in the '60s for what he did to that teacher. That would certainly be the case, today.
When I was in Catholic high school some of the guys got the hare-brained idea that it would be funny to poke people with pins. One of our big (really big) doofus football players poked me in the back in the shoulder blade area. Instead of a tiny poke, he hit a vein and by the time I made it up to the nurse's office there was blood soaking the back of my blouse and almost down to my waist. Mrs. Armstrong called in Br. Michael, who was the principal. After the bleeding stopped, he took me into his office and got on the intercom and paged Glenn to come to the office. Br. Michael was also maybe 160 lbs. Glenn was closer to 300 and was about a foot taller. After Br. Michael screamed at Glenn a while, he instructed him to take off his glasses. Then he hit Glenn in the face so hard that he nearly knocked him off his feet. I sat there with my jaw on the floor. Glenn then had to call his parents and explain to them that they were going to pay for a new blouse for me, dry cleaning costs for my uniform, the doctor visit and tetanus shot I had to go have. No one argued. I didn't know monks were allowed to get that mad.
“If you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room.” — Confucius
