BILL CADY Word Count: 149,227 - At My Friend's Place

Bill Cady, The Early Years … by Bill Cady 53
building two brand-new high schools! Guess what, boys and girls, especially you eighth
graders? You‟ll get to be the first four year class to graduate from those new schools!
Uh-huh. So, instead of being top of the hill as a ninth grader, I start at the very
bottom as a freshman, right? And the happy part of that is …?
Wunderbar! I‟m so happy I can‟t shit. Yippy ki-yay!
Anyway, it was a wonderful school.
Every word in that last sentence is a damned lie. I hated Catholic schools.
That said, I wish all kids had to go to one. We were taught mostly by nuns, with a
few lay teachers due to shortages in the Habit Crew. Those women damned sure meant it
when they said we were going to learn. There was no “or else”. You had to do it. No
ifs, ands or buts. You learned.
They believed in corporal punishment when I was there. Hell, if she‟d had a
chance, our principal, Sister Mary Adrian, would‟ve used sergeant punishment to get her
point across. She had a yardstick with a metal edge. For the bad guys. She also had a
barber‟s strop. For the really bad guys. It hurts. I say that from experience.
Those nuns weren‟t a damned bit afraid to take hold of an ear and use it to drag
you anywhere they wanted. If you ever wanted to hear again, you went where she told
you to go. Sister Mary Flavian, my sixth grade teacher, was later committed to a loony
bin. She once locked me in the broom closet for an entire afternoon. That woman had a
temper.
She disliked the lack of uniformity caused by using names. Everyone got a
number, instead. I was number eleven. Each day a student was appointed as class
monitor. We had all our classes in the same room, so we each had a desk. All our junk
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