Butch’s Cousins Are in the Principal’s Office!

  When I wrote a book about Darlington School in 1988, I interviewed hundreds of former students, including two of my cousins . . . Dale Cohee and Donnie Dale, who both graduated in 1957. They enjoyed being with their friends, but studying was not on their list of favorite things to do. However, they were very creative when it came to pulling pranks on classmates and teachers. Dale related the following . . .

   “Some of the things that happened in seventh grade seem funny now, but the teachers didn’t think they were too funny at the time. One night at a basketball game, Kendall Wells (another cousin), Donnie and I slipped up to our seventh grade homeroom and put a dead baby mole in Mrs. Martin’s history book. Then we mashed it down, and the book closed pretty good. The next day we heard plenty of screaming and saw lots of tears when history class rolled around. All of the seventh and eighth grade boys ended up in the principal’s office. When we three admitted to the dastardly deed, we had to apologize to the teacher, and we were ordered to buy her a new book. We didn’t buy the book though . . . Donnie just traded his to her!”

   “That same year, some of us had been mushroom hunting on a Sunday afternoon in the woods behind the school. We killed a big blue racer snake, and brought it back to the school and hid it in the grass by the front walk. On Monday morning, I got it and jumped out of the shrubs, dangling it towards the high school girls. One girl screamed, and fell through the Home Economics room window. I had to pay for the window and apologize to the girls . . . also had to get rid of the snake.”

   “When I was in the eighth grade, I had a paper route in the evening, but there were lots of things to do more fun than carrying papers. One day when the final bell rang, I took off down the front stairs on a dead run before the bell had quit ringing. Just as I got past the buses out front, I was lifted off the ground and turned around toward the school. John Bowerman, the principal, had caught me from behind. He took me back to his office by the shirt collar, set me down in front of his desk, and took out his paddle and laid it in front of me. He left me to sit in that office alone, with the paddle, for what seemed like three hours. I ended up only receiving a lecture, but still to this day I don’t see how he caught me!”

   “Another incident I recall is that one day in class, Donnie kept rolling his pencil down his desk top, making a distracting noise. The teacher had her fill of it and made Donnie stand at the blackboard. She drew a circle with chalk and had him stand there with his nose in the circle. I watched Donnie stand there and realized that she had made the circle too high, because he could barely reach it. Trying only to help him out, I walked up to the blackboard, erased the circle which she had drawn, and drew another circle four inches lower. The teacher then erased my circle and drew TWO new circles. You can probably guess what the second circle was for!”

    At family gatherings, we could also count on those two to make “exciting” things happen. After graduation Dale and Donnie both served their country in the military, and the two worked at R.R. Donnellys . . . Dale for 40 years and Donnie for 46 years, until they retired. Dale also started up his own handyman service. Sadly, they both passed away in 2024, but they kept their sense of humor to the very last. Both were good guys. They made school a little more lively and interesting for everyone, and I’m sure their teachers never forgot them!

John “Butch” Dale is a retired teacher and County Sheriff. He has also been the librarian at Darlington the past 36 years, and is a well-known artist and author of local history.