The case of the transplanted snakes

Or, The saga of how Harlan Wyrick broke his new meter stick killing snakes in the girl’s room and how, as a result, Dick Budig got to spend many an afternoon in the principal’s office waiting for his diploma

 I’m not sure, anymore, whether it was the snakes, the beer, showing off for the girls, or the sudden realization that this event – the senior picnic for the class of 1956 — might be our last opportunity to act foolish and get away with it.

 For sure, the beer we laid in for the picnic played a part.  I and a couple of other guys made the trip to Jack’s Place down in Cedar Bluff, KS to buy several cases of beer.   We sneaked it into the picnic grounds – the old Elks Club Campground west of McCook – and quietly dropped it into the ice-packed livestock tanks that already held soft drinks.  We passed the word that you had to reach all the way to the bottom to find “the good stuff.”

 Thus began an afternoon odyssey that led from the Elks Lodge campground to the snake infested banks of the Republican River at the south end of the picnic grounds, to the thought that it would be a really great idea to bag up a half dozen of those big bull snakes we found slithering through the grass, and turn them loose in the girls’ bathrooms on both floors of the brand new McCook High School building.  In fact, shrouded in the mist of alcohol-soaked thinking, it became something of a holy mission . . . a way to properly initiate this new school building.   After all, we had all spent more than a few queasy moments in the old school’s second-floor library as it creaked, groaned, and settled around us in the year before the new building was finished.

 Besides myself, I really can’t remember who helped catch and bag those snakes, snakes that were guilty of nothing more than courting other snakes on a sunny spring afternoon south of McCook.  The Randolph twins come to mind, as do Ernie Markwad and Jim Ross as possible co-conspirators of the great snake caper.  So does Larry Clark.  However, getting drunk and disorderly while handling snakes wasn’t really Larry’s style.  By the way, whatever happened to Larry Clark?

 It was a short run from the picnic grounds to the new high school on West 7th Street. I guess we thought that drinking beer all afternoon made us all invisible because we parked right in front of the school, got out in front of God and the entire school full of kids, and walked straight into the building carrying several paper bags that moved ominously in afternoon sun.

 Classes were in session, so the halls were empty.  We split up, heading for girls’ rooms on the first and second floors.  It was a simple matter to push the doors open and dump the writhing snakes into the room.  Then, we simply turned and walked out and returned to the picnic, all the while thinking that, magically, we were invisible.

 I learned otherwise, however, when a day or so later, I was confronted by an irate Harlan Wyrick (MHS science teacher) who, due to the degree of his ire, seemed to have grown a couple of inches  taller.  But it was only an impression.  Angry as he was, he still managed to achieve no more than his full height of 5-foot, 4-inches.

 “Your antics, Mr. Budig,” he fumed, “resulted in my breaking my brand new meter stick!”

 “How’d you do that?” I asked.

 “Killing the snakes you put in the girls rooms,” he huffed indignantly.

 Killing snakes?  He actually killed those harmless old bull snakes, snakes that make their living eating mice and other critters around farm granaries?  Farmers’ friends, that’s what they are!  I was agape, agog, and aghast, and it only got worse when he sniffed haughtily, “And, Mr. Bliss wants to see you in his office . . . “trailing off into an evil little smile.

 Well . . . there it was.  Busted . . . again. 

 Gordon Bliss, then principal of MHS, took a kinder tone of voice with me, but delivered something of a setback in my graduation plans.  I was sentenced to receive a blank diploma folder when I walked across the stage at graduation ceremonies a few nights later.  I would not receive my diploma until I had served a 20-hour “time out” in the school office.  It was an hour a day, as I recall, until the sentence was served in full.  So, there I was, a full blown senior, months away from marriage and a stint in the US Air Force, sitting like an errant fourth grader in the principal’s office.  (Never mind that I acted like a fourth grader when I delivered those pesky snakes.)

 I eventually got my diploma, and I’m sure Mr. Wyrick got a new meter stick, and I’m sure the girls who found the snakes have recovered, as well.  If I have any regrets at all, it is that those poor snakes got whacked by a mad little scientist wielding a sharp-edged meter stick.  I mean, c’mon .  . . life is hard enough on snakes. 

SNAKE STORY

Harlan Wyrick

My recollection of Dick’s story differs in some of the details.  I have always considered it as a cute prank and in fact related it recently in response to the question: “What is the worst “kid problem” you had while teaching?

Story follows:

 In McCook, the seniors were excused from the last week of school if they had not had a week off for “sneak week.” During this “off” week on a particularly hot afternoon (no air conditioning) all the windows were open and the librarian, Mrs. McGrew, burst into my room and exclaimed: Donna Lee Pade discovered a snake in the girl’s rest room, can you get it out of there!!!? I grabbed a big waste basket and got some kind of a cover for it, went next door to the rest room, and sure enough there was a nice big bull snake.  I put it in the waste basket and thought: “I’ll take it to the farm tonight and let him go to work as a great mouse trap”.

 I reasoned/assumed that some of the more ingenious males of the senior class (and I had a number of them) had gone onto the roof, figured out which window was for the “targeted” room and had dangled this snake by the tail, and I hoped on the first attempt, had managed to swing it into the rest room.

A short time later, Mrs. McGrew “reburst” (Oh, oh, I believe I may have created a new word!) into my room exclaiming—“Didn’t you find that snake”?  I replied “Yes, it’s in a wastebasket in my store room.”  She said: “Well there’s another one in there.”  I promptly got another waste basket, went into the rest room and captured another “mouse trap”, probably thinking: “I should be grateful to my “ingenious” pupils.”

And, until yesterday, this was the end of my story, when Dick’s “story” of the snake event turned up, which did indeed  point out that I erred in my assumption of how these “ingenious” males had deposited the snakes in the rest room.  However, I regard the balance of his “story” concerning the destruction of a meter stick and two perfectly harmless snakes, and turning him into Bliss for the twenty hours of detention and a blank diploma, as fiction, creative writing, wishful thinking, or even faulty memory - which many of us are experiencing.  It may have been a newspaper man’s idea of making a good story even better—they sometimes do this!!

Richard Budig was born in 1936 and grew up in McCook. Shortly after his discharge from the U.S. Air Force in the early 1960s, he worked for a short time at the McCook Gazette. He later worked for several newspapers, freelanced to various newspapers and magazines and owned and operated an advertising agency. He also operated pawnshops, first in Lincoln, then Omaha, for 25 years. For years, he’s been writing stories about growing up in McCook and is now sharing them with the Gazette.