The Rolla Boys™- Chapter 5

"Russell D, ya Ol' Codger-man it's good to see ya", yelled the Beav as he jumped out of his Jinx mobile before it had a chance to come to a complete stop.
Steven Ray Moses had picked up more than one mannerism from his Dad Lou while growing up on Lynwood Drive, in a home that had perhaps the coolest and now most storied basement in all of Phelps County. One of those mannerisms was saying things like, "You old codger" or "You old farmer". If I live to be a hundred, I'll always remember Lou Moses making me feel welcome at their home every single one of the hundreds of times I visited there, beginning when Beav's Mom Jeanine was my Cub Scout Den Mother in 1967, and ending as I recall sometime in the fall of 1977, around the beginning of our senior year at RHS. I couldn't begin to count the number of times I spent the night at the Moses home, played touch football in their sloped and relatively short back yard, or stopped by on Friday nights to pick up the Beav before heading off to watch the latest John Wayne movie at "The Uptown Theater", or to get pizza at Tim's in preparation for cruising the strip to look for girls; girls as I recall we seemed to rarely find. I don't know for sure where all the girls were when we went looking for them in 1975-1978, but apparently they were someplace other than anxiously waiting along Pine Street for us to come driving by so they could jump in our car and throw themselves at us. Although this is how I envisioned it when I was 14 and dreaming about "getting my license", I don't recall it ever actually happening-not even one time. Though at the time, our consistent inability to find girls was frustrating, I know now I'd rather have all the other wonderful memories of growing up in Rolla, such as those that involved the Moses family, who resided very happily all those years at 1127 Lynwood Drive.
After exchanging welcomes and good to see you's at the front gate, I hopped on my 4-wheeler and told Beav to follow me back to the cabin. I took it kind of slow on our way in to give my old buddy a good look around at our little slice of woodland pie, beautifully situated essentially in the middle of Barry County nowhere.
We arrived at the cabin within a short couple of minutes, with enough daylight remaining to get my old buddy unloaded, shown around and situated with a steaming hot cup of "Black as the Ace of Spades Ranch Coffee", before the sun began it's nightly descent on Butler Holler.
As I stood in the kitchen slicing onions, opening cans of tomato sauce and kidney beans, and browning vast quantities of extra fat hamburger, Beav and I began updating each other on the various going's on in our respective lives over the past several years. It takes a while to prepare a near perfect pot of Ranch Chili, and as I diced, sliced and stirred, we shared stories and opinions on a wide variety of subjects; everything from how great each of our wives were, to how proud we both were of our kids and numerous other topics pertaining to family life and related matters. It didn't take long however, for the two of us to find our way to the front deck and for our conversation to find it's way back to the specific time in history, when we actually started becoming good friends. As we both fondly recalled, It was the day after Labor Day, Tuesday September 2, 1969. The specific place was what became our mutual 4th grade class at Fort Wyman Elementary School (a veritable bastion of decency and All-Americanism).
Although I didn't realize it on that hot September morning as I said good-by to Mr. Davis and stepped off bus #11 before walking through the front door of my school, as I'd done numerous times the previous 2 years, this would not be a normal first day of school. It was a day that would go down in the personal history of several Rolla Boys as perhaps their most significant first day of school ever. This was the day a very select group of 9 year old snot nosed boys became, in their eyes, men. It was the day we all met our new 4th grade teacher; the fabulously beautiful and very sophisticated, Miss Caroline McCutcheon. Upon seeing her for the first time, I knew immediately, she definitely was NOT my Dad's 4th grade teacher!