Please Excuse Johnny

By Florence McGehee

In the present volume, former school teacher-turned-hookey cop, Florence McGehee, chronicles her time as a truant officer in a fruit-growing area of California. In Please Excuse Johnny, McGehee details her many experiences with truants, their parents and home life, and juvenile delinquency.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Release date: Dec 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789128123

Florence McGehee

Florence McGehee was a classroom teacher with fifteen years of experience when she became a supervisor of child welfare and attendance in California. In addition to her biographical book, Please Excuse Johnny, which was published in 1952, McGehee was also the author of Sailors Kiss Everybody (1955) and Bride of King Solomon (1958).

Book preview

This edition is published by Papamoa Press – www.pp-publishing.com

To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – [e-mail]

Or on Facebook

Text originally published in 1952 under the same title.

© Papamoa Press 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

PLEASE EXCUSE JOHNNY

BY

FLORENCE MCGEHEE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

1—I Become a Hookey Cop 5

2—A Charm from the Skies 9

3—Good Boy 18

4—I.Q. 28

5—Whose Untutor’d Mind 37

6—Put Them All Together, They Spell ‘Mother’ 45

7—Romany Road 52

8—Thankful 56

9—The Best People 63

10—Licorish for Hilario 77

11—Tree of Life 84

12—The Job and the Jalopy 88

13—The Broken Pinion 100

14—Accomplished Female Friend 108

15—Clouds of Glory 115

16—Sixteen Candles 127

17—Call No Man Master 132

18—Not to Believe in Germs 141

19—Genesis 2:24 147

20—The Herald Angels Sing 154

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 167

DEDICATION

To my daughters, Phyllis and Charlotte

1—I Become a Hookey Cop

I never did mean to be a hookey cop. My becoming one was a thing that came about, quite by accident, when I applied for a job as supervisor of instruction, which I did not get. For a long time I had been preparing myself for some such thing, yearning to get my hands on the new Progressive Education, which spelled itself in capital letters, and shake some sense into it. It was such a beautiful and promising thing, this theory of the child-centered school, in which all learning stemmed from Johnny’s own thirst for knowledge. One had only to be a good shepherd and lead him into green pastures, guiding him to where the mental fodder was high and lush. This was the poetic sort of approach my mentors had given me during the years that I was getting myself indoctrinated, while less earnest souls, home from a hard day of teaching, were staying young and gay in pursuit of pleasure.

About that time many a sincere parent, himself reared in the traditional school, was looking down his well bred nose at Progressive Education. The kids could not spell, he said. They could not read. They could not add. Of what use for a ten year old to be able to converse with facility about the land and sea lanes of medieval commerce if he could not count his change at the grocery store? Johnny might preside over a parliamentary session with more aplomb than his father could muster for such a task, but he was unable to write an acceptable letter to Aunt Bertha, thanking her for the nice necktie.

Dedicated disciples of the Progressive leaders discounted both the crisis in the grocery and Aunt Bertha. Johnny was a whole child, and the whole of him must be taught. He was to get the Wider View; his visual acuity was to be sharpened by competing, not against others, but against himself. Tool subjects, interpreted to mean the tired old three R’s, were to be come by incidentally rather than by drill; and everything would be all right if parents would just stand still and let the educators demonstrate this shining new thing. In time Johnny would become indeed the whole child everyone wanted him to be, initiating his own program, finding his own areas of experience.

It seemed likely that Johnny would be called upon at some time in his life to put a motion before the house; it seemed more likely that he would frequently use the United States mails to communicate with Aunt Bertha. I was convinced that he could become adept at both, and I wanted to convince others. I had tried it out on countless dozens of other people’s children and it had worked. What I needed was a wider field of endeavor. There seemed to be one fairly close at hand, and I decided to heed the advice of the old hymn to Brighten the corner where you are.

I had the necessary teaching experience, plus the extras over and above the college degree needed to become a supervisor of instruction, but the one other candidate had seven years of actual supervision behind her. These added up to more than my pleasant theories and my willingness to brighten the corner. I also had two children, a fact which, or so it seemed to me, gave me an edge over the rival applicant, who was a virgin (were we not to work with children, for goodness’ sake?), but I was surprised and dismayed to find that it didn’t count. I lost.

There is another thing, though, said the superintendent whose staff I wished to adorn. How would you like to be a supervisor of child welfare and attendance?

I’m not qualified, I objected. I studied only in the field of instruction. I want to work at reconciling two opposing—

How do you know you’re not qualified? Here, take a look at this. Much of the required preparation is the same.

She handed me a leaflet listing the qualifications for super-visors of child welfare and attendance. A quick look showed me that there were quite a few that I did not have, so, disappointed, I moved toward the door.

Well, I guess this is goodbye forever. Thanks, anyhow.

Don’t be in such a rush, advised the woman who was to be the Boss for many years. Take a run over to the state capital and have your credentials evaluated. Who knows?

I do. I just don’t have the stuff. I’m not much interested, anyhow. I have never even considered such a thing. Besides, it’s not lady-like. (I was thinking back a great many years to the time my father had said, with true Victorian authority: You be a schoolteacher, dear. It’s a nice lady-like profession.)

Quit moaning. Go home and sleep on it, said the Boss.

I slept on it, and awoke to the decision that the defeatist attitude was no good. Had I not got my very first teaching position because the hiring authority was impressed by the fact that I walked on my heels? One who walks on his heels is a strong character, he had said. Too, I might like this child-welfare business once I investigated its problems and possibilities. Perhaps I could do something about the whole child in a less familiar field.

An austere person in the State Department of Education ran a calculating finger down my list of assets and accomplishments, said a noncommittal Um-hum from time to time, and kept a careful poker face. To my credit she checked off History of Education in the United States, Tests and Measurements, Educational Statistics, Psychology of the Unadjusted School Child, Philosophy of Education, Critical Difficulties in the Teaching of Arithmetic, School Law, Elementary Supervision, Supervision of the Rural School, Abnormal Psychology, Training for Citizenship, Growth and Development of the Child. All of these had been background for the now lost job in supervision of instruction and were now, educationally speaking, money in the bank. Smug at these happy evidences of my erudition, I was brought up short by hearing her say, Now about yourself.

Myself?

Yes. You are in good health, have no apparent blemishes, have no evidence of mental or physical disability, have been vaccinated— (Irrelevantly, I thought of my husband leading a horse to the auction sale.) No history of epilepsy? Deafness? Poor eyesight? Allergies? And you have sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States. You have served with various character-developing groups, Scouts, ‘Y,’ Campfire Girls, Sunday School. Um-hum. You have fifteen years of experience as a classroom teacher, including work with subnormals, and you have done some mental testing. Um-hum.

She looked at me sharply.

You write a newspaper column?

I hung my head.

That won’t count, she said.

I hung my head lower.

It says here that you are the mother of two children.

Indeed, yes! I cried, snapping to attention and whipping out snapshots. The one on the left is my daughter Phyllis. At four years of age she could—

Um-hum.

And the little one is Charlotte. Why, when she was only two—

Very nice, said the starched icicle, barely glancing at my precious pictures, and hurrying on with the evaluation. If you were going to work in child welfare, it didn’t matter much that you had first practiced up at home.

It was finally revealed that while there were some things among the requirements that I lacked, I was rich in equivalents. After practically every one of the items on the list given as an essential for the proper conduct of the office there were those lovely little weasel words or the equivalent. And I had them in plenty. I must do something at once, however, about Care of Dependents, Control of Poverty, and Human Relations. The university was giving courses in these subjects, and it would be well if I hurried right down there and got busy. Intrigued by the fascinating titles, I promised. Care of Dependents? Whose? Control of Poverty? Now, there was a challenging topic for you! All the woes of the world would be solved forthwith, once poverty was controlled. Why had we been so long getting at it? And Human Relations promised everything from sly keyhole peeping to the noblest kind of uplift.

I went back to the Boss, all in a pleasant glow at what equivalents will do for a person, convinced that virtue is its own reward, and gratified that during long studious evenings I had unwittingly made ready to kill two birds with one stone.

You qualify, said the Boss, and so you are hired. Besides, you have a lot of loyal boosters—influential ones.

I was a hookey cop.

I was not altogether certain that I wanted to be, even now that I had cleared the first hurdle. It was a promotion, of course, with a gratifying salary. Also, it would be stimulating to get out of the schoolroom and see the race of men go by. But, in common with most people, I held the time-honored mental picture of the truant officer as a grizzled, tobacco-stained veteran who, like King William, wore a star upon his breast, pointing to the east and west, a bully who hid behind boulders down near the old swimmin’ hole, there to pluck the naked screaming victims of his wrath from their good clean fun and fling them back into the schoolroom to wrestle with the intricacies of improper fractions. The rare female of this species wore a librarian’s hat and a permanent air of disapproval. She it was who dragged little golden-haired Shirley, the lighthouse keeper’s granddaughter, from her pleasant lobster pots and set her feet on the path to learning. Little Shirley sickened and died, and Grandfather, after a dish of grog, dived out the lighthouse window to a salty grave, thus proving that compulsory education is a foul thing.

The quaint characters above mentioned are treasures right out of American folklore, as dear to the heart as Paul Bunyan, and as hard to give up. But they have given way to the smart young people who have acquired a little something in the way of booklearning. Today’s attendance worker may be a teacher who has fled the cloistered confines of the schoolroom, a nurse skilled at healing the spirit through the medium of the body, a former minister or lawyer weary of pulpit or courtroom, a social worker toughened to the tricks that make up Man’s inhumanity to Man—or any combination of these. Whatever else he is, he is a student of psychology, versed in the ways of childhood, inured to, but sympathetic with, the sight of human woe, aware of all the influences that go into the bending of the twig. Horse sense, the ability to laugh, large tolerance, a dash of the missionary spirit, and a backward-reaching memory that can encompass the ways of one’s own youth are stock in trade.

I hoped I had all these. I hoped I could make Johnny a better boy even if I never did sit down and open a book with him, as a supervisor of instruction would do. Anyhow, I walked on my heels.

2—A Charm from the Skies

It was a vast, dreary stretch of sun-baked ground on which the camp of the pea-pickers was spread. Heat waves shimmered in the distance, and the thermometer in an old packing shed read 103°.

The tents were so close together that the people had no privacy in any detail of daily living. Everything, from what was eaten for breakfast to the fervor of intercourse between husband and wife, was known to the neighbors. Tattered bedding, reeking with dried urine, and clothing of tattletale gray hung on sagging ropes strung between the tent poles, and the scum of yesterday’s food clung to the sides of unwashed pots and pans, abandoned to dirt and flies. These last—big green things slow and sluggish with eggs—droned from the food remnants to the piles of fresh cow manure in an adjacent pasture and back to the spittle on the lips of sleeping babies.

Out back (presently to be looked upon with wrath by health authorities) a couple of rickety latrines leaned drunkenly over a stagnant pool. Here two youths, master craftsmen of the jack-knife art, etched the immemorial legends that one finds forever on the walls of outhouses. Kilroy had been here, too.

The dispirited slouching people gathered in little knots here and there were obviously discussing the newcomer (me), who looked too neat to be out here. Probably a reformer of some kind. Their dark, hostile looks said they wanted no truck with me. I knew a moment of panic, thinking of the nice orderly schoolroom I had always maintained, in which well disciplined children responded, Yes, ma’am, and, Thank you. But I had bit this off; I had to chew it.

I had become a hookey cop and the state of California looked to me to be firm in the performance of my duty. Not only from a humanitarian standpoint must children go to school; there is the less altruistic business of funds allocated on Average Daily Attendance, whose guardian I was. Even those swift couriers in the post office, glamorously unstayed from the completion of their rounds by snow and sleet, were not to be more zealous than I.

In rehearsal it had seemed right and business-like to make a smiling, firm little speech to the effect that here we were again, ha-ha, making our annual little check to see how many children there might be in the camp so that when school opened next Monday we might be properly prepared to meet their needs; that, in order to do so, we must know exactly how many to expect; that if the mother would just give me the names, ages, and probable grade placement of her children now...All this with professional smiles.

But it is hard to knock on a tent flap and gain the attention of the householder, and so presently this prim, schoolteacherish approach gave way to a shouted, Hey, anybody home in here?

He came at my call, a big unshaven red-eyed man, holding a cup of hot coffee in his shaking hand, his demeanor something less than Chesterfieldian.

You goddam school people always messin’ aroun’ when a man’s busy. Always buttin’ in! Always nosin’ roun’! How the hell you expect me to send my kids to school when they have got no shoes? Ain’t got clo’es. Ain’t got nothin’ to eat. Non of them got shoes.

Well, I—

"You got shoes!" accusingly.

Well, yes, but—

You gonna get my kids the things they need?

I don’t know. I’d have to—

She’d ‘have to.’ She’d ‘have to,’ he mimicked to the interested group that had gathered as audience. "You get my kids what they need, an’ then I’ll send ‘em to your goddam school, and not till! You jus’ do that, an’ then we’ll see."

This was my first experience with the deal, which so many parents of low-income brackets and small pride strive to make. I was to be a party to it many times in years to come, swapping sweaters and eyeglasses for Johnny’s physical presence in the schoolroom; but right now it was new to me, and I could not commit myself. I said I would see about it.

She’ll ‘see about it,’ he told his delighted admirers. "See about it’s no good. You goddam school people all alike. All you got to do is ‘see about it.’ Always nosin’ aroun’. Always squawkin’ about schoolin’. I ain’t got no schoolin’, and look at me!"

I did look at him; but I kept myself under control, moving away with, We will expect to see your children on Monday, please.

The hell you say! said Red-Eye, and let fly with the cup of coffee. I ducked and moved away with what dignity I could, and large brown splashes on my fresh gingham dress for souvenir of the interview.

He’s a plumb ornery man, ma’am, whispered an anonymous voice behind me, sympathetically. I wouldn’t blame you none did you call the Law. He’s a plumb no-good, with a passel o’ hungry kids an’ a sick wife. She’s plumb bad off, his woman. Nothin’ to eat—allus travelin’. You make him do right by them kids, ma’am. Send ‘em to school, feed ‘em up. You can do it; you got the power!

I had the power, had I? Well, I supposed I had, though as a tool of the trade I much preferred persuasion to coercion. Still, I looked at the coffee stains on my dress and made some private resolutions.

The mothers were generally glad to stop, wipe sticky hands on their bedraggled skirts, and comply, somewhat relishing the brief recess from the futile business of redding up their tents. Someone has written that women, pioneering in the Plains States or the backward mountain regions, sought to alleviate the harshness of their lives by giving their daughters beautiful names—or names that seemed beautiful to them. I thought of that now as I wrote down Rose-Pearl, La-Dell, La June, Opaline, Alluria, Jumella, Annamarita, Luetta Estrelle, and Permette. Nowhere was there an Ann or a Jane or a Susie.

The boys held ruggedly to initials in the place of Christian names. Never assume that J. B., R. D., or T. M. may stand for anything like James Bennett, Robert Dodd, or Thomas Matthew. They are simply J. B., R. D., and T. M., and that’s that. Bosom friends may go through life side by side knowing one another only as initials. A Ruby and a Pearly showed up among the lads, but it developed that Ruby had been named for the lead mine where his father was working at the time of his birth; where Pearly got his strange name remained a mystery.

One mother, preparing a late breakfast for her family, hospitably shoved a plate toward me and asked, Where at this school gonna be? I looked at her offering and reproached my stomach for its quick leap of protest, for her hospitality and her smile were genuine. But here was the dish I had seen all over the camp, fried rounds of biscuit dough over which was poured a grayish gluey mass made up of various oddments from the unscreened cooler, exposed to dirt and flies, and with bits of unrinsed soap clinging to dishes that had been hastily dipped in cold water. With my thanks, I said I was too hurried to stop and eat this morning. Her smile narrowed, and she asked again: This school gonna be where? Can’t send my childern all the way inta town. Too far, and you prob’ly ain’t got buses for ‘em. They never do. Buses is only for rich people. Rich people got their own fine cars awready. They got ever’thing so they don’t need nothin’, but they get buses. They get the gravy.

The school— I began.

Well, I wouldn’t ‘low my childern to ride on no buses anyhow. Can’t trust them drivers. They get drunk and don’t drive safe, an’ they try to get funny with the little girls. You know what I mean, all right. I wouldn’t ‘low my childern to ride on no buses for anything in the world.

Told that there were no buses, she went on: Course not. They’re for rich people. We ain’t got nothin’, so they don’t give us nothin’. If they was bankers’ childern they’d get buses, an’ if the President o’ the United States was out here his childern ‘ud get to ride on buses. But not ours! Well, they can’t go all that way inta town. It’s too far!

But they don’t have to. The school will be right here.

Right here! Out here in all this dirt an’ heat? Our childern ain’t good enough to go inta the town school, so they gotta have sumpin’ separate out here where they don’t get to ‘sociate with rich people’s childern ‘cause they ain’t good enough—

A group of gypsies, who had been huddled in a far corner apart from the others, approached, their spokesman a handsome, dark-eyed youth with little things about him that were remindful of the late Valentino. But he claimed, prosaically enough, to be the father of the half dozen ragged, handsome, dark-eyed kids who flanked him. Eloquently, he announced that, lady, it was not possible for these little ones to go to school just now. A few days hence, perhaps? Their work was needed desperately. They followed the sun and the seasons, and they stopped wherever the fruit or the field crops hung ripe in order to get the bread that even a poor man and his little ones must eat. There was a payment due on their car, and they must all work long and hard in order to meet it. If they lost their car, what then? How could they work? How should they eat? Lady, until two weeks? One week? Next Friday? Wednesday?

The deadline set, the charmer gave me his solemn pledge of faith, and an amorous look that rocked me back on my middle-aged heels, while I spoke sharply to my