The Hun's Plumbers

By Peter Hitt

If you enjoyed the classic novel, THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, you should also like THE HUN'S PLUMBERS. These are mostly true stories from the heyday of military schools when parents of means thought they were doing everyone a favor by sending their adolescent sons to be raised by a military institution during those difficult teenage years. The perspective is from one of the cadets who lived and remembers the experience. Living cheek-by-jowl with the usual military school denizens; those one step ahead of reform school, the effeminate types, the academic underachievers, the jocks and the various other sub-categories provided the unvarnished material for a number of inimitable stories.If you enjoyed the classic novel, THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, you should also like THE HUN'S PLUMBERS. These are mostly true stories from the heyday of military schools when parents of means thought they were doing everyone a favor by sending their adolescent sons to be raised by a military institution during those difficult teenage years. The perspective is from one of the cadets who lived and remembers the experience. Living cheek-by-jowl with the usual military school denizens; those one step ahead of reform school, the effeminate types, the academic underachievers, the jocks and the various other sub-categories provided the unvarnished material for a number of inimitable stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Hitt
• Release date: Jun 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781491205204

Peter Hitt

PETER HITT worked on this book and other stories of his unique experiences as a boy and young man for a number of years. He currently lives in the Jacksonville, Florida area.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION

Except for a fairly severe case of acne, life, the summer before my junior year of high school, was definitely looking up. Academically, I made straight A’s my sophomore year. I had my driver’s license and the girls I had known most of my life were physiologically developing in ways I never thought possible. During the latter part of the summer, football camp began. I worked all day helping harvest the tobacco crop until about four pm and then drove to LaPlata High School (LPHS), about eight miles away, to practice football until dark. This was an exhausting regimen, but the superstar right halfback had graduated and it appeared I was being groomed to fill the vacancy. Little did the coaches or I know I would never play a game for them.

My father's family was very poor when my father was a boy, despite the fact that my grandfather was a surgeon who served with the Confederacy during the Civil War. The disastrous reconstruction era following the war barely allowed my grandfather to make a living because few of his patients had any money, but the ultimate disaster resulted from some ill-advised investments. When my father was about 14 years old, the family moved from Augusta to Atlanta, Georgia. With only an eighth-grade education, my father taught himself typing and shorthand and went to work as a stenographer to help support the family. My father observed the sons of some of his more prosperous neighbors coming home on vacation from Sewanee Military Academy (SMA) in their splendid uniforms and was very envious.

When my father had sons, he had a lingering notion that they should attend SMA. My older brother, Moultrie, grew up before my father acted on his dreams of having a son go to school there.

I was six years younger than Moultrie and by the time I was in high school, Moultrie was struggling with the physics curriculum at Johns Hopkins University. Despite the fact that Moultrie was his class valedictorian at LPHS, my father ascribed Moultrie’s academic difficulties to poor preparation in high school.

Unbeknownst to me, as my junior year at LaPlata was about to begin, my father applied on my behalf for admission to SMA. SMA’s initial response was all students had been accepted for the year, but consideration would be given to my application should an opening occur. Sure enough, three weeks after school began, SMA had a student drop out and they notified my father. Having no idea of the consequences, but usually up for a new adventure, I acceded to my father’s plans. I had one day to say goodbye to schoolmates and teachers, some of whom I had known for ten years including my barely civil football coach.

As one of the benefits of having a number of years of service working for railroads, my father was still eligible for free passes for himself and his family members. I had never been on the train ride by myself before. The connection was from Union Station in Washington D.C. through Atlanta where I caught another train to Cowan, Tennessee which was about six miles away from Sewanee. I took a taxi from Cowan to Sewanee that was driven by a dried-up wizened little guy, who turned out to be The Geezer, the only taxi driver for miles around.

I arrived at SMA and went to look for the Admissions Officer who took care of the paperwork to get me enrolled and subsequently took me upstairs to my assigned room in Quintard Hall, the older of two barracks buildings. I was to share the room with Rich, who was a senior and a third year cadet at SMA.

The next few days were pure hell. Everybody was in uniform except me. Bugle calls

blared over the public address system every so often, the meaning of which was a mystery to me, but they had a galvanizing effect on everyone else. The cadets streamed out of the barracks to line up in formation. I had been assigned to A company, but initially had no idea where it was located. I got yelled at a lot by cadet officers and acquired about sixteen demerits in the first three days, which earned me a visit to the commandant’s office. The commandant was the faculty officer in charge of discipline. I braced up in front of his desk while he hauled me over the coals about having broken the demerit acquisition record. I explained that I did not know what was going on and needed to learn the rules before I could play the game. He softened somewhat and actually removed the demerits from the record, but with a stern warning to get squared away. For every demerit over 15 in a month, one had to march a penalty tour that was 45 minutes of marching back and forth in front of the barracks during what would have been free time on Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoons.

My second day, I was sent to see Uncle Pid, who was the quartermaster in addition to being the chemistry teacher, to get outfitted with uniforms. Uncle Pid was fairly incompetent at both of his responsibilities. He was always piddling around with something, hence the moniker. It took me several revisits to Uncle Pid’s store to get everything to fit reasonably well over the next few days. A couple of the guys on my hallway explained how clothing was to be precisely folded to certain dimensions and placed in your metal locker in the prescribed location. Spit-shining shoes and boots was another art one had to master. Once you had your locker set up, the smart guys never touched it again, except to dust, and they wore other clothing.

Another aspect of getting acclimatized to military school was the necessity of learning how to drill. Under normal circumstances, new cadets reported to school a week before classes began, specifically to learn the very things I was to pick up on the fly. I had no idea what the various marching commands meant or how to execute them. We were issued rifles for drill practice. They were the M-1 rifles of World War II and Korean War vintage. There is a whole set of rifle manipulations such as right shoulder arms, left shoulder arms, order arms, present arms, port arms, et cetera which had to be memorized and the various movements executed with precise sequence and timing. At my first drill session, the platoon commander poked me in the buttocks with his saber because I did not properly execute one of his commands. I briefly considered smashing his head with my M-1, but decided I better learn more about what was going on around here before assaulting anyone. When I got back to