I have been fired from two jobs in my life. One of them was in journalism.
The position was co-editor of the 1963 “Jetstream” yearbook at Hauser High School. The reason given for dismissal was “obscene conduct and lack of respect for authority.”
As juniors, classmate Loraine (Clouse) Wells and I had been selected to work on the book, along with a staff from the senior class. The way things worked in those days, we would become co-editors as seniors.
But, as fate would have it, the faculty adviser who had appointed us departed our senior year and was replaced by a new teacher. The new teacher did not greet me with open arms and great confidence.
I admit a “my-way-or-the-highway” teacher might have had valid reasons not to feel deep affection for me. I questioned more often than accepted instructions. I found humor in situations the teacher often found serious. I was not afraid to state my opinion.
If being “respectful” meant never questioning or disagreeing, I was guilty. Still, I survived the chilly relationship all the way past Christmas and into the second semester.
By February, most of the pictures had been taken and all but a few of the page layouts had been completed when I came down with the flu and was home for about a week.
The day I returned to school, I was sitting in the yearbook office dummying pictures onto a page when the teacher walked by me, looked at my work and went off like a Roman candle. She screamed I had a “dirty mind” and accused me of maliciously sneaking a vulgar picture into the book — a picture she said she had expressly banned from publication the previous week.
I looked at the pictures and could find nothing even remotely vulgar or inappropriate. So, I asked the teacher which picture was vulgar.
She refused to respond to my question but said she would not tolerate my vulgarity. Then I responded that if she saw a vulgar picture, she was the one with the dirty mind.
A few minutes later I found myself in the principal’s office.
Evidently, not having learned any lesson about asking disrespectful questions, I prodded the principal to explain to me what was vulgar about the pictures.
The teacher had left the “offensive” page layout with him, so — after a brief pause — he pointed to a picture of a girl at a school convocation. A magician had hypnotized the girl and placed her on her back across three folding chairs. He then had told her to stiffen her body, pulled out the middle chair and left her suspended between the two remaining ones.
Puzzled, I asked the principal to explain what was vulgar about this picture.
After a bit of verbal dancing about, the principal quietly confided the teacher thought the picture showed the girl’s sweater hugging her chest in a way that left her breasts looking like “Christmas trees,” revealing she was wearing “falsies.”
(Seems the girl in the photo had accomplished her trick. She had indeed fooled me.)
So, I was fired. The teacher refused to allow me back in class. The befuddled principal decided to exile me to study hall during yearbook period for the rest of the school year.
My banishment was an educational experience, however. I learned someone is always ready to serve as censor, under the belief that his or her opinion alone is the final judge and jury for determining what is too “vulgar” or “inappropriate” for the rest of us to see, read or hear.
I also learned I didn’t have to accept that judgment quietly. Asking the questions those in authority found to be inappropriate led me to a fairly successful career in journalism. That was worth a few boring months of study hall confinement.
(By the way, my other firing came during a summer job in a factory when I drove a fork truck through an 8-foot-high door — while the lift was up about 9 feet. It was quite a jolt for both me and the production manager who had hired me. No one tried to censor the foreman’s words as I carried my lunchbox to the door.)
