Been There by Neil W. McCabe
False alarms in the land of the Panthers
My daughter Katherine told me her school day was disrupted by a false fire alarm going off at her high school. The very thought of it brought me back to my old high school days.
My junior year, we had such a crazy rash of alarms it reached three and four per day as we approached the end of the school year.
This was not a small problem because union rules meant that every time a firefighter responds to an alarm he gets triple pay, every alarm cost the town an extra $1,500 each time--and that was in 1982 money! We are talking about Reagan/Volker dollars.
One day we had six alarms and the principal went ballistic. He had the president of the senior class go on the PA to plead, "Come on guy
s. Please, please stop."
I will always remember listening to this young man's voice crack into a crying whine as he explained that if there was one more false alarm the principal would cancel that night's annual Seniors' Bonfire.
Neil W. McCabe
The wood pallets had already been stacked on the field atop the hill side by the teachers' parking lot. It must have been 30 feet high--I would say that things seemed bigger then, but in fact I had basically reached my current height of 72 inches.
Unlike those slides at the JFK School, whose ladders seemed to my first grade self to reach up into the skies like redwoods, this pile was then as I remember, impressive and not distorted by time and a child's perception. But, I digress.
I also remember thinking, as the boy wept into the microphone, this pathetic plea will not end the way he wanted.
When the address had finished an eerie spell descended upon the studentry. Many of us believed that the last two hours of the school day would actually pass without a false alarm. I was skeptical. The payoff was too much for the vandal to pass on. I even contemplated pulling the alarm myself.
For the next period, no matter what class one was in, everyone was listening to the silence. Would it continue or would the Class of 1982 go down as the first class in memory not to have a graduation celebratory bonfire--even as the pallets stood there unlit and unloved atop the hill next to the teachers' parking lot.
You know things are not as simple as they seem. For example, I was thinking the other day about the fact that the same people who complain about global warming are the same ones who want us to retreat in shame from Iraq. What if you proved that all of the airplane pollution from bring the troops home would hasten the planet catching fire? One could argue that we have to keep the troops over there to save the planet! Those self-loathing quislings would be torn between their hatred for our flag and their hatred of a working economy. I just mention it because it was sort of what I was thinking about when I saw that huge pile of wood out the window. Certainly, it would be hassle to remove the wood, which the town bought for the one and only purpose of torching the black out of the night for our outgoing seniors. What then would you do with the wood? They could have just left the pile there until the triumphal graduation of my own class of 1983, but I suspect the since the field was where the Oak Street School held their gym classes--there were conflicting motivations.
Frankly, the town fathers, or the principal, or whoever was really making these decisions would have preferred to have the fire--if only to save the expense and toil of removing the pile and to allow the fifth and sixth of Oak Street to continue to have gym class. Such was the pressure of these factors, I imagined that they could let the night pass without a bonfire and then out of spite and a rational acceptance of common day realities have a private fire for themselves over the weekend.
But, of course, all that would be immaterial if the the students of Franklin High School--home of the Panthers--could get through the final period without a false alarm.
As the time ticked away, people started to focus in on their classes and the idea of a false alarm and all of its turmoil and complications slipped away.
This calm made me more anxious. By now, I craved a false alarm. I craved the idea that the student president's weak, weepy begging would be repaid with contempt. I craved to idea of our grown-up leaders struggling with what to do with this then-would-never-be pyre sitting in the middle of the field atop the hill next to the teachers' parking lot and where next Monday the sugar-addled and attention-deprived students of the Oak Street School would expect to have their physical education classes. No fire = no kickball.
Were I to take matters into my own hands, there was one particular alarm box around the corner from the driving education classroom on the way to the field house. Since the shut down drivers ed as a program during the school day and since everyone going to the field house for our high school level physical education went first to the locker rooms, at the end of the day this alarm trigger was deserted by onlookers. It was hanging there like a ripe tomato.






















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