ON PATROL

The power to control traffic, to stop a car dead in its tracks on a busy street, is heady stuff for a sixth-grader.
That power was briefly mine when Tuttle Grade School invested me with a bright orange patrol flag. I don't remember having any type of uniform or insignia to go with the sacred flag. We were issued a sort of Sam Brown belt that had a metal hole in the middle where we could rest the flag butt, but nothing else. But that was okay by me. That flag, kept in a musty cellar room of the school that smelled of stale milk and mildewed Dick & Jane readers -- as well as tattered copies of Little Black Sambo -- gave me the right and responsibility to guard the lives of my classmates as they scurried to and from school.
Back in those easier days parents were not considered derelect if they pushed their kids out the door ten blocks from school, telling them briskly to hoof it. Even grade school kids were expected to fend for themselves as they encountered mad dogs and bullies, walked past spooky old houses with crazy old men and women cackling behind partly-opened shades, warily navigated roads where big-finned Buicks barreled pell-mell past them at just under the speed of light. And weather? No sympathy there from the parents, my little hob-goblin! Howling blizzards and pea-soup fog were all the same to them; they bundled you up in woolen coats and mufflers and gloves and stocking caps, crammed black rubber galoshes over your tennis shoes, and sent you on your merry way. A waterspout could be heading directly for your house and still your mother cavalierly kissed you on the top of your doomed head as she gently nudged you into the great outdoors. School buses were for the crippled and blind, nobody else. We survived this daily ordeal somehow, to become the pill-popping, dope-smoking, binge-drinking and thoroughly neurotic Baby Boomers of today.
The only concession to safety made by the adults was the school patrol, who stood bravely at the four corners of the school block with their orange flags waving to warn motorists to slow down, stop, and let the kiddies cross the street in giggling gaggles.
As Mark Twain wrote about his tenure as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, so a member of the school patrol felt; there was no finer calling on God's green earth with such absolute authority that we could have out-hubrised Napoleon or that rascal in the Kremlin, Stalin.
Just how I got accepted to the school patrol I no longer remember. But the astonishment of being accepted into that august society is still with me after all these years. I was a puny and meek child, not to say strange. Strongly influenced by The Three Stooges, in the winter I would often pause by a frozen puddle to act out one of their violent scenarios; I'd lift a thin sheet of ice from the puddle, snarl at myself "Watch it, porcupine!" and then break the ice over my head, stagger a bit, and utter a high-pitched "woo woo woo'. Nosy neighbors watching this performance were sure to spread the world that the Torkildson boy was not playing with a full deck.
My schoolmates did not think much better of me. My bologna sandwich was often snatched from me at lunch. I rarely did anything about it, except whimper quietly in a corner and gnaw on my mushy apple. My mother had some kind of genius for picking out brown, mushy apples at the Red Owl supermarket. However, I did possess some native cunning; one time I took my bologna sandwich out of the sack prior to leaving for school and ladled horseradish on it. When some stupid bully grabbed it from me at lunch I had the satisfaction of watching him tear up and gag. That was a beautiful day in my young life.
As I say, I don't recall how I got picked for school patrol. Once I was in I relished every minute of it. I grew five inches taller when I had that flag with me. And especially so when I could finagle to get The Corner. There were four corners that we guarded. Two of them were quiet residential streets that saw nothing more dangerous than a squirrel come zipping by. But the other two corners were on Como Avenue, a very busy artery into downtown Minneapolis. The corner at Como and 18th was busy, true, but that's about it. There was no other action. But then there was Como and 19th . . . The Corner. It had Harry's Grocery Store on it, and Harry allowed the school patrol member on duty at his corner to come into the store and pick a penny item from his wonderous glass candy case for free. It was graft, I suppose, to keep us on his side in case the authorities ever wanted to press specious charges against him -- or so I thought, anyways. When I was on duty at The Corner I would march into Harry's with my flag nonchalantly drapped over my shoulder, somewhat like a cape, and give Harry a friendly salute, then drool all over the glass counter as I picked my little bit of payola. There were Tootsie Pops and Sputniks and Atomic Fireballs and my favorite, the All Day Jawbreaker. This luscious item was the size of a minature bowling ball and would not desolve in a vat of hydrochloric acid, much less my mouth. Each one lasted me about a month.
The only drawback to this idyll was crabby Miss Henderson, the fourth grade teacher. Hatchet-faced, with a voice like ten-penny nails drawn across a blackboard, she was in charge of the school patrol. She made sure the flags were stacked neatly in that smelly cellar hole after the morning and afternoon shift, and in the winter she made something slimey and evil that she cruelly called hot chocolate and made us drink it. It's hard to take something as simple and sweet as hot chocolate and turn it into a sickening brew that sweet-toothed children loath, but she managed to do it. Her hot chocolate tasted of chalk dust and disinfectant, and she kept each mug cooling on the table before she'd let us have it until a skin, an honest-to-goodness skin, would form over it. We were all afraid of her and didn't dare turn down her noxious witches broth. I still remember with a shudder that hot chocolate blob attaching itself to my lips as if it were alive and ready to crawl up my nose to suck out my brains like a movie space alien.
One snowy morning I just couldn't take it anymore. When I thought she wasn't looking I surreptitiously dumped my hot chocolate into a nearby wastebasket. But the eagle-eyed Miss Henderson missed nothing. Fixing me with a stare that would frighten a basilisk she icily asked if perhaps I didn't care for her hot chocolate. Struck dumb with terror, I could only flap my lips and make blubbing sounds. The next day I was drummed out of the school patrol.
No more freebies from Harry's Grocery Store. No more glory. And now the bullies not only swiped my bologna sandwich at lunch but they would take the mushy apple, too.
I'm telling you, it was tough being a sixth-grader in Eisenhower's America.