So Long at the Fair

Mr. B. E. wasn’t widely known as warm, much less amiable. Fierce would be, I think, the general apprehension of children who crossed his path, which may just have been his style of school superintending.

That morning, though, he seemed positively tickled as he saw us all off on our great trip to Atlanta, to the state fair to represent the county at Dr. Collins’s Annual Spelling Bee. I was there, and my mother, and Joe, the alternate, and his mother, and his grandfather, who was driving us. And he gave us each—the competitors—a 10-dollar bill. In the fall of 1965, this was a princely sum. I expect he suggested we not spend it all in one place.