Mrs. Tucker taught 7th grade RWS (reading, writing, and spelling). When I say “taught”, I use the term loosely. She was quite old, drove a beat up shell of a pick-up truck, called us buzzards and towed her books down the hall with a red wagon. Each time the book club took orders she reminded us of her personal ban on "To Kill a Mockingbird.” We were to never ever read that book. We could only guess why. But it showed up on NBC Saturday Night at the Movies and we were beside ourselves. She couldn't stop us! I liked the movie but never figured out her objections. At thirteen, veiled references to sex or race just flew right over my head unnoticed. But in my house I could sense when to let sleeping dogs lie. Asking my parents a question never ended well anyway but queries about this movie would surely produce a calamity.
Mrs. Tucker would empty the wastebasket on her desk and reassemble torn up notes. Anything she did not finish went home in a paper bag. One day a kid threw a wad of paper and she conducted a half hour investigation involving the projectile’s direction, speed, distance, cross winds, and bad seeds to determine who threw it. It was remarkably similar to the courtroom scene in JFK about the magic bullet. Oliver Stone had nothing on Mrs. Tucker.
Mrs. Tucker would empty the wastebasket on her desk and reassemble torn up notes. Anything she did not finish went home in a paper bag. One day a kid threw a wad of paper and she conducted a half hour investigation involving the projectile’s direction, speed, distance, cross winds, and bad seeds to determine who threw it. It was remarkably similar to the courtroom scene in JFK about the magic bullet. Oliver Stone had nothing on Mrs. Tucker.
She never got out of her seat and always had a half empty six-ounce glass coke bottle on her desk. She wore sunglasses with her elbows on the desk and her head resting in her hands. She told us the sunglasses prevented us from knowing who she was eyeballing. It turns out she was right. But one day the toughest hood in our class, a fellow with two first names, Scott Thomas or Thomas Scott, stood up without raising his hand, sauntered right up to her desk, picked up her coke bottle, hocked up a loogie, spit it into the coke, placed it back on the desk, and casually strolled back to his seat. She was asleep! The class was absolutely breathless. We sat in terror until the end of the period. When the bell rang we stampeded like cattle. It was a miracle we didn’t break bones getting through that door.
Twenty years later, I read the book for the first time and have since read it seven more times.
Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing. - Robert Benchley
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