That meant you took a ride down to the—you might have been riding just
talking to some people because you didn't have very much place, no
living room area, in which to have a date, you know. What would you do?
You might get in a car and take a ride to Dillon and have a Coca-Cola
over there or something like that. It may be very harmless, and I
suspect it was. I don't think it was really a very harmful situation,
but the mind of man can make some things evil that aren't evil.
Well, they had given me a very hard spot to teach in. My room—I can
remember, I can still see it—you entered the front door, went past the
superintendent's office and down the hall to my classroom. They had a
door off of the closet, and there was a transom. Everything that went on
in my room, he could hear it right in his office. That was okay. Big old
boys, I thought they were tremendous fellows.
You were asking me why I moved on. Well, alright, I taught mathematics. I
had to teach chemistry. The first year I had to teach French, and I
never would have made that one if there hadn't been a flood and the
school hadn't closed for a few days. I didn't know I was going to have
to teach French until I got there. The school was closed for a few days.
I got my books, and I got ahead of the students, and I stayed ahead of
them. But I had had a good background in French in college, and my
teacher was just as contemporary as today. We never heard a word of
English the whole two years I was in that class. Everything we read was
in French, and all we wrote was in French. But I kept losing friends. They'd get fired, you know. Then, in the middle of
the summer after I had been at Lakeview five years, this agriculture
teacher came to my home in Lodge and said, "Mr. Thorne has been fired.
Mr. Stephenson has been fired, and I am the new superintendent, and we
want you to be the principal of the high school." I just let him know
that I was not coming back. Now I didn't know where I was going because
I didn't have a job, but I said if my superintendent and my principal
were not good enough, you know, to serve in that community—I saw no
reason for them to be fired—I just could not come back. And so I left at
the end of five years. I found another job and it was a promotion. I
went to McColl, South Carolina, near Bennettsville, Marlboro County, and
I had a tremendous principal there. The superintendent was fine. I
enjoyed my work there. I was there four years but then I felt that I got
a better offer, a position in Gaffney, South Carolina. There was a
college, Limestone College, and I had wanted to have an opportunity to
study piano again. I had to give it up when I left high school. I
couldn't take it in college because it cost extra money to have lessons
and extra money to rent pianos and all those kinds of things. So I did
get a chance to study. I'm not any great musician. I did play the little
pump organ in my church when I was a child. But I can play for my own
enjoyment, and it was fun taking piano at Limestone. And I taught there.
All during these summers I was working on my master's degree.