TEACHING A BULLY A LESSON

Every picture I have of our neighborhood kids growing up shows Beecher Kirby with a rope hanging from his waste. I guess he qualified as a bully back then...and he was never really a part of our little group...I guess because Hop Scotch and plays about miracles and dwarfs just didn't interest him very much. Part of me thought he was kinda cool, since he had a convertible and an air compressor.( My friend Susan and I had plans to one day build a blimp that we could ride in.) Most of the time Beecher was just mean and annoying however, and even though he hung out with the older guys like Tommy whom I've mentioned before (the one who would crawl out of his bedroom window and sit on the roof in his underpants smoking cigarettes), and Mike Rome who drove a corvette and was the handsomest guy I'd ever seen up to that point, Beecher picked on us. One day when the girls and I had been pushed to the point of a near nervous breakdown  by him repeatedly squirting away our hop scotch game with a hose, we decided to beat him up.

Nancy and Loretta  who were twins, ten year olds who were usually nice little girls and frequent extras in one of our garage extravaganzas, suggested that we form a circle around Beecher and on the count of three we'd all charge him and teach him a lesson. First we all sat around chewing on blades of grass and acting nonchalant until one of the twins said the secret word and we all formed a very menacing circle....(well, as menacing a circle as we could muster with about six ten year old girls, me, and my friend Bill who might have been a turncoat all along). A faintly whispered one two three, and wham! Into the circle I leaped....alone. The girls and the turncoat all ran away screaming and Beecher rolled me around a few times and went home laughing. So much for his "lesson". I think I learned one.

Having been abandoned by all of my cohorts, I of course had to punish them.

I immediately canceled the afternoon rehearsals for " The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima", and announced that a new Blessed Mother would be replacing Susan. To this day...fifty years later, she still insists that I coveted that role from the very beginning, and that the failed coup against Beecher was nothing more than a smokescreen. I still beg to differ.

I don't know whatever became of Beecher. I still imagine that he goes to drive- ins with wild looking girls in his convertible and smells like an ash tray.

His name is so unusual that I worry a little bit that he'll read something like this and track me down and try to beat me up all over again. This time I'm going to add my mother and cousins Eleanor and Judy to the circle..THEN we'll see what happens to Beecher Kirby.