I attended Central School in Wilmette Illinois, just down the block from where I lived from 2nd to 6th grade beginning in 1963. It was a standard, nondescript collection of rectangular buildings that held classrooms for each of the six grades from which students would matriculate on to Howard Junior High, another collection of rectangular buildings. To deem Central as nondescript is no insult; every elementary school is basically the same and tasked with the same fundamental mission: to keep the kiddies safe during the day – in loco parentis – so moms can return to work. It’s only with higher institutions of learning such as middle school, high school and college, that the schools attain some measure of differentiability with the accommodation of more mature students and the teaching of subjects with greater sophistication.
The collective actions of older students get reflected in the school itself such that it develops its own character and becomes an institution of learning with a definable personality of sorts. My high school, NTE (New Trier East), had a multifaceted student body with a winning basketball team, science and math clubs that won national competitions, and being in the middle of wealthy suburbs, had students who took foreign language classes, traveled frequently overseas, drove expensive cars to school, and were mostly destined to head off to a university upon graduating and eventually settling into a life in a different State in the Country. Compared to another high school to our west, ETHS (Evanston Township High School) served some less affluent suburbs and, while having good football and basketball teams, had a much less diverse student body, most were academically lacking and many belonged to local gangs. It was a more ‘rough and tumble’ place where a majority would find jobs after graduation and continue their lives near in the same area and tended to fill most of the blue-collar positions in the large suburban areas of the North Shore outside of Chicago. ETHS thereby presented a much narrower set of traits to define the school. However, the higher institutions have the primary purpose of providing a warm container for kids to continue their development beyond being simple boys and girls, and prepare them for future development such as their place in the American caste system. This hierarchy of classes is composed of several intersecting castes, namely those of the Jocks, Pot-Heads, Cheerleaders, Brains, Bullies and the Unaffiliated. The unaffiliated constitute the largest caste and while others, such as Brains, typically show their gifts as prodigies, they burn out relatively quickly while the Unaffiliated continued their slow evolution to become the next generation’s Presidents of the United States, Nobel prize winners, award winning authors, physicians, producers, and engineers. Bullies continued their torture of other kids until the age when the others just ignored them and carried on, Jocks played whatever sports they could until the final cut in which only a few succeeded in making the draft after high school and college, the Cheerleaders stayed with the Jocks who didn’t end up working in a garage or the food service industry, and the Pot-Heads went into whatever jobs they could find where they could continue getting high while working.
While elementary schools are mostly uniform and, to an adult, mostly dull, with their young student population, the elementary curriculum has the important duty and distinction of teaching the foundation of our educational curriculum which includes the introduction to the Alphabet Song, the National Anthem, the concept of Recess, the Multiplication Tables and the intricacies of grammar in the literary work See Spot Run.
However, while this is a necessary function that all elementary schools have to fulfill, the students have found ways to add an element of uniqueness by recognizing and rejoicing when something unexpected occurs – usually anything that disrupts the drudgery of the normal, routine school day. Sometimes an incident leaves an impression on those involved and it becomes a legend that may or may not become part of the school’s lore, but is carried along in an oral tradition by the students involved. I was one of a group that was awarded with the role of monitoring the presence and of the ultimate removal of a surprise discovered in the boy’s bathroom in the second-grade section of our building. It is lost who provided a name for the event but this incident became referred to both at the time and in future references as Jamie’s’ Cigar. I should add that this story is true, I was there. I have an image in my memory of the Cigar and of the series of actions of my classmates took after its discovery. All I can say is that as I got older, I could conjure up and embellish events that happened at Central during my stay there, but the truth behind Jamie’s’ Cigar would, frankly, never have occurred to me to make it up! So, I present it to you as an honest-to-God actual event as much as I can remember it after all these years.
Jamie was our gym instructor. He was middle-aged and a huge, extremely overweight man. His girth was notable, certainly to normal sized adults but particularly to us second graders. He was monstrous with every part of him distending into his shirt and pants, trying to push the fabric away so he could distend some more. It struck me later in life that, sometimes, the person least qualified to hold a job would be the one who gets it, and that was certainly Jamie. But then, the fact that he would never be a draft choice for the NBA, I think his ability to herd an entire class of second grade boys is what got him the position. Now I should add that, overall, he was a good guy and both myself and the rest of the second-grade boys liked him. While he was larger than most monsters any of us had imagined and which kept us awake at night, he laughed a lot which really deflated his scariness and he would chuck out the balls or equipment that we would be using during gym class in a teasing manner that had us running after or trying to catch the gym equipment as he pulled them out of their containers. But while he was generally a happy fellow that we resonated with; he also was a strict disciplinarian. Whoever did something wrong, whatever that might be, he would get the notorious Jamie Ear Pinch which is simply Jamie grabbing tightly with a couple of giant fingers the ear of the unruly, yanking them up a few inches so that, aside from screaming ‘OW!, OW!, OW!’, they would be trying to stand up as far as they could on the tips of their toes to lessen the pain. Jamie would then pull them over to a bench on the side of the gym for further interrogation or send them out to the hallway to tell them to go down to the Principals office and tell him what they had done. Sometimes he went down with them to inform on their heinous crimes but other times he simply told them to head down on their own and confess what they had done. I recall thinking that, because there was little else they could offer to tell but the truth, they could not get away with saying anything different to the principal, I thought that it was a smart move by Jamie: ‘Woah! Way to go Jamie!’ Of course, I never felt that way whenever I was forced to do the march and confess the truth of my actions to the principal. I recall a day when we were all returning in through the gym and I accidentally chucked a basketball hard in the wrong direction that headed on a ballistic trajectory into a group of girls heading back to their locker room. The ball first creamed Gail Armstrong by hitting her in the side of the head and she was knocked down to the floor staring fixedly at the ceiling. The ball then flew over to Janice Hunter and hit her in the forehead that ricocheted like a pinball twice to her shoulder and back again until she finally turned her vibrating head away so that the ball could careen away and punch Audrey Sayner solidly in the chest, knocking the wind out of her and her to the ground, leaving all three girls crying on the floor, before finally continuing bouncing harmlessly across the gym floor. Yup, I was guilty big time, and after doing the high, tippy-toe dance step and yelping ‘OW!, OW!, OW!’ while subjected to the Jamie Ear Pinch, I had to follow the Central School Via Delarosa like Jesus and his cross to soulfully explain my unplanned torpedo launch in great detail to the principal (who seriously told me of how many I could have killed but yet couldn’t hide a smile nevertheless).
I think now I’ve reached the point to detail the occurrence that happened in the second-grade boys’ bathroom. I don’t remember what day of the week it was but the incident must have started sometime from the afternoon of the day before to the early morning of the current day. When we all arrived at school at 9:00am, from our class it was always the same two guys who needed to visit the bathroom first thing and were allowed to do so by Ms. Nissen, our teacher. Although the side of our class room that faced the hallway between the other classroom was filled with windows that were covered with all sorts of stuff taped to them, you could still see the guys leave our class and scamper down the hallway towards the boy’s bathroom. I really wasn’t paying attention but, when they returned, they were walking without a scamper and slowly entered our classroom. I looked at them because they were acting different and were both kind of silent and slightly pale. That’s all it took for me to not be concerned about anything Ms. Nissen was talking about and all my attention was directed towards finding out what was going on with our two classmates (whose names I have forgotten, sorry). I noticed through the hall window that the other two kids from the other classroom who also had to run into the bathroom first thing in the morning and so had joined with our guys, were also walking in an unusual manner back to their classroom. This naturally set off the underground communication network that gets established in every classroom. In elementary school these ‘secret exchanges’ consisted of verbal whispers to everyone who sat next to the current person broadcasting the message. When the class seating is arranged in fixed rows and columns, the message move regularly and quickly, but if the classroom has been configured into islands of desk-clusters of, say, 3 to 4 kids, the whisper transmissions are quick within a cluster but then requires someone to present a need to walk over to another student in the next cluster to continue the message. This is usually inefficient and, sometimes, can take a while to get a message around the class. Then, of course, to have a hidden conversation with everyone in the classroom, messages have to be passed back and forth along the specific sequence of messengers who function as transmission lines that carry the conversation. This can all get really complicated.
For the rest of the morning students in groups of twos and threes from both our class and the one across the hall would get a bathroom pass to view the magical sight. At first this object was one that evoked a scary vision but as more kids saw it and discovered that it was actually harmless, it became less of an extraterrestrial visitation and much more a curio, an example of a Barnum-Baily display with a Ripley’s Believe It or Not feeling of butterflies in the stomach experienced as seeing something very odd but still ‘of this world.’ It was in our group of adventurers that it was correctly concluded that only Jamie could have been capable of landing a cigar of the size he left on display. It can only be speculated what had gone through Jamie’s mind as he ran into the boy’s bathroom. It was obvious that he had to get rid of something immediately that would not wait for him to reach the teacher’s area with the full-sized bathrooms upstairs. He must have known the commotion it would cause but then realized that he wanted nothing involved with removing it. And, like the conundrum any really bad guy gets into in the course of a serious crime, how do you secretly move a body and then how do you dispose of it? What were the logistics? It looks like Jamie, thinking like a second grader, did not know what to do and would rather just go home and hope that the problem would disappear in the morning. Until then, what Jamie was forced to dispose of in a miniature half-scale commode in the boy’s bathroom was precisely like a massive cigar propped up in an impromptu ashtray.
During recess, all the boys formed a think tank and consulting body of experts in expressing various aspects of the monument on display in our bathroom. As this body debated the phenomenon in ways worthy of a religious council, the girls who had only been part of the secret information exchange, couldn’t understand what was so special about a large cigar found in the boy’s bathroom, adults lit those things up all the time and would dispose of them in all sorts of places. Yuck! There were a few boys who had somehow missed the pilgrimage and, when informed by the council, adopted an expression right out of the Norman Rockwell portrait of a 7-year old kid experiencing something incredible for the first time: body bent over, mouth open and drooping, and huge bulging eyes. After recess they had an immediate Hajj to perform by visiting the boy’s room down the hall.
When these last kids emerged from our Temple at Delphi, it was clear that our euphemism had to be clarified. After visiting the holy site, one of the kids expressed the obvious: “yeah, but why are you calling it a cigar?” I recall thinking: ‘yeah, good question, but we’d rather call it that than what it really is.’ The truth was that ‘Jamie’s Cigar’ was the biggest darn turd any one of us had seen or could have imagined might exist. It was shocking. At first glance it was considered too gigantic to be produced by a human being. My memory of the gargantuan poop was that it was log-like, symmetric in shape, somewhat like two bowling pins reversed and stuck together. And it was so large compared to the tiny toilet bowl it was dropped into that it did look like a cigar that was lying over to rest on a side of the bowl while sticking about a third of its length above the bowl – or ashtray. Ms. Nissen had been introducing us to dinosaurs and I’d like to think that, not since the Jurassic period, had a land animal relaxed a set of sphincter muscles to eject a coprolite as large as the maximally impacted fecal bolus that Jamie had passed in our bathroom. It was amazing. None of us realized the importance or what we should have done with it. Since 1955 there existed the Guinness book of world records that at least could have been contacted, and then there is the Mutter Medical Museum in Philadelphia that was founded in 1858 that could perhaps have provided a large enough sample jar to faithfully preserve the specimen, perhaps labeled ‘JC 1963, Wilmette, IL’ for interested observers. The National Bureau of Standards was founded by Congress in 1901 as an authoritative domestic measurement and standards laboratory, and should have been alerted to the possible new unit for accurately measuring specimens of this nature. Indeed, while carefully maintaining precise lengths and weights for the foot and pound, new measures are possible. For example, in 1958 a fraternity group at MIT, Cambridge, proposed a new length unit named the “Smoot” after a fraternity pledge Oliver R. Smoot and was equal, exactly, to 5ft 7in Imperial US units or 1.702m SI units. For application and as a demonstration they had Smoot lie down repeatedly along the Harvard Bridge connecting Cambridge with Boston and determined it to be exactly 364.4 Smoots. However, because there was nothing inherently novel about the Smoot, it was not accepted as a standard unit of measurement. For the Cigar, we could imagine a new unit entitled Jamie-Cigar or jc. One can only speculate on specific medical applications where this unit would be useful; for example, on consumer OTC medicines, it might have been used as a quantitative rating on the efficacy of laxatives allowing a precise contrast between, say, Phillips’s Stool Softener Liquid with a maximum rating of 0.35 jc and Colace Tablets that could be rated up to 0.4jc. Hey, when they all look the same, this works for me, and I could purchase Colace Tablets because they’re up by 0.05jc stronger than Phillips, and sometimes you just want the best. But none of these possibilities came to pass. This incident was only to live on in the class of second grade boys attending Central School in Wilmette during the year 1963. Later that day I heard a clanking noise and looked over to see two janitors pushing a mop and pail towards the bathroom. In a short time, they could be seen walking back from the bathroom, and I wondered what they had to do to dispose of the cigar. But the monument was gone, the ‘cigar’ was destroyed. I’m sure that Jamie could breathe a sigh of relief. Once cleaned up, the incident was over but not forgotten by any of the second-grade boys at Central School in 1963. Such is life; in the role of a historian, I simply found it satisfying to recall the incident of Jamie’s Cigar as it is not completely forgotten among the participants and still deserves a moment of reflection and a recollection of awe. Of course it may be a profound metaphor for the current state of civilization, but, then, perhaps not; usually a thing simply is and that’s all it is.