Initiation

aka Just Hangin’ Around

My Guest Author today is my Dad as he shares memories of his Freshmen year at Sweet Grass High School. Go Sheepherders!

My 1925 beginning was in a mountain wilderness twenty miles from a country store, a post office or a telephone. Electric lights were something magic which they had in town forty miles away. My older brother died when I was six years old. I had two sisters, and there were two girl cousins who lived two miles down the road, but the nearest boy my age lived nine miles away. Sometimes, I knew what lonely was.

After seven years and eight grades of education in a log cabin school with a top enrollment of six, I was sent forty miles away to a mind-bending 150 student high school in Big Timber, Montana.

In those days they initiated the freshmen class by marching us down Main Street. The boys were dressed in dresses and the girls in boys clothes. I won the honor as being the best dressed freshman boy in the Initiation Parade. I wore one of sister Barbara’s dresses.

The next day the freshmen were herded up the airport hill to repaint the school logo. “SGHS”. That done we were officially accepted as the Big Timber Sheepherders – except for the “pantsing”, an informal part of high school initiation where Sophomore boys stripped the Freshmen of their pants and hosed them down with that cold Big Timber water. A few favored freshmen had to run down main street to retrieve their britches. I boarded at the far edge of town and missed the pantsing, but the next day the Sophomores caught up to me at the high school and hung me up by my belt on a coat hanger in the hall. A teacher came along and set me free before my first class.

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