There are high school graduation ceremonies going on around the country this month, causing me to remember mine, back in Houston High School in the sixties. I was only 17 when I graduated and never even dreamed of going to college. My grades were not very good, because I never studied anything except outdoor magazines, and seldom completed any homework. I spent all my out-of-school hours working in my dad and grandfathers pool hall or on the Big Piney River in my johnboat.
My dad and mom never went to high school and had no relatives who did. I was the first Dablemont to achieve that high honor. Our family was poor; both my parents were shoe factory workers. There was a guidance counselor who knew that, a man by the name of Cloyce Gerdes. He noted that I had made a very high grade on some graduation test they called an Ohio something or another. I don’t know how that happened because I just hurried through it so I could go fishing with a cousin that afternoon.
Surely something got switched or confused in those test results, but because of it and the financial situation I was in, Mr. Gerdes called me into his office to tell me about a college called School of the Ozarks, near Branson, Missouri, where poor kids were given jobs on campus to pay for room and board and tuition. I sort of let that go by me because I had obtained a job sanding cars at a local body shop. Each night my fingers would bleed but it was worth it for the dollar and a quarter per hour I was getting and the opportunity to learn a trade.
But I signed that application to School of the Ozarks and forgot about it. The guidance counselor filled out the rest and sent it in. That was in May and before the first of June I got a letter back saying I had been hadn’t been accepted but I had been put on a waiting list. I figured as much… what college would want a pool hall kid with a 2.5 grade average? Miracles occur in everyone’s life and that next week one definitely took place for me, a miracle that changed my life entirely.
I was helping my dad put a new roof on our house that Saturday morning when Mom came out and told me that I had a phone call. When I answered, a Mr. Timmons told me he was the registrar at School of the Ozarks. He said that I had been fifth on their waiting list and five kids had quit. Looking back, I think that was indeed a miracle and that God was that day smiling on one of the poorest and dumbest kids in the Ozarks. I wasn’t very high on myself and I never thought something like that could happen to me. That night I filled an old dilapidated black suitcase with all the clothes I owned, as excited as I have ever been. In two days I had a job at the school and a dorm room and had started summer classes in a genuine college.
For a lot of reasons, the place called S of O was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. A big fountain filled a pond-sized lake there on campus. It was called Lake Honor and no one knew it was full of bass but me. I found out within a few days of the time I got there.
The school sat on a bluff overlooking Lake Taneycomo and a student fisherman named Darrel Hamby showed me a path down over the bluff to find it. He taught me how to catch a fish I had never seen before, the rainbow trout. From Darrel I learned about the efficiency of using a spinning reel and rod and all about cooking fish in a dorm room with a hot plate and a skillet.
I went to work on campus for the school president, Dr. Graham Clark who showed me some property the school owned on Tablerock Lake called Clevinger Cove, where a V-bottom boat was chained up beside an old abandoned house. He gave me a key to the gate and the boat and in June of that year I caught the first crappie I had ever seen, plus the biggest largemouth bass I had ever caught. On the weekends that I couldn’t go home to the Big Piney, friends and I would spend the night in that old broken-down house and fish most of the time there.
Indeed it seemed like I had died and gone to heaven. The story of Clevinger Cove continued for two years, so I will finish it in my next column. But my life as a naturalist-outdoor writer got a big boost because of a miracle… five students quitting and making me a place to learn, away from the Big Piney River… Lake Honor, Lake Taneycomo and Tablerock.
Read the conclusion to this story, and next weeks column on my website, larrydablemontoutdoors.com
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