For some reason I’ve been remembering a lot about my high school days lately. One memory that stands out is how much fun we had in those days… the things we did, the pranks, the little no-no’s that we almost always got away with.
My god. We occasionally stole gas from a few of the ranchers’ big gas tanks, always late at night. Amazingly, we never once got caught. I say “amazingly” because we simply weren’t that smart… we just decided to “do stuff” and then we did it, and got away with it. I heard, from time to time, that some of the townsfolk knew we were up to certain things, like drinking beer in our cars in the evenings when we could get our hands on some.
It wasn’t easy, we were all minors, of course. But we knew a guy, Lou Lock, who owned and ran a bar in Norris would occasionally sell us a case out the back door of his bar. We would nurse that case for maybe a week, enjoying smoking a few cigarettes, drinking those beers, cruising the drag, and generally feeling “grown up.”
Our talk was always about sports, girls, and music. My god, we used to sing at nearly the tops of our lungs with the Everly Brothers and the Big Bopper. I remember Tom Erdie, the oldest of our 5-man “gang,” singing “Needles And Pins.” He awalys emphasized needles and pins… “And so it begins-uh, Needles And Pins-uh.” I loved it.
Poor Tom Erdie. Our basketball team played Boulder in Boulder one evening before Christmas. Their scoreboard in the gym had enough room on it to put the opposing players’ names up there. Tom’s was Terdie. There was no period after the T. After some chuckling and teasing Terdie, we shortened it to “T” and that nickname stuck with him through the rest of high school.
My best bud back then was Dick Sprout. We did a lot together… played football and basketball, drank beer, smoked cigarettes occasionally. We never double-dated, as Dick was a little too rough-edged, maybe a bit too wild for most of the girls. He had a crush on Sherrie Frisbee, but she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see him for the trees. So, we would usually hang out, cruise the drag, have a beer and sing with the radio if I wasn’t dating.
Sharon & Me
And who was I dating back then? Mostly Sharon Riley, a pretty little thing from West Yellowstone. She sang in the chorus, played piano and trumpet in the band, was smart, very cute and seemed to tolerate me okay. We both dated others occasionally during those 4 years, but we were an item, to be sure. If someone else would ask her out, they knew in advance it would piss Hulse off. Mostly, they didn’t care.
I dated other girls from time to time… Byllie Rankin, Jo Ann Hacker, Kathy Anderson (once), Joani Neis and Carol Carey from Sheridan.Those were dangerous waters. There was Barbara Hedges, from Whitehall, and Millie Whitman, also from West Yellowstone. What a disaster that turned out to be.
I took Millie to a movie one winter’s night, and after, we did the usual… drove outside of town, parked next to the river with the heater on, turned the lights out, listened to the radio and got better acquainted. Now I have to tell you, I was having some problems right then. I’d just broken my collar bone in a football game three weeks earlier, and I had a full-shoulder cast on. I had been wearing braces for 4-5 years by then. And worse, my cast was beginning to smell.
Never mind all that. As we got together for a kiss, she put her hand on my shoulder, and pulled it back in horror, with a little shriek. “What’s that?” She squeaked?
“That’s just my cast. It’s okay, it doesn’t hurt.”
“Maybe not, be it feels creepy.”
We sat and listened to the radio for a minute or two, then Millie said, “What’s that smell?”
I was embarrassed, but told her that was probably my cast. I hadn’t been able to shower, to clean myself around the cast for several weeks, as I’d been told not to get the cast wet. She sniffed, “Oh.”
Another minute, then it was time for the first kiss. She put her hand gently on my cast, and we kissed for a moment. She suddenly pulled away with a loud “Ouch, ouch!” She had caught her lip on my braces.
She started to cry and I tried to hold her and comfort her (natch) but she pulled away. “Please take me home. There’s just too many things wrong with you, Steve Hulse.”
For some reason any time a high school girl was upset with me, they would call me “Steve Hulse.” Really strange. I called Sharon Riley after we were in college, she at Montana State and I at the U. Of Montana. I was missing her and called her. She was a bit chilly, and evasive. I finally said something like, “But Riley, I love you!”
“Steve Hulse, you don’t even know what love is!”
Anyway, after that enlightening and confidence-building date with Millie, I began using a little too much Aqua Velva to hide the cast’s odious aroma. I’m guessing the whole school was delighted when the cast finally came off after a month and I was able to return to my relatively clean demeanor.
My pal, Dick Sprout and I had met two girls from Whitehall at a school mixer, and had begun dating them. He was dating Janice Opey, whom we called simply “Opey” and I was dating Barbara hedges, whom we called, of course, “Hedges.” Anyway, every so often we would pull out the old excuse to drive over to Whitehall, almost 50 miles away, to bowl. In four years of driving over to Whitehall once in a while, I think we actually bowled once.
One weekend the girls invited Sprout and me over to Whitehall to a house party that one of their friends was having. It turned out to be a big party, with nearly half of Whitehall High in attendance. One of the toughest guys in Whitehall at the time, Sonny Huckaba, also liked Opey and decided he wanted some of that action. He tried to cut in on Sprout while they were dancing, and Sprout goes, “No, I don’t think so.”
Naturally Sonny didn’t like that at all. “Oh, you don’t think so, huh?” Sonny sneers. “Well just what the hell do you think, Sprout?”
Dick paused, then, “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen that, Huckaba.”
“Seen what?” Sonny growled.
“Teeth in a horse’s ass.”
Suddenly it seemed like an excellent time to leave the party, and we did… post haste. Now Huckaba was big, and tough and mean. What he wasn’t was fast. We made it to my car and got out of town before Huckaba and his minions could punish us for our unsociable behavior. However, Huckaba, known to all of us who played football as “the human bowling ball,” had the last laugh, as he bowled through us in our next football game against Whitehall like hot butter.
Me and Sprout
Oh, we stopped him most times all right, but most times was not enough. Sprout and I both played linebacker on defense, and Whitehall began running Sonny at Sprout’s side, obviously on purpose. I hit Sonny several times, and each time he left my head ringing. This one time he ran against Sprout’s side 3 times in a row. Dickie stopped him 3 times, but on the 4th run Sprout just let him go. He would say later, “I just couldn’t do it. Steffen. I wasn’t going to let the asshole kill me.” And I had to agree with Dickie. It wasn’t worth it. And we quickly found that there was, indeed, life after Huckaba.
Steve Hulse