It was April Fool's Day, one o'clock in the afternoon. We students were all seated in the study hall, each at his regularly assigned desk. In the parking lot out front were two trucks and a number of automobiles, all parked orderly and aimed in the direction of the Double Mountain River. The entire student body had been warned that the school board would not tolerate running away on the first of April. Those who did would have all their grades lowered by ten points. When the one o'clock bell rang, the study hall teacher said, "Rise and pass to your classes." We stood up and passed all right, but not to our classrooms. We marched out of the study hall and downstairs, taking a select group of teachers with us. By the time the superintendent realized what was happening, we were all loaded into our vehicles and heading for a sandy playground in the channel of the river. The kidnapped teachers gave us very little trouble. They liked it. We were told later that three girls showed up for class in one room. Their teacher asked, "What are you girls doing here?" They told her they didn't want their grades to be lowered ten points. And the teacher told them, "No one is going to knock ten points off your grades. Get on out from here and have a good time." We were not only organized in making our get-away, we had also arranged for a little bit of entertainment by surprise. Three of us boys had made a man-size straw dummy, and while all the other students and teachers were playing in the sand down in the river, we boys secretly took our dummy up on a high cliff across the river, and there on the edge of that cliff, in plain view of the spectators below, Virgil Davis and I got into an argument which ended in a fight. Before we took the straw dummy up on the cliff, we arranged for one boy to remain in the crowd below to call attention to our fight up on the cliff. We boxed and pushed and shoved and rolled and tumbled. Then we rolled behind some bushes to where we had the dummy hidden. And when I came back into view, I was wrestling the dummy instead of Virgil. When we rolled near the edge of the cliff, we struggled to our feet and I knocked him over the edge and he fell to the river below. This was no big deal but it was different, and it brought a few screams from the gallery below. By the first day of April the following year, the school board had decided that this April Fool thing had gone too far, and they convinced us kids that they meant business. We knew there was no way we could pull another stunt like we pulled the year before and get away with it. We accepted the new ruling and had no intention of causing any trouble.