As I mentioned before, the Rat Skat Club was sort of a underground fraternity at Marietta High School. Or maybe it was a wannabe fraternity. It was a club for boys to simply have fun and promote the school spirit, in maybe unorthodox ways. None of us wanted to do harm, as a group, anyway.
We had socials like hay rides and Christmas dances. The school authorities thought we were hoodlums. And some parents also thought we were a bunch of hoodlums, street gang, or, well, rats.
At the Pre-Varner Reunion was a guy there with the name Chipper Newport that I didn’t remember. Tonight I looked him up in the Olympia school yearbook and believe it or not, he has changed in the last 49 years.
He called me tonight and we knew the same people, such as the late Larry Holcomb and Paul Roper.
He told me when he was a sophomore in 1960 he was asked to join the Rat Skats. His father found out about it. His father met him at the door when he came home and confiscated his car keys, then told him to pack his bags. He shipped him off in mid Tennessee to live with his grandfather.
I suppose his father heard we were a mean gang and he did what he thought he had to do. I think somebody gave some his father some wrong information. I’m sure I would do about the same if I heard something bad about an organization one of my sons was about to join.
Now, it is all water under the damn.
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