Word: graner
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When eleven-year-old Roscoe McGeorge refused to stop playing with cards in the back row of a fourth-grade penmanship class in Cincinnati's Washington Elementary School. Teacher Gayle Graner decided to take appropriate action. She told him to turn over and gave him a paddling. Roscoe's outraged mother had her arrested for assault and battery, but 22-year-old Teacher Graner, though less than a year out of the University of Cincinnati's Teachers College, is not one to be easily intimidated. "Yes. I paddled him," she told reporters. "I have firm ideas...
Cincinnati apparently approves such firmness. Washington's principal rushed to Teacher Graner's support. William F. Hopkins, a topflight Cincinnati criminal lawyer, offered to defend her without fee ("More paddlings like that would help to keep down our prison population"), and 40 members of the Cuvier Press Club sent her an orchid corsage with a note saying, "We salute you!" Finally, the day before her case came up in court. Teacher Graner got the biggest boost of all. Her entire class. Roscoe included, chipped in nickels and dimes to throw a "good luck" party to wish her well...
There are a few uneasy moments at the start, when Ben Graner gushes about "the daring man they said would never come back alive" and how he "threw himself at the mercy of the Pacific." An adventure, as every adventurer knows, is adventurous only in the retelling; and nothing can be so downright dull as three months on a raft. But after Mr. Grauer's hyperbolic foreword, "Kon-Tiki" luckily avoids the perils-of-the-deep, the yoicks-man-overboard, and the eek-it's-a-man-eating-shark, episodes that seem presaged by the opening. It becomes the tale...