Grape Gum

It was noted on my internet feed this morning that today marks 34 years since the Chicago Cubs played their first night game at Wrigley Stadium. Twenty years prior to the lights going on at Wrigley Field, I had an English teacher who declared herself as a baseball fan who was mad at the Cubs because Mr. Wrigley did not see fit to lighting the baseball field named in his honor. Because of that, she declared that there was to be no gum chewing in her class. Doing so would support Mr. Wrigley.

To say that Mrs. Fair disliked her English students chewing gum in her class would be a fair statement (note the play on words). While she was intolerant of all chewing gum, she was particularly intolerant of grape-flavored bubble gum.

When it came to grape gum, the woman had a nose like a hawk. If she even thought that you had grape gum on your person, you would be sent to the restroom to spit out the offending gum and then were told to rinse out your mouth before coming back to class.

There were other rules, too. I’ve forgotten most of them because, as I came to the discovery in my early days as part of that class, I sat in what I would consider to be the “Teacher’s Pet” seat. I got away with a thing or two because of my position in Mrs. Fair’s seating chart – and no, I didn’t test the limits by chewing gum, much less grape gum the entire school year. Came close, but never caught.

Why I was put into the “Teacher’s Pet” seat was likely because I was new to the school and/or new to the school system. I was in the position of having to find a whole new set of friends. Seated where I was didn’t help things, especially when the word was out that the front seat in the center row of Mrs. Fair’s classroom was… shall we say, special.

A couple of side notes having to do with my time in Mrs. Fair’s English class.

For one, we spent a few weeks studying Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. There was an extra credit assignment which found me writing a “Musical.” I did a “Weird Al” thing of setting several plot points to already existing tunes. Mrs. Fair loved it. One of the easiest projects I ever did.

For the other, Mrs. Fair announced one day that one day, when she retired, she would sit in her rocking chair and listen to me on the radio. She retired in June, 1972. I started working at the local radio station in December of that year. (I would mention that Mrs. Fair’s husband and the owner of the radio station where I first worked were former mayors of the town, bookending a short-lived experiment of having a Council-Manager form of government. The better half found it amusing.)

At any rate, I believe that night baseball in Wrigley Field came well after Mrs. Fair expired, so she never got to take back her vendetta against poor Mr. Wrigley. And despite having the temptation of being able to chew any gum I wanted to chew in my lifetime, I never developed a taste for grape gum.

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