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With fondness, they recall the good ol' days of sore backsides

Whuppin' has fallen out of favor, and schools here don't spank. But these longtimers say that some lessons are best delivered with a paddle.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published October 19, 2006

BROOKSVILLE - Pittman Jernigan used to dance in the groves north of town. The pickers would stop and watch and throw him nickels and dimes. One day Jernigan took some of that change and went to buy some bubble gum at the service station not far from his home and then came back late.

His dad was waiting.

"Took his belt," said Jernigan, Hernando High School Class of 1944.

"Worked on me.

"Educated me."

The Times talked to dozens of longtime locals in the months leading up to the current Founders Week festivities. One thing some of them talked a lot about? Gettin' whupped.

It's not like that anymore, of course. The use of corporal punishment in the home and at school has been on a steady decline for the last 30 years.

In 1968, according to the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, 94 percent of parents thought spanking was necessary at times. But by 2004, that number was down to 61 percent, according to a survey done by the Center for Child and Family Studies in San Francisco.

Twenty-eight states have banned spanking in school. Florida's not one of them. This state essentially leaves it up to the districts, and Hernando doesn't allow it because the School Board hasn't written it into the guidelines, said Paul Carland, the board attorney.

But not everybody around here thinks that's good.

"Some of these kids today need to be given the belt," said Mike Steele, Hernando Class of '93. "I would like to see it back. I think it would put some fear back into these kids. That would be for sure."

Kids used to mind their elders, said Dan Merritt Sr., Class of '60, Hernando's administrative circuit judge. "Going to school was a different experience than it is today. There was a high degree of respect for your teachers. There was genuine respect between the teachers and the pupils. They were like your parents away from home. It was a mutual thing."

A note to the faculty that ran in the front of the 1948 Hernando High yearbook went like this: "Our capable and enthusiastic administration, with their patience and fortitude, have ... won our fondest admiration and highest esteem for the efforts they have rendered in order that we might receive knowledge in preparation for our future life."

Times have changed.

"When my father put out the rules, it was like it was with his father," said Tom J. Deen Jr., Class of '43. "That was it.

"One day my brother threw a rock at me and it hit me and I decked him. And my mother wanted to whip me for it and I wouldn't let her whip me because I didn't think I deserved it. My father come home, and he was very quiet, I never heard him cuss - he come in and he says, 'I understand you sassed your mother today.' And I said, 'Sir, I didn't think ...' and he says, 'Well, bend over.'

"About two months later, for some reason, I did the same thing, and this time he beat the living hell out of me, and I mean this time it hurt.

"That ended that."

"The police here in Brooksville," said Gene Manuel, Class of '46, "they were part of the same social structure that you had in that day and time. Unless you were extremely out of order there wasn't any arrests or anything made. If a kid got in trouble they'd take him home and let his parents handle it, take him home and tell 'em that he's down there doing something wrong, and usually you got your fanny worn out and you didn't do that anymore."

"You got beat if you were late" to school, said Tom Varn, Class of '69, who's now an assistant principal at his alma mater.

"If we got a spanking at school," Class of '57 grad Ginger Garnett said this summer before she died, "we'd get a harder one at home."

"I even remember in ninth grade somebody getting spanked," said Leslie Taylor, Class of '85.

Steele remembers it like this: There was a picture on the wall in the principal's office of his elementary school. It was of a sunset over an ocean.

The principal's command was standard:

Grab your ankles.

Look at the picture.

"His paddle was like a boat oar with a sawed-off handle," Steele said. "I always used to imagine him rowing a boat and then coming to work ready to paddle some a----."

Local construction company owner Alan Krasemann made paddles out of scrap wood for at least one teacher.

"Almost like a pingpong paddle," he said. "I didn't put any holes in them because you weren't allowed. They hurt more that way. So we had to make just flat paddles.

"Some of that may help now," Krasemann said. "It'd keep 'em in line."

But critics say spanking perpetuates a cycle of child abuse and hurts kids physically and emotionally. Corporal punishment, they say, isn't even sanctioned in prisons.

"Every generation thinks in the next generation that the world is going to hell," said Murray Straus, a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire and the co-founder of the Family Research Lab. "It's simply a myth that things were better in the old days. On average, children are better off now, socially and psychologically.

"And my belief," he said, "is that part of that improvement is that kids are getting hit less."

Consider old Brooksville unconvinced.

"You see way more kids now disrespecting their moms, their dads," Steele said. "You don't hear 'excuse me.' You don't hear 'please.' You don't hear 'thank you.' "

Plus, what came with the culture of that sort of punishment, said Merritt, the judge, wasn't just punishment.

"It was common for a teacher to hug a child," he said. "Everybody's families looked after everybody's children. And if you fell down and skinned an elbow or a knee, a teacher could make that feel better in about two or three minutes - just like mom would at home."

Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report. Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.

Forum today

YOU'RE INVITED

The Times invites the public to a panel discussion today featuring staff writer Michael Kruse, photojournalist Edmund D. Fountain and some of the residents featured in our "Brooksville: 150 Years" project.

The discussion about life in Brooksville through the years will begin at noon at Lykes Memorial Library, 238 Howell Ave., in downtown Brooksville. Refreshments will be served.

Scheduled to participate are longtime residents Murray Grubbs, Hazel Land, Neil and Freddy Law, Leland McKeown, Bruce Snow and Mike Steele.

[Last modified October 18, 2006, 21:46:43]