Guns at achool

When I was about 15 I took Vocational Agriculture in high school. We lived in town so I had to rent a stall at the school farm to raise my project for the year (pigs). It wasn't really a farm, just a large lot, fenced, with a barn and a couple dozen hog pens. We had a grain grinder in the barn so that we could buy whole grains (cheaper than buying the feed grains grounds).

But there's a problem with grinding grain. The grain dust that gets all over everything attracts mice. And mice attracts snakes. This was in Sinton, Texas and snakes meant rattlesnakes.

It shouldn't have come to any surprise to any of us that one day one of the kids finially got bit by a rattlesnake. Our ag teacher told us that we should start bring guns to the school farm when we made our daily trips to muck the stalls and feed the pigs -- just for rattlesnake protection.

I think he meant something like a .410 shotgun, but I didn't have a gun. I told my daddy I needed a gun for school.

He was in the Army Reserve so he went out to the armory and got a .45 military pistol out of the small arms locker. He took me down to a creek and had me shoot at beer cans in the creek until I could sink one at about 20 feet. He figured that was good enough to shoot a rattlesnake so that's when he gave me the pistol to keep in the trunk of my car.

Things sure have changed since then (about 1964, maybe 1965).