No Spanking Zone

I needed to borrow my parent-in-laws' car. There was only one slight little problem; they were out of town. But we have a spare key to their house and I know where they hang the spare car keys. So I went over to, as the younguns say, "jack" the car key. My in-laws always let us borrow it before. I knew they would have let us borrow the car again but they weren't home to officially ask. Still, I felt a little nervous taking the car without asking. The key rack is under a cutesy wooden plaque that says GRANDPARENT'S PLACE. And dangling off the plaque, right next to the car key was a little painted piece of wood that reads NO SPANKING ZONE. Well that was a relief because I did feel a little naughty at that moment. But not to fear; this was a no spanking zone. The car keys were just hanging there – waiting for me to reach out and grab them. That's like the on-your-honor goodies tray. You're probably going to pay for your candy bar, but there isn't going to be any recrimination if you don't. You are on your honor. I looked at the keys. It was all good except for that little nagging problem of guilt. I'm part of generation that knows inculcated guilt. We received consequences for our actions. We lived in a spanking zone.

According to statistics, 98% of kids in my parents' generation ('40s and '50s) were spanked. When I was growing up that number was supposedly down to just below 90%. But I don't know if I believe those stats. I think the number was higher. Pop culture showed us that it was a required family practice. On TV alone; Andy spanked Opie, Laura spanked Ritchie, Mrs. Brady spanked Cindy, Samantha spanked Tabitha, Ricky spanked Lucy – well, maybe that one was different. Did Little Ricky ever get it? And can we talk cartoons and comics? And what about action shows like Bonanza and Wagon Train? Full grown women being spanked by rugged cowboys – but that's back to the Ricky and Lucy thing. Even as a little kid I suspected there was something else going on there. But I digress.

Sure, there were some kids who never seemed to get it. But that wasn't always good either. Being spanked is certainly better than the fear that Beaver Cleaver lived with. His father never touched him but the Beav seemed to live in fear that "Dad's going to kill me." I believe that same psychological abuse made him the supermarket opening celebrity that he is today. Contrast Mr. Cleaver (Mathers) with Sara Blakely, the creator of Spanx underwear. She claims that when she was a kid and about to be spanked she would go and put on all her day-of-the-week panties at once; a less detectable version of the board-in-the-pants. Today she is an underwear maven. You never know where inspiration will take you. Granted, her line of underwear will not protect you from assault, but if you wear enough of them…

Anti-spanking advocates claim that the prisons are filled with convicts who were spanked as children. They claim cause and effect. I claim correlation. They were spanked, and they are in jail, because they are bad people. If we want to believe in cause and effect then I better start walloping my kids because now we know, according to a study published in USA Today, that the nation's top CEOs were spanked as children. Just ask Sara Blakely. Then again, maybe spankings instill a desire to have a lot of money and acquire stuff. Whether you end up in the big office on the top floor or a little cell on the jail-block is just a consequence of career path. Both are after the same thing. AND just by the demographics alone you have to conclude that it would be odd if you could find convicts, CEOs, landscapers, truck drivers, presidents or astronauts who weren't. You could just as effectively argue that spanking makes you older.

Which is another point; today you have all these post-modern granola moms screaming that they can't stand by and watch this child abuse. When did spanking become abuse? Until last Tuesday it was never considered abuse. It was institutional. It was part of education. I started school in 1970. The elementary school where I attended handed paddles out to the volunteer lunch monitors. The cafeteria staff gathered the paddles up after lunch and stored them in a closet until the next lunch shift. The volunteers kept us little heathens in line while the teachers recouped in their lounge observing a deserved respite from their own toils and labor. They spent the days striving to mold us into productive individuals by applying stimuli to us on both ends. I have my own encounter-with-a-lunch-volunteer tale to tell, but that is for another time.

I attended first grade in a small village in Western Pennsylvania. We were a tough bunch to reach. At least weekly some fellow first-grade urchin was taken over the knee of our exasperated schoolmarm and given six good whacks or so. The rules demanded it. It was required to encourage better study habits and classroom deportment. The guilty party only hoped that no letter would be sent home or the operation would be repeated in the privacy of home. Looking back, domestically and institutionally, after the licks, neither the crime nor the punishment was ever brought up again. The slate was clean. Except for this, you weren't really accepted by the other boys until you went through your own proper orientation. There were two ways to undergo the rite of passage. Either suffer under Mrs. Shydow's paddle or be kicked in the butt by the gym teacher – without crying. I never was properly initiated. I think this was because my great-aunt taught at the school. She and my teacher didn't get along so well. Mrs. Shydow probably figured why stir the pot? So I had a modicum of protection. You really shouldn't mess with either side of my family. I believe that they are secret Sicilians. Even so, I think it a good thing we moved after my first year - the second grade teacher's paddle had holes in it.

But I didn't escape. We moved to South Carolina. You would think that the South would be worse. That is its reputation. In actuality, there was less corporal punishment, but that may have been because we attended school on Federal Property as the dependents of U.S. Servicemen. And most occurrences happened in the privacy of the Principal's office. But it could still happen from the teachers if they felt the necessity. I know because I have my own encounter-with-a-teacher to tell, but that is for another time. I can say that the dominant party to that encounter was my 4^th grade teacher, Miss Allen. I think she was my first real crush. She was young and nice and pretty and single. And then she had to go and spank me in front of the whole class including Katie Francis (who I hated). And thus the imprinting for my love life was solidified. Like Lucy and Ricky it could have worked out for me if I were older, but at 9 years old it's a deal killer. Someday I'll tell the whole story – the facts are different than you may think.

For story-time, Miss Allen would sit on her chair with us gathered around on the floor. She would read classics. Tom Sawyer opens with Aunt Polly catching the hero in the act and about to give him a lickin' for getting into the jam. Not one to let a prime teaching opportunity pass, Miss Allen expounded on the plot by commenting that children need a good spanking every now and then or they would become spoiled. None of us really knew what would be so bad about being spoiled. But according to her proscribed cure, I had no fear that I would ever become spoiled. She asked us, "How many of you are spanked at home when you've been naughty?" There were close to 30 kids in the class and everybody raised their hands, except for Katie Francis and Michael Lee.

I suppose that some of the kids who raised their hands weren't really raised that way at home. They could have been caving in to peer pressure and just saying they got spanked so they would be like everyone else. Who wants to be different from your friends when you are in elementary school? Maybe they were just lying. After all, they never got spanked for it. All of us noticed which children had their hands down. Michael Lee was sickly with thick glasses and a perpetual sniffle. He was too fragile to handle without care. Only a cruel adult would lay a hand on him. But Katie was a prime example to us that being spoiled was indeed an awful thing. We weren't like Katie. We almost wanted to write thank you letters to our parents. But we were afraid it would only serve to encourage them to redouble their efforts in our behalf. It would be more prudent to wait and express our gratitude to them when we were grown-up.

Back in the kitchen of my wife's parents, I looked at the sign on the wall. Why didn't they have these No Spanking Zones when I was a kid? Admittedly, I believe that through my parents' ministrations I did have improved behavior, but at the same time they may have inadvertently stifled some of my natural genius. Take for example my innate curiosity for the natural sciences. One unsupervised hour I was bouncing a marble against the sliding glass door to our patio while playing solitaire catch. The game was only challenging if I could toss the marble at sharper angles and at higher velocities. The glass was extremely thick and nothing bad could possibly happen. At some point a sniper decided to take a shot at me and a small bubble appeared on the other side of the glass. It had to be a sniper because the other side of the glass door was where the bubble was. Obviously, IF I HAD broken the glass then the hole would be on my side of the door.

I searched cautiously for the sniper's location. I considered that a friend may have come and seen my game and threw a rock at the door to mess with my head. But there was nobody out there. Curiosity began to get the best of me as a healthy skepticism dispelled my initial supposition. Could I have been the one to break the sliding glass door? Maybe, it slowly dawned on me, the other side of the glass had the bubble hole because the marble had blown out the fractured glass by the force. I decided to test this hypothesis. Instinctively knowing that methodology needed to be exact in order to prove repeatability of results I threw my marble at the other sliding glass door. Harder and harder I bounced it. Soon I was chucking it against the companion glass the way you throw a baseball against a barn wall. Whack, whack, whack – I tested the laws of physics with my little marble. Then, CRACK, it happened. There was a companion bubble hole on the second sliding glass door.

Wow! What do you know – it was me who had done it the whole time! I left my marble and the two rippled and bubbled holes in the patio doors (at right about adult eye level) satisfied in knowing that scientific methodology can discover the truth of the most baffling of puzzles. My enthusiasm was short-lived however. My mother discovered the remains of my experiment and, need I even say it, methodically conducted her own little trial testing the laws of physics; whack, whack, whack... I believe that this disapproval de rigueur discouraged my quest for empirical knowledge and killed my scientific career.

This pattern was repeated throughout my formative years. Seemingly innocent and innocuous incidents in my childhood led my parents to instill the inhibitions that I suffer with today. Painting our fading green Chevy Impala with a can of black spray paint possibly killed my artistic career, not to mention any interest in the auto body business. Studying pyrotechnics behind the house, aka playing with matches, killed my anthropological interest and proved that fire is not necessary to generate heat. Getting caught borrowing the neighbor's darts off his patio put an end to my sense of communal pride through shared ownership. I believe it's why I am not a democrat today. Actually, I'm not a republican either – and I'm sure someday I will find out how my parents ruined that for me too.

Through corporal punishment I learned lots of other important things as well. Hitting mom in the head with a slush ball on her way to a meeting – is not a good idea. Filling the toothpaste tube with Noxzema to trick your siblings but having it discovered by a parent is not a good idea. Filching goodies that were reserved for a visit from company is not a good idea. Well, not unless you wanted to sit on a pillow for dinner. Truthfully, did anybody ever have to do this?

In all honesty, I wasn't exactly traumatized by the experience. There were worse things. Being grounded was way, way worse. This was before TV's in bedrooms, video game consoles, iPods, cell phones and cable. Being kept in was practically the same as being put in solitary confinement. When mom gave the choice between grounded for the rest of the day or a spanking, we took the lickin'. It was easier on her, too. 30 seconds and she was done. She didn't have to enforce a penalty for the rest of the day. We were back outside trying to not do again what got us called inside in the first place. Anecdotally I can testify to the efficacy of a spanking. But as the aforementioned Thomas Sawyer philosophized, "Shucks, what's a licking!"

You can't blame our predecessors for observing this practice. Culture is cruel and society is fickle. Back then you were a bad parent if you didn't spank, they could take your kids away from you. Today, the same nosey busybody types claim you are a bad parent if you do, they could take your kids away from you. It's just so confusing. Which brings us back again to the No Spanking plaque in the kitchen. I guess traditional parents can find absolution if they forsake its use on their grandchildren.

I called my wife to let her know the keys were there. And I told her about the sign, "Looks like a free pass, Babe." Wisely, she reminded me that the plaque reads Grandparent's Place. It didn't apply to their children. She is in the same 90% that I am and knows that by experience. The sign was not there when she was growing up. Her conclusion (one in which I mentally stretched for a loophole), I wasn't a grandchild so the contractual obligation on the wall was null and void as far as my person. Aside: Please tell me why the small print in a contract always works against me?

I stood hesitantly in the kitchen and stared at the sign. Suddenly inspiration hit me. A loophole appeared. Then, in the interest of self preservation and personal security, I let my daughter – their grandchild - take the keys. I also let her drive. I congratulated myself; if you are smart you can usually find a way. However, my wife, the tattletale, in a move reminiscent of Katie Francis, casually told her parents on the phone that, "Rick borrowed your car while you were gone." Her ulterior motive is still suspect. OK, sure my in-laws said that it was fine and everything was okay. Even so, I was tempted to wear a board in my pants the next time we went over to visit. Just in case.