In my younger days, I attended McClain Elementary school, the oldest and best school in town. Its faculty educated three generations of my family, and it closed after my final year. Obviously, they realized that they could have no better student than me and decided to shut the doors.
McClain was an old building with no air conditioning and plenty of asbestos. I can remember the staircases, the coat rooms, the cafeteria that doubled as the theater and the playground. There was also a huge field behind the school that was used for field day and other outdoor activities.
It makes me feel old to say that it was a simpler time, but, when it came to elementary education, that is the truth. We had no computers, no iPhones, no Internet. Heck, we did not even have televisions in the rooms. We had teachers who took pieces of chalk and wrote on blackboards. We even had those old-timey desks that had holes for ink bottles. That is the definition of simple.
That is also the definition of being cut off from the rest of the world. We did not have information at our fingertips, and McClain felt like its own world. While the teachers may have known what was going on out there, we students had to make educated guesses. This was really difficult during that time of year when it was cold enough to snow and everyone wanted to be out of school.
That is when the rumors would begin. It would start simply enough. Some kid would say that he heard the teachers talking about the weather. According to them, it was snowing in Memphis. As every little kid knew, weather always hit Memphis before it hit here.
Before you knew it, the word was spreading, and everyone was hearing that it was snowing in Memphis. It was only a matter of time. It would start snowing, and we would be getting out of school. However, there was a fundamental problem. When word got out that it was snowing in Memphis, we never got out of school.
Obviously, skullduggery was afoot. Something was wrong. It took many years for me to figure out exactly what happened. First, it was probably not snowing in Memphis. Second, if it was snowing in Memphis, then it would never get here fast enough to get us out of school.
We got plenty of snow days, but the old “snowing in Memphis” rumor never did work out.
SBI: A Thinning Crowd 