Hometown

My junior year civic’s class teacher was a Jules Legier.  One guy, two unusual names in a school full of Bob’s, Bill’s and Tom’s.

One day Mr. Legier chastised the entire class for not being able to spell “Crescent City.”  Evidently some of the students were having difficulty with the proper name of the town.

He scratched out the words “CRESCENT CITY” on the chalk board behind his desk. Mr. Legier then scribbled out the words”CRESENT CITY” The word “Crescent” was misspelled.

As soon as the class was seated, he launched into his talk about how they lived in Crescent City and that they should know how to spell it correctly and how he couldn’t understand why we couldn’t get it right. It didn’t make any sense to me either, because I knew how spell the name of my hometown.

Suddenly, Mr. Legier ordered me to the chalkboard, assigning me the task of spelling the name of my hometown correctly.  He erased the correct and incorrect spellings then handed me the chalk.

Like a good student, I obeyed Mr. Legier and promptly wrote down the correct spelling. The class snickered in unison as the teacher turned red.

Mr. Legier had forgotten where I lived.  On the chalkboard in white-yellow letters was the name “KLAMATH’ and it was spelled correctly.