Just like out of a Hollywood script!

Tenth grade at LaMarque High School, just outside Galveston, TX., was not an especially fun time for me. I was 6 ft. tall and 145, and I got picked on pretty regularly...by a number of people who maybe just didn't like my looks. I was gawky and had, as I admitted to in an earlier blog, a ferocious set of buck teeth. I looked funny... squirrelly. I didn't have a girl friend, and except for a handful of friends from church, I was sort of a misfit.

One day, on a Monday morning, I arrived a little bit early for my first class of the day -- shop class. I had been making a mahogany bookcase -- it was nothing to write home about, but I was proud of it. I still have it. I won a first place ribbon at the Industrial Arts Fair, and was more proud of the ribbon than I was of the bookcase.

On this particular Monday morning, some of the guys in the class whose projects were further along than my own project, had left their wooden creations in the well-ventilated room where things were lacquered and left to dry. Someone had broken in over the weekend and had defaced a lot of the projects in this 'finishing room.'

The shop teacher, Burl Clayton, had not yet arrived, and, since my project had not been in the finishing room and had therefore not been vandalized, I was running some of my mahogany lumber over a machine called a jointer, which smoothes and cleans up the edges of wood boards. I am normally left-handed, and, as I was running the wood from my right to my left, holding the wood safely with both hands with a huge push-block(to keep hands and fingers away from spinning blades), I caught movement coming from my left.

It seems that some of the guys were sitting on tables in the finishing room, which was located near the entrance to the shop room. A hot-headed guy had come into the building and had gone to the finishing room to see his project. It had been gouged with a sharp instrument and was ruined. He flew into a rage and wanted to know who had done it. One of the guys who was sitting on one of the benches,looking around for someone to deflect the hothead's temper, piped up with: "Shoemake did it!" The other guys, seing the possibility of a fight, chimed right in: "Yeah, Shoemake did it."

The hot-head looked around and saw me working on the jointer, across the room. He grabbed a half-finished baseball bat and ran at me across the room, weaving among the work tables as he headed toward the open area. I caught side of him as he ran directly at me, with the baseball bat cocked over his right shoulder. He had rage in his eyes and on his face as he started swinging the bat directly at my head! In a self-protective reflex, I jerked the push block up with my left hand, to try and block the bat. He swung the bat and my push block caught the bat, not far from where his hands gripped the bat. Almost simultaneously, he slammed into me. The bat was leveraged from his grip, due to the push block's point of impact with the bat. As he plowed into me, and we both flew backward, I did something -- without having time to think about it -- that might have saved my life. At the very least it changed my life at that school!

As we flew backwards, I grabbed onto his shirt collar with my right hand. We were falling, with me about to be on the bottom of the pile! I pushed my right leg up and into him, not wanting to have him solidly on me. What happened next was pure luck --- a serendipity---something that could have been scripted for a movie.

As I held his shirt and then pushed outward with my leg into his body, I hit the concrete floor on my back. An amazing thing happened! He was catapulted over me as I hit the floor. He continued on -- now upside down --- and slammed into the wall behind us. He fell from the wall onto his head and was knocked out cold! I thought he was dead!

Although I knew nothing at all about self-defense in the tenth grade, and did nothing 'on purpose' to protect myself other than just react to a threat, like anyone would do, the guys who had seen what had happened, told the story all over school. In one day, I went from the skinny kid with buck teeth that the high school jocks loved to pick on and taunt, to the kid that nobody wanted to mess with! I was, in one day, thought to be 'BAD'...and that was GOOD...REALLY GOOD! I had no knowledge about protecting myself, but, as long as no one else knew that, I guess that was okay. Life got easier after that day in shop class. My attacker got in trouble, but I didn't, since I was on the receiving end of the trouble.

After that chance event, I decided to take self-defense training. Over several years, I learned a lot of helpful things -- among them, how to take a fall. That later saved my life, when I fell through the window at OCC years later. When you practice something for a long, long time, whatever you have learned can become a reflex---something you may be able to do without thinking about it.

It's often seemed odd to me how a chance occurrence can change ones' life....again, just like in a Hollywood script!