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school bus, was older than me. She would strong-arm me every morning and make me give her free candy.
    “No, it’s thirty cents,” I would tell her.
    “How about nothing?” Darla would say before grabbing a fistful of my hair.
    It made me so mad, but she was bigger than me, so there wasn’t much I could do about it. She goes to our church now, and I could definitely take her these days. She’s a tiny little woman, so it’s funny to think that I was once scared of her.
    After a few months of selling the candy, the principal called me to his office.
    “I’m hearing you’re selling candy to other students,” Mr. McCall told me. “Are you?”
    There was no denying it.
    “The concession stand’s sales are way down and they’re complaining about it,” the principal said. “I’m going to have to shut you down.”
    I quit selling the candy, but I still found other ways to make money. I sold everything from pencils and erasers to orange juice tops (which I claimed once sat on Abraham Lincoln’s eyes!). The kids were just used to giving me their money, so I found creative ways to take it. I would eat June bugs for fifty cents and sing on the school bus for a quarter. One of my favorite moneymaking schemes involved my turning into a human jukebox. Kids would put quarters under my arms, and I would start singing. The only songs I knew were the ones my older brother Alan had on eight-tracks. Foreigner’s “Juke Box Hero” was always the number one request, but I also sang songs by the Beach Boys, the Gap Band, Molly Hatchet, and Michael Jackson. I was the school bus entertainment. We went to a small country school so everyone lived far apart. I think we were on the bus about two hours each way, so this was a great way to pass the time.
     
    I WOULD EAT J UNE BUGS FOR FIFTY CENTS AND SING ON THE SCHOOL BUS FOR A QUARTER.
     
    Phil’s philosophy about education was a lot like his philosophies about everything else in life. If my brothers or I told Phil we wanted to quit high school, he would look at us and say, “You wanna drop out of school? Knock yourself out, but don’t come running to me.” Then Phil would tell us that he wouldn’t recommend quitting school. He would always tellus to make the best grades we could make, get our homework done, earn our diplomas, and get out of there. I’ve heard people talk about “helicopter parenting,” where the parents hover over their kids, watching their every move. There was no danger of that in our house. We were pretty much on our own and were expected to do the best we could do with it.
    Phil never told us we had to go to college or anything like that. If we woke up in the morning and decided we wanted to blow off school, we would just blow it off. Phil would never say anything about it. I never asked for Phil’s permission to stay home; if I didn’t want to go to school, I just didn’t go. But Phil always told me if I missed too many days and got kicked out of school, I would have to deal with the consequences. We missed the maximum amount of days you could possibly miss every year, mainly during hunting season. We took full advantage of sick days to spend time in the woods.
     
    Korie: This was not the case in my house. If you stayed home from school, you were going to the doctor, so you had to weigh the pros and cons. We took school seriously. We were never punished for making bad grades or anything like that; it was just expected that we’d work hard in school and do the best we could. And we did. Mom would say that school and the after-school activities we were involved in were our “job,” and we were expected to give it our all. If we started something, we couldn’t just quit it because we didn’t want to do it anymore. We had to finish what we started. If itwas a sport, we were part of a team and had a responsibility to our teammates to give it our best.
    Mom was big on our learning new skills, so I took everything from tennis to baton lessons,