A long bomb off the tee
Foreign writer Len Payne from Malabar has more folklore about World War II Lancaster pilot and Sydney professional golfer Dan Cullen (C8): “A great guy and a good friend. After a professional event in Germany, a local representative asked him if he had been to Germany before, Dan replied ‘never been during the day’.”
Thirroul’s Jeff Wall knows all about creative school assignments (C8): “Back in the 1960s we all saw weekends at the beach as equals but to match our female schoolmates attending ‘St Mary’s Star of the Sea’ we young men at Bulli High opted for the educational heights available to all at ‘Ursula Road Academy’.”
“It’s nice to see another Grandma Souffer (C8) and someone who knew my childhood home in Mark (Rooey) Roufeil,” says Suzanne Saunders of Wadeville. “Never forget the school motto: ‘Fuck you, Alice’ (sicut aliis) and the emblem is a dingo (named Alice) on a rock.
Paddington’s Geoff Maynard weighs in on the prefab classroom debate. “Speaking of Shacktown, my junior year (1971) classroom at Pennant Hills High School was one of a pair of ‘temporary’ aluminum demountable classrooms from the 1950s. It was a furnace in the summer and a refrigerator in the winter (unlike today’s cowards, there were no air conditioners, fans or heaters). If it rained, we had to read or do art because we couldn’t hear the teacher. When I walked by the school recently for the first time in many years, The ‘temporary’ classrooms were still there, at least 70 years old, and there were two more ‘temporary’ classrooms.”
Dermot Perry, from Mount Keira, was grinding coffee beans and reading the packet it came in: “The label said ‘apricot, caramel, peach, long milk chocolate fudge coating’. It tasted like coffee and reminded me of Graham Kerr, the ‘Galloping Gourmet’ who made fun of flavor descriptions in Australian wines.”
Beecroft’s astute Andrew Mowat saw holding on to one’s bush beginnings (C8) as a learning experience: “I must admit that I went to a sandstone college and lived in an adjoining sandstone college. I arrived there through a studentship and was greeted with some surprise. Their first question was usually ‘what does your father do?’ and when told he was the stationmaster ‘how many heads?’ he asked the question. “As the son of a Queensland railway worker in the far north, I was quickly learning how the world worked in the big smoke.”
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