chin up champion of the third grade

When I was in the third grade, living in England, on Lakenheath Air Force Base, I went to school in a Quonset hut. A Quonset hut looks like a large, corrugated aluminum can cut in half and laid on its side. My third grade teacher was a man, the first time in my entire 4 years of education up to that point (counting kindergarten) I had even seen a man teacher, let alone be taught by one (sadly, I don't remember his name - so he shall be called Mr. Johnson). I liked Mr. Johnson and learned a lot in the third grade. The class I was in was the accelerated class, something they did regularly in the Air Force, which I thought was a good thing. So, the students in the class were all the go getters from the third grade.

Our first day of class, we all came in and saw the classroom. It was very cool from my point of view. We had an aquarium. The bottom of the aquarium was covered with hundreds (maybe thousands) of marbles. I came to know later that our teacher Mr. Johnson, took wayward marbles from students who could not keep them in their pockets or lunch boxes and dropped them with great drama and ceremony into the aquarium. I think I lost one marble to the watery depths but no more.

There were maps and charts and other large poster pictures on all the walls. In one of the door ways, connecting our classroom with another on the other side of the Quonset hut, above the standing reach of any of the students, was a sturdy bar, fixed in place with rubber stops at each end. This was the chin up bar. Over the course of the school year, we had multiple competitions involving the chin up bar, seeing who could do the most at one time. My chief and closest rival, pushing me to do better in each battle was my next door neighbor, Susan. I remember one particular battle, when she went first. She did an unbelievable number of chin ups for a third grade girl (or boy). As I got on the chair to grab the bar, I had only one thought, "I have to beat her." I started off fast and furious, knocking out chin up after chin up. As I got about 2/3's of the way there, I started to get a little tired and felt a little tightening up. In the competitions, the only way you could rest was to be in the up position. I pulled myself up, gathered myself and finished up with several more chin ups, passing her by one. I dropped to the ground as the class cheered, gave a tired but happy smile to Susan and went back to my desk, the class champion.