Hmmm, lessee. Went to Catholic school in grades 1-5. The only actual "bully" I remember was from, like 2nd or 3rd grade and was simply FAR larger than anyone else. He was stupid and slow, but I guess size matters most at the younger ages so he ruled the roost as all of us walked home from school. You just had to go around him, is all, and a few years later he was not only not a threat but most of us who could reasonably take care of ourselves could have taken him down.
I escaped to public school in 6th grade. The first week there, I got into four fights on the playground. It wasn't until decades later that I realized this was straight up tribal sociology wherein, as the newcomer, I was now being tested in order to establish my place in the hierarchy.
Anyway, by the fearful standards of all you present day keyboard commandos suffuse in video game and Fox news hysteria, the fights were relatively tepid affairs -- some bloody noses but no bones broken and nobody was permanently maimed -- and I "won" them all and then, I guess, my place in the hierarchy established, they stopped.
But I remember the established "bully" then was Bobby Harper, again mostly because he was just LARGER than everyone else. But he never fucked with me, probably because he was already securely ensconced at the top of the hierarchy, and we actually became good friends.
Back in Catholic grade school, there was Tommy Roth. Rodo was his nickname. We got in a fight in 3rd or 4th grade when we had both been kept after school and taksed with cleaning the erasers and the nun was gone from the room. He sucker punched me and I took him down.
There was some lingering bad blood between us and we later got into a far more violent fight at our outdoor basketball court when he challenge me to a bet on a game and I won and he wouldn't pay and started mouthing off. This was when we were 15 or so.
Nobody liked or trusted Rodo. He was a straight up bad seed, a through and through dirtbag. I later heard that when he went to High School (Catholic) he went nuts, challenging all the larger, older, toughest guys to fights. I'm glad we no longer crossed paths because if there's one type you don't want to fight, it's a crazy person --superhuman, adrenaline-fueled powers and no reasonable quit.
While I was in college, I heard he was shot dead by a homeowner who caught him having broken into his home in a burgulary. Nobody was really surprised, and everyone felt sorry for his family.
In my local public High School, we all walked to school but historically a group from miles away Tinicum were bussed in as they had no HS of their own. They were the louts of our student body, and so there were several in my grades that had been "left behind" at least two grades and so were MUCH larger and bored and liked to fuck with you.
I remember John Hibberd relieved me of my trusty Timex and dropped it off the top of the outdoor bleachers and just said, "Oops" and there was little I could profitably do but go retrieve it. I also remember John Roosevelt sitting right behind me in home room and often low-grade fucking with me until I had to fight him, which I "lost" but during which I got in my licks and after which he more or less left me alone.
Then, for my last two years of HS my local, lovely, old school, decent, laid back, less than 600 in the entire student body Jr and Sr High School (grades 7 through 12), the oldest in the area, got swallowed up in school district consolidation into the 2,300 in three grades Ridley High.
2,300 in three grades. One way halls. ALL the bathrooms were permanently locked because the goombas had destroyed them. I'm not kidding, ALL the bathrooms in the entire school except one were permanently locked. They never lost a football game or a wrestling match. All the other high schools hated and despised us. Our wrestling coach once went up into the stands and fought with some opposing fans. NOTHING happened to him.
You may not have gotten to see every one at all, but somewhere in the school each and every day there was a violent fight. I did witness quite a few. There was about 20% black students who were bussed in from Morton but they ran scared and under the thumb of the mostly Italian blooded goombas who rules the roost.
There, I got wise and made strategic friendships very early on. I saw some true violence there, but had personal popularity and strategic protection and managed to avoid it all the entire two years.
One thing you had to watch out for almost primarily were the smaller, more wiry guys who felt they had something sized-based to prove and would pick on larger but less athletic guys and just WAIL on them unmercifully.
They often wouldn't stop that quickly once the guy was down and basically not resisting. That sucked to see.
Rodo's long dead. Bobby Harper inherited his parent's house next to their smallish lumber business which he also inherited. He has a shit ton of cash but dresses like a hayseed and drives a beat up pickup truck while he has both a Porsche 911 and the red Jag XK-E his parents bought him a his HS grad present in his tumble-down garage.
He's got a slew of dobermans who are barely trained and dangerously schitzy, which he seems to encourage, and keeps two loaded shotguns in his living room. He's let the house go to seed. He's really a nice guy, but if you didn't know him you'd be scared of him, and rightly so.
John Hibberd and John Roosevelt I long ago lost track of, but neither were ever destined to win life's lottery. Neither were really all that bad guys at all.
Ha ha, just remembered one last example.
There was one legendary black guy at Ridley High that nobody fucked with, not even the biggest, toughest goombas. He was only about 5' 6'' tall or so and must have weighed at least 250 lbs, if not more, but the guy was a freak of nature, he could move like a cat!
He had legs like tree trunks and he could move with a deadly swiftness, agility and speed that would astonish you. He was a champion wrestler who could never stay academically eligible. I never came up on his personal radar, thank God, but heard constant tales/complaints of how in gym class he would "lose" your gym basket contents for you after which you had no choice but to pay him to "find" them for you. Nobody ever declined.
Good times, growing up in the baby boom. We kids had unsupervised freedom after school and during the summers most of you would have trouble imagining. Ours was a true Kid's Republic.
I was tempered and annealed in the company of a broad cross-section of my peers, sans helicopter parents, and I wouldn't trade my experiences for anything. :thumbsup:
Ha ha, one last example that I'd forgotten, three Irish Catholic brothers, when I was still in Catholic elementary school. I had gotten in a fight with one of them, and gotten the best of him. I thought nothing of it, but one day afterwards when I'd come home from school my Mom told me that some other Mothers had called her to warn her that they'd heard rumors that all three were planning to jump me in the one stretch of woods we all walked through on the way home from school.
She told me to take the other, alternate route, but I don't think I did, iirc. We were pretty much friends and I wasn't really that afraid of them. Anyway, nothing ever happened.
That family moved to another adjacent Borough some time thereafter and I never heard from/of them again until their names were in the paper when we were all about 17-18. Seems they'd gotten into a dispute with another kid and subsequently waylaid him and beaten him TO DEATH with trashcan lids and were up on murder charges!