Do 'blue words' qualify you for presidency?

By DAN WHITTLE

As a second grader at my rural school, I beat out an older "town boy" in a "cussin' contest."\

Does that qualify me to run for U.S. President?

That's my grown-up question as the strange 2016 political campaign got down in the gutter early and has stayed there on up near the Nov. 8 voting day. The latest presidential debate underscores my dilemma.

Back to '52 in the school yard ...

Drama had been building about the impending school yard "cussin' contest" between me and third grader Larry D. Taul, who carried the title for two years as "champion cusser" of our farm school of advanced thinking and higher ciphering.

Second grade pretty little foxes Brenda Harlan, Rosemary Hopper, Ellen Campbell and Gladys Johns formed a cheer-leading squad for me, patterned after big girl cheer-leaders Margie Latham, Renda Chaney and Joann Summers, who cheered our high school Yellow Jackets' basketball team to stinging and glorious victories.

"Do you know about tomorrow morning's cussin' contest during recess?" my cheerleaders advertised through the halls of our little rural school.
"Little Danny Whittle can 'cuss a blue streak,'" bragged cheerleader Rosemary.

"Yes, but my third grade friend, Larry D., being older and knowing more curse words as a town boy, he's been champion cusser for two years," championed third grader Bonnie Jean Barnes, destined to be Little Danny's first "older woman" girlfriend when I was in fifth grade and she was in sixth.
Never will I forget my second grade cheerleaders' chant: "Danny, Danny, he's our man, if he can't cuss, nobody can."

I don't remember the actual "cuss word" that took out my third grade competitor, but I do recall with painful emphatic clarity the hard paddling I got that afternoon from our second grade teacher.

"Little Danny, I have it on good evidence that you knew the worst of the bad old blue words this morning out on the school yard," Mrs. Cox crowed between the board of education "whacks" across my buttocks.

I didn't mind that paddling as bad as the one I knew I would get at home that afternoon from Momma Whittle when I stepped off Earl "Eagle-eye" Jones' big yellow school bus.

Since telephones were yet to arrive in our swampy neck of the woods there by the Mississippi River, I've always wondered how Mother found out my mischief before I got home from town.

I still judge it cruel and unusual punishment when Momma Whittle required me to cut the switch she was about to admin-ister to my already black and blue (there's that word again) bruised behind. That's the day I understood why we named it the "weeping willow tree."
We didn't know the words as "curse words,' but as "blue words," as branded by my brothers' grandmother, Granny Grunt, and her generation.
I've always guessed the label "blue words" came from the phrase to "cuss a blue streak."

How did a 7-year-old country boy learn all those "old blue words?"

Mostly from two sources: First, I learned a lot of those biggo bad words while sitting on Daddy's knee when he gambled in the backroom of Nath Hewitt's farm town barber shop.

"Little Danny, don't say a word while I'm playing poker, and don't tell you Momma where we've been," was Daddy's firm instruction. I proudly kept both instructions.

First cousin Robert Terry "Goodboy" Reed and I learned some of the bluest of the blue "curse" words when farm neighbor men would band together and conduct organized rat-killing days up along the railroad tracks that sat up above the swamp water.

We may not have known what all those "blue words" meant, but we knew the words at an early age.
Why did cousin Terry carry the title of "Good Boy?"

He was smarter than me by never letting our parents hear him "jar down" on a big mouthful of "blue words."