The song Lucy is based on some of my experiences from the first grade. I started first grade in 1968. Kids in my school would usually wear nice clothes to school every day. Occasionally, the girls would wear dresses. One day some of the boys in the class were talking about a specific girl that wore a dress and she had a hole in her panties. One of the guys claimed to have actually seen it. This discussion started while we had some free time in the class. It was suggested that we start crawling under the table to look. Someone even said we should crawl between the legs of the chair. The chairs in our classroom looked much like the one in the picture below. It would be impossible for the smallest kid in our class to successfully do this and go undetected. Needless to say, no one ever crawled under the table or the chair. We never confirmed this rumor.
I know I will have some friends who are wondering who “Lucy” is. I cannot remember which girl in my first grade class we were talking about. There was no one in our class named Lucy. That is one of the reasons I selected that name. If someone from my first grade class remembers who this was, please tell me. I would like to know.
In the song, I also talk about the boys being lined up in front of the class. This did happen but was completely unrelated to the Lucy incident. Our first grade classroom had a set of wooden blocks of varying shapes and sizes. One day we had some playtime inside and our teacher stepped outside of our room for just a moment. It was long enough for a full-fledged block fight to breakout among all the boys in the class. As our teacher returned, a wooden block buzzed by her head. This was at a time when getting a paddling at school was fairly common. This seemed to be the perfect reason to for paddlings to occur and we had the first grade teacher that was known for being the mean teacher. No one ever got a paddling in our first grade class. But for our block fight, we were subjected to public shaming. We were lined up at the front of the class and asked one by one if we had done wrong and if we were sorry.
