** The Sad, Sad Story of “Principal and Secretary” ** Sometime back around the year 2000, there was a music service called “Napster.” You could download any files they had there—primarily music—for free. Naturally, for people who used the internet and liked music, it was a great thing. Record companies and people trying to sell music hated it with a passion, finally suing the service and bringing it down, in the form that it existed. I was one who took advantage of the service. The idea was to take some files, but also contibute to the pile ‘o files available for taking. Napster kept statistics you could see on what was popular, giving the count of how many people downloaded the file. At that time—I think maybe 2003 or 2004--I was busy scanning the 1958 and 1959 Marsh Fork High School yearbooks for my friend Gracie Stover to include on the marshfork website, which she was still in the process of working on. Since I had all of those MFHS picture files available, I thought that maybe it would be an OK idea to share one of those Bulldog-themed photographs on Napster. So I selected a nice one out of the 1958 Marsh Fork High School yearbook. It showed Claude Worley the principal at MFHS, along with Norma Dickens, who was the school secretary. I had called the picture “Principal and Secretary,” never dreaming of the popularity of that photograph and of what twisted thoughts it might elicit! Looking at the count of how many people had downloaded it, within the first hour of its being up, over 500 people had gone for it. And the number of additional downloads for it was climbing by the minute! The only reason that I could guess as to its popularity was that the title somehow excited thoughts of depraved and salacious activities of a crazed boss and his willing accomplice. But the thought of both those people in my photograph being into something “kinky” was totally laughable. I know that both Norma Dickens (Secretary) and Claude Worley (Principal) were totally upright, morally respectable persons for whom even the thought of impropriety would have been repellent. But those Napster people kept on a-downloadin’, a-dreamin’ their repellent dreams... Yee haaa, Uncle Jed!!! The picture is right here. I see two hard-working, sincere people who did separate jobs, but who served the people of Marsh Fork High School to the best of their ability!
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 01:26:52 +0000
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