On Guard Last of the Patrol Boys by Walter Jowers hen I was 11 years old, and in the sixth grade, I was one of four patrol boys at Burnettown Elementary School, in Burnettown, South Carolina. It was our job to escort the first-graders from the school to two points -- one east and one west -- about a half-mile from the school. After that, the first-graders were on their own. Last night, I told my 10-year-old daughter Jess about my patrol-boy days. She was astonished. "How did they pick you?" she asked. "Our mean old sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Rogers, just pointed at four of us and said, 'Y'all are the patrol boys.' That's the way things happened in those days." "Were there any patrol girls?" Jess asked. "No. Never. Girls weren't smart or careful or responsible enough to be patrol boys." (Okay, okay. I was kidding. But I wanted to see what she'd say.) "How old did you say you were?" Jess snapped back. "Eleven." Jess laughed uncontrollably for five solid minutes. "Girls weren't careful enough to walk first-graders home? And boys were?" "I don't know what to tell you," I shrugged. "I had the long patrol route. I had to actually walk the first-graders across the highway. Sometimes, I had to walk out into the road and stop traffic, using nothing but my hand. No whistle, no stop sign, no orange gloves." Jess just kept laughing, and shaking her head. "Eleven-year-old boys. Careful. Hahahahahaha." I must admit, she has a point. These days, what school administrator would put boys just shy of bomb-building age in charge of a bunch of first-graders? Away from the schoolhouse, with no adult supervision? For that matter, what first-graders walk home anymore? Perverts could snatch 'em up. Well, I don't know what's changed. But I do know this: When I was 11, you could count on a class of 30 sixth-graders containing at least four miniature honest-to-god men. Stand-up guys who could be trusted to protect their little schoolmates, rather than picking on 'em. By the time we were 16, some of the boys were volunteer firemen. We'd be sitting in algebra class, the alarm at the firehouse would start whooping, and a couple of boys would just jump up and run out to fight fire. All I can figure out is, we must have expected more out of boys in years past. It could be a Southern thing. Just after the Civil War, the men were mostly dead or mangled. The boys were the men. It could be an agrarian thing. When a boy was old enough to load a wagon, he had to load a wagon. These days, though, what do we expect of the boys? I think we expect just about the same thing from them that we expect from the girls. And I suspect the kids will set their goals pretty close to the adults' expectations. I know it won't happen, but let's just pretend a teacher had to pick a patrol squad today. Of course, she wouldn't choose just boys. And would she dare limit her choices to the alert, upstanding, responsible types? Nope. Most likely, the patrol children would be chosen by lottery, lawsuit, or both. If we'd done that back in Burnettown, Leon Lewis, the class criminal, could've ended up a patrol boy. Inside of a week, he would've had the first-graders stealing cigarettes for him. So, Jess is probably right to laugh at the thought of 11-year-old boys as protectors. I say that's a dang shame. Ten years from now, we'll need those little guys to guard the perimeter between the good and the not-so-good. In fact, I suspect we'll need all the protector-types we can get, girls included. If we want that, we'd better start expecting it of the kids, and we'd better encourage 'em to get a little protector practice in, starting now. We old patrol types aren't going to be around forever.