“The Merry Month of May” was the title of a poem written by someone named Thomas Dekker in 1599. I don’t know what May 1599 was like for Good Old Tom, but for me in 2025 it was anything but merry. Looking back, I see it as grey, cold, rainy, and about as merry as a five-mile funeral cortege.

But that was then, this is now, with summer on its sweet, hot way — or so I hope.

Ah yes, summer — The Great Emancipator of my Youth.

In seventh grade, my burning up with spring fever while thinking only of summer began. To me then, school was the equivalent of involuntary servitude. For the most part, each class was too long, each school day was too long, and each school year was FAR too long.

By early May I was chompin’ at the bit to break out the corral, as it were. By early June, I’d chomped THROUGH it. But instead of breaking out, I was yoked to the Petrova Plantation till my term of servitude for that year was over. And when it was, there were five more to go. I rankled about the injustice of it all: Indentured servants usually served a term of six years; when all was said and done, I’d have served 12.

How did I know so much about indentured servants? It was because of my 7th and 8th grade history teacher, Grace Kiernan. She was most knowledgeable about early America, probably because that’s when she came of age. Obviously, she was blessed with great health to have lived that long, and blessed even more with great luck, having survived the gallows in Old Salem Town.

But other than indentured servitude, I didn’t learn much else in her class, nor in fairness to her, did I learn much in any of the others. The sad fact was I couldn’t concentrate — at least not in school. Once out of school, my concentration was first-rate. I could concentrate on wandering in the woods, reading Mad magazine, finding returnable bottles to keep my candy jones at bay and staying up late listening to Cousin Brucie on 77 WABC.

So it should come as no surprise that my public school career was at best undistinguished. At least that’s the word I used. My mother the overseer and someone who minced neither pies nor words, preferred the label “disgraceful.”

While my academic performance was hopeless, I, myself, was the exact opposite — full of hope, from the top of my curly blond locks to the bottom of my PF Flyers. Unfortunately, while I had hopes, I had no work ethic to accompany them. In short, I HOPED to get good grades and thus end my mother’s near-constant hectoring. But I didn’t actually DO anything to please the old girl, like…uh…maybe study.

But I got by. OK, it was by the skin of my teeth, but I did get by. And this, my pathetic excuse for success, allowed me to spend my free time in lighthearted boyish amusements. I flew kites (or at least tried to). I whittled branches (and often chunks of my thumb). I had a Duncan sleeper yoyo and a cool spinning top I got in New York (unavailable here). But my main hobby in the last few weeks of school was indulging in hydrological hi-jinks — or in plain English, squirt guns.

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Frontier IN-justice

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The first squirt gun was patented by a Brooklyn businessman named Russell Parker in 1897. It was called the U.S.A. Liquid Pistol and was made of nickel, the water contained in a rubber bulb in the handle. Most amazingly, it cost 40 cents cash money, roughly the equivalent of $33.00 today. Of course, as a kid I didn’t know doodle about squirt gun history, nor would I have given a jot if I had. Mostly what I cared about — other than drenching my fellow miscreants — was concealed carry.

Concealed carry was no concern when I was roaming in The Free World. Back in those simpler times, most adults thought of boys as fundamentally goodhearted but mischievous scamps, maybe like escapees from a Norman Rockwell painting: Bright-eyed, tousle-haired, big grins on dirt-streaked faces, soda bottle in hand, slingshot in back pocket, heading out to skinny dip in the crick.

Of course that kid existed only in the popular imagination — much like a lot, if not most, of our national icons. No matter, his illusory aspect gave us the benefit of the doubt when it came to close observation and strict judgment. And so a lot of our antics were forgiven, and maybe even excused, under the classic dictum, Boys Will Be Boys.

But that Boys Will Be Boys shtick meant nothing once you stepped into the hallowed halls of good ole SLHS. You did what you were told; you didn’t do what you were told not to do; and while you got no reward for the former, you got punished for the latter. That sentence should’ve been on a big bronze plaque over the main entrance and recited each morning along with the Pledge of Allegiance. And though not stated, but clearly understood, was the ironclad rule that teachers did NOT negotiate with terrorists.

And that, dear reader, was the reason for concealed carry, which, while perfectly easy to understand, was bloody hard to pull off. If you ask why that is, you obviously know nothing about the squirt guns of 1958. They shot just fine, but they leaked like a rotten roof.

This left me and my fellow aquatic hit boys with only three options. One was to keep it empty in school. The second was to leave it in your jacket, in the cloakroom. And the third was to stash it in your pants pocket. The first two were not options. Every red-blooded American lad who belonged to the NSGA knew unloaded or an inaccessible squirt guns were each as useless as the other.

This left us with one choice — the pants pocket carry. Or more exactly, the TELLTALE pants pocket carry, because it was pretty obvious you either had a squirt gun on you or you’d whizzed your drawers. And since seventh graders were long past their drawer-whizzing years (at least the first set), your gun-slinging days might not be over, but your gun-slinging DAY sure was.

Then, justice being swift and due process nonexistent, your squirt gun was now the property of the teacher who snagged it.

And what did they do with it? Good question.

They had choices. If the quality of mercy was not strained, they gave it back to you at the end of the school day. If they wanted to let you know they meant business, they did NOT give it back. And if they were on a power trip and had a flair for the theatrical, they’d stomp it into a million pieces in front of the whole class.

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Shocking update

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Last week I was talking about this to a young guy (someone in his mid-30’s, clearly a product of these permissive times) and he was shocked.

“They didn’t give you the squirt gun back?” he said.

“Hell no,” I said.

“And they’d even bust it in front of everyone?”

“Hell yes,” I said.

“How could they do that?” he said, clearly outraged. “It was your property!”

“Because it was against the rules,” I said. “We were wrong, and we knew it, and that was that.”

“What would your mother have said?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said, “cuz you can bet your bip I’d never tell her. And if I did, she’d tell me what a nitwit I was for doing it in the first place.”

“That sounds really unfair,” he said.

“Maybe to you now, but not back then,” I said. “Besides, let’s face it, if I got caught, I knew I was a nitwit too.”

He shook his head.

“Still doesn’t sound right,” he said.

“Beyond the ethics, there was one major mitigating factor,” I said.

“What’s that?” he said.

“They only cost a dime,” I said. “Right after school, I’d peel down to Newberry’s, cop another one, and live to squirt another day.”

By the way, my weapon of choice did indeed cost only a dime. It was a small, futuristic, space derringer called a Wee Gee. They came in two sizes, the small ten-cent one, and a bigger one for fifteen cents.

On a whim, and to see if my memory was accurate, I Googled “Wee Gee squirt gun.” And — lo and behold! — not only did pics of them pop up, but scads of them are for sale.

Used ones are going for about ten bucks. But catch this: There was one in the original package and they were asking $28.00.

Twenty-eight simoleons for a Wee Gee, and a small one at that? That’s 280 times its original price, for pete’s sake!

Currently, people are all in a tizzy about our increased inflation and all the tariff madness — and rightly so. But lemme tell ya something: All those prices are a pittance compared to the cost of today’s nostalgia.