Cloyce Construction

I have an old friend, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who told me something of an embarrassing tale from his school days. Oh, it wasn't all that embarrassing. But you need to remember the times, and his age when it happened.

Cloyce was in fourth grade and the teacher decided that he and his peers were old enough to write a short paper on what they wanted to do with their lives, what careers they might like to explore. So she arranged some time at the school library for the kids to check out books on whatever future her charges may have cared to look into.

Cloyce thought that he might like to build houses. That does seem to be precisely the sort of job a ten year old boy would think cool. When he was off to himself in the library, he found a book on a shelf called How to be a Homemaker. In his mind, he wanted to build houses, so home maker in the title made sense.

Remember this was fifty or sixty years ago, when career paths were very much based on Leave it to Beaver Americana. The homemaker Cloyce's book spoke of was housewife and mother. It was not what young Cloyce expected.

"I opened the book and commenced to reading, and I saw it was nothing like I thought," Cloyce explained. "So I looked around to see that no one else saw what I had, took the book to a drop box, and told the librarian what sort of books I actually wanted."

"I wasn't caught. Can you imagine if my buddies had seen me with that?" he asked me. 

It would have been bad for a fourth grader in 1970, no doubt.