I wish I had more old photos of my days at Branch Elementary School in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley, which I attended between 1958 and 1966.

I started at the 1880s schoolhouse, but in 1962, we moved into one of those Sputnik School of Architecture schools that was twice as big as the old school.  It had four rooms.

I remember seeing one photo of me, Dennis Gularte, and it might’ve been Melvin Cecchetti, all decked out like cowboys, down to chaps and Mattel Fanner ’50s (“If it’s Mattel, it’s swell!”) on our hips.

For the uninitiated, a “Fanner ’50″ is a replica double-action Old West six-shooter that allows your shorter Old West gunfighter to get off approximately 1,200 shots without reloading. It was a marvel.

That was back in the days when gunfights on the playground were still culturally permissible, although they were limited to Fridays, which remains my favorite day of the week.

There was even a glorious, if very brief, time–our teachers would decide to draw the line at high-capacity ammunition drums–when the television show The Untouchables was popular and so we re-enacted the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre with Mattel-It’s-Swell Tommy Guns.  We died spectacular deaths after we had lined up, hands up, against one wall of the school. We took turns pretending to be the Moran Gang victims and Capone’s button men. We were a democratic bunch.

The girls on the swings just thought we were gross.   But they were girls, mind you, and they liked to pretend they were horses, which we found damned peculiar.

We liked to pretend we were ’62 Corvettes.

So us Branch School kids–all 70-odd of us, first through eighth grades– were both rootin’ and tootin’. But we also could be very good.

The entire third and fourth grades went on a field trip to Morro Bay, in a little yellow bus driven by Elsie Cecchetti, whom I will always love, and we all walked through the crew quarters of the Coast Guard cutter Alert without awakening the young man busy contradicting the cutter’s name, snoring softly in his bunk. We were impressed with how white his underwear was.  The Coast Guard is a well-laundered service branch.

During that tour, we requested, but were denied, authorization to fire off a few rounds from the 40-mm Bofors gun on the forward deck, which put quite a damper on an otherwise fine outing. It would’ve lifted or spirits and sustained us when, later in the day, we had to visit the abalone processing plant.

Abalone, we discovered, have little Stage Presence, so we watched, stifling yawns, as they lay lifeless and inert, pounded with wooden hammers, by sad, unfulfilled men, until they achieved abalonability.

Years later, with a shock of recognition, I saw the same abalone factory ennui when I took some of my AGHS European history students to Munich and ate schnitzel in a massive auditorium while an oompah band performed and two girls, in traditional costume, more or less danced.  It must’ve been about their eighth performance of the day, in front of masses of greasy-cheeked, ungrateful American teenagers–except for our kids, of course– and dancing with gleeful abandon was just not in their repertoire.

By the time the disconsolate abalone pounders had finished with their victims, they looked disgusting, like Neptune’s cow patties. By the time we were old enough to realize that they were tasty, they had all been eaten. Sea otters were the alleged culprits, but my money was always on the Morro Bay Elks Club.

[Clams are no more stimulating than abalone, by the way. The second-best show-and-tell ever, other than Tookie Cechetti’s fingertip in a vial of alcohol, lost in a saber-saw accident, was the Pismo clam Dennis Gularte and Melvin Cecchetti attempted to keep alive in the classroom sink in the new school. Clams have all the entitlement and ingratitude of the Kardashian sisters and are only marginally smarter. Our clam said little during the school day, showed little interest when we tried to push a length of kelp, which we know had to be yummy, through its shell’s opening, and then did nothing at all for about another day. Dennis ate it.]

By the way, we didn’t always have the luxury of Elsie’s school bus. We first had a pickup painted school bus yellow, with two benches bolted to the truck bed and a tarp over the top, and when we crossed the creek, we all bounced like a bagful of marbles and squealed with delight.

Not everybody enjoyed the pickup. One morning, one of us got sick, and we decided he’d had scrambled eggs for breakfast.

We also used to go to Poly Royal, the local college’s open house, and loved that jet engine fired off in Aeronautical Engineering, before the event deteriorated into the kind of Roman Bacchanalia that would make Caligula blush.

We most of all loved the biology department, because its centerpiece was the genuine stuffed two-headed calf.

We spent some time pondering another of their exhibits, an aquarium tank full of bullfrog tadpoles that was labeled, soberly, “Elephant Sperm.”

In our day, Branch no longer had the steeple and bell that originally was standard equipment for rural schoolhouses, but it did have the first multi-purpose room in San Luis Obispo County.

The hallway in between the two classrooms was used for both hanging up your coat and for beating students with yardsticks. This encouraged us to learn harder and accounts for why, to this day, I still know all my state capitals, down to the fact that Pierre, South Dakota, is pronounced, “Peer,” of which our teachers had none.

Yes, in that hallway, Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Fahey had perfected a technique called “Bad Cop, Other Bad Cop.”

They wore Eleanor Roosevelt cotton print dresses, our teachers did, which made them look, even then, like exhibits from a fashion museum, but either one could’ve humiliated Roger Maris in pre-game batting practice at Yankee Stadium.

They also would’ve made Billy Martin sit perpetually in the corner of the Yankee dugout, his nose pressed against the water cooler, which, given Martin’s notorious partying, might’ve considerably lengthened Mickey Mantle’s career.

The powdered soap dispensers out back were incorporated into language lessons, which is why there are only two documented instances of That Word being uttered with impunity at Branch Elementary between 1888 and 1962, and I believe one of those involved a carpenter and the other a school board member.

It’s a home today, and painted yellow, but in our day it was pink, sheathed in what I think what former classmate Michael Shannon has said were asbestos shingles, which serve as wonderful insulation, but, by the time you’re in your fifties, your school days suddenly begin to produce clouds of what look like chalk dust every time you sneeze.

For the health-conscious reader, not to worry. On summer mornings, when school wasn’t in session, my favorite thing to do was to wave at the biplane that crop-dusted the fields next to our house and then go frolic and gambol in the clouds of herbicide.

Of course, in those days, everybody smoked (Camel shorts), soon after they’d taken their first steps (“JIMMY’S WALKING! Here, son, light one up on Pop!”), and the only seat belts in use were those fastened around Ham, the Space Chimp, the precursor to the Mercury astronauts.

We were a hardy breed, us Baby Boomers. Hack. Wheeze.

There were good things, too, mind you, like actual Pismo clams–all from the extended family of our classroom clam–at Pismo Beach. You didn’t even need a clam fork. They’d just walk up to you and surrender, as if it were North Africa, not Pismo, and they were the Italian Army. But I digress.

The point is that I just don’t have to seem a single picture from those days except of my eighth grade graduation when, of course, I looked not just like a dork, but like a PARODY of a dork. So if there are any in your collection at home, Arroyo Grandeans, I’d love to see them.

But none, please, of Mrs. Brown.  She still makes my palms sweaty.