Teacher Trouble
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About this ebook
Paul Hutchens
The late PAUL HUTCHENS, one of evangelical Christianity's most prolific authors, went to be with the Lord on January 23, 1977. Mr. Hutchens, an ordained Baptist minister, served as an evangelist and itinerant preacher for many years. Best known for his Sugar Creek Gang series, Hutchens was a 1927 graduate of Moody Bible Institute. He was the author of 19 adult novels, 36 books in the Sugar Creek Gang series, and several booklets for servicemen during World War II. Mr. Hutchens and his wife, Jane, were married 52 years. They had two children and four grandchildren.
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Reviews for Teacher Trouble
7 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Sugar Creek Gang is still having teacher trouble. Some other people outside the Gang are trying to get them into trouble. The Gang causes a bit of it when they make a snowman that looks like Mr. Black, their teacher, and he sees it. Little Jim never thought it was a good idea. Other things happen that makes matters worse. Like somebody nailing a board over the chimney while a fire's going like one of the characters did in the Gang's favorite book. To make it look even more like the Gang did it, the board that was across the chimney, was part of Bill's swing, and the trouble makers used Bill's ladder. In this book, you'll learn that Bill does not know how to walk on a roof! Awesome book! Almost just as good as " One Stormy Day". Oh, Man it's a good book!
Book preview
Teacher Trouble - Paul Hutchens
America
PREFACE
Hi—from a member of the Sugar Creek Gang!
It’s just that I don’t know which one I am. When I was good, I was Little Jim. When I did bad things—well, sometimes I was Bill Collins or even mischievous Poetry.
You see, I am the daughter of Paul Hutchens, and I spent many an hour listening to him read his manuscript as far as he had written it that particular day. I went along to the north woods of Minnesota, to Colorado, and to the various other places he would go to find something different for the Gang to do.
Now the years have passed—more than fifty, actually. My father is in heaven, but the Gang goes on. All thirty-six books are still in print and now are being updated for today’s readers with input from my five children, who also span the decades from the ’50s to the ’70s.
The real Sugar Creek is in Indiana, and my father and his six brothers were the original Gang. But the idea of the books and their ministry were and are the Lord’s. It is He who keeps the Gang going.
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
1
One tough guy in the Sugar Creek territory was enough to keep us all on the lookout all the time for different kinds of trouble. We’d certainly had plenty with Big Bob Till, who, as you maybe know, was the big brother of Little Tom Till, our newest gang member.
But when a new quick-tempered boy, whose name was Shorty Long, moved into the neighborhood and started coming to our school, and when Shorty and Bob began to pal around together, we never knew whether we’d get through even one day without something happening to start a fight or get one of the gang into trouble with our teacher. On top of that, we had a new teacher, a man teacher, who didn’t exactly know that most of us tried to behave ourselves most of the time.
Poetry, the barrel-shaped member of our gang, had made up a poem about our new teacher, whom not a one of us liked very well at first because of not wanting a new teacher. We’d liked our pretty woman teacher so well. This is the way the poem went:
The Sugar Creek Gang had the worst of
teachers,
And Black
his name was called.
His round red face had the homeliest
of features;
He was fat and forty and bald.
Poetry was always writing a new poem or quoting one somebody else wrote.
Maybe it was a library book that was to blame for some of the trouble we had in this story, though. I’m not quite sure, but about the minute my pal Poetry and I saw the picture in a book called The Hoosier Schoolmaster, Poetry had a very mischievous idea come into his mind, which he couldn’t get out, no matter how he tried.
This is the way it happened. I was staying at his house one night, and just before we went to sleep we sat up in his big bed for a while, reading and looking at that picture. It was a full-page glossy picture of a man schoolteacher up on the roof of a country schoolhouse, and he was holding a wide board across the top of the chimney. The schoolhouse’s only door was open, and a gang of tough-looking boys was tumbling out along with a lot of smoke.
Have you ever read the story?
I said to Poetry, and he said, No, have you?
and when I said No,
we both read a part of it. The story was about a teacher whose very bad boys in the school had locked him out of the building. He smoked them out just the way a boy smokes a skunk out of a woodchuck den along Sugar Creek.
That put the idea in Poetry’s head and then into mine, and it stayed there until a week or two after Christmas before it got us into trouble. Then, just like a time bomb going off, suddenly that innocent idea, which an innocent author had written in an innocent library book, exploded.
It was a fine Saturday afternoon at our house with bright sunlight on the snow and the weather just right for coasting. I was standing by our kitchen sink, getting ready to start drying a big stack of dishes, which my mom had just rinsed with steaming hot water out of the teakettle.
I was reaching for a drying towel when Mom said, Better wash your hands first, Bill,
which I had forgotten to do, as I do once in a while. I washed my hands with soap in our bathroom, came back, grabbed the towel off the rack by the range, and started in carefully wiping the dishes.
I didn’t exactly want to. The clock on the shelf said it was one o’clock, and the gang was supposed to meet on Bumblebee Hill right that very minute with our sleds. We were going to have the time of our lives coasting, and rolling in the snow, and making huge balls and snowmen and everything.
You should have seen those dishes fly—that is, they started to!
Be careful,
Mom said and meant it. Those are my best dinner plates.
I will,
I said, and I was for a while, but my mind wasn’t anywhere near those fancy plates Mom was washing and I was drying. In fact, I thought there wasn’t any sense in washing them anyway, because they weren’t the ones we had used that day at all. They’d been standing on the shelf in the cupboard for several months without being used.
I don’t see why we have to wash them,
I said, when they aren’t even dirty.
We’re going to have company for dinner tomorrow,
Mom explained, "and we have to wash them."
"Wash them before we use them?" I said. It didn’t make sense. Why, that very minute the gang would be hollering and screaming and coasting down the hill and having a wonderful time.
Certainly,
Mom said. We want them to sparkle so that, when the table is set and the guests come in, they’ll see how beautiful they really are. See? Notice how dull this one is?
She held up one that hadn’t been washed yet in her hot sudsy water or rinsed in my hot clear water, or wiped and polished with my clean dry towel, which Mom’s tea towels always were—Mom being an extraclean housekeeper and couldn’t help it because her mother had been that way too. And being that kind of a housekeeper is contagious, like catching measles or smallpox or mumps or something else boys don’t like.
For some reason I remembered a part of a book I’d read called Alice in Wonderland. It was about a crazy queen who started to cry and say, Oh! Oh! My finger’s bleeding!
And when Alice told her to wrap her finger up, the queen said, Oh no, I haven’t pricked it yet,
meaning it was bleeding before she had stuck a needle into it, which was a fairy story and was certainly crazy.
So I said to Mom, "Seems funny to wash dishes before they’re dirty—seems like a fairy story, like having your finger start bleeding before you stick a needle in it." I knew she had read Alice in Wonderland, because she’d read it to me herself when I was little.
But Mom was very smart. She said, with a mischievous sound in her voice, That’s a splendid idea. Let’s pretend this is Bill Collins in Wonderland and get the dishes done right away. Fairy stories are always interesting, don’t you think?
I didn’t right then, but there wasn’t any use arguing. In fact, Mom said arguing wasn’t ever polite, so I quit and said, Who’s coming for dinner tomorrow?
I wondered if it might be some of the gang and hoped it would be. I didn’t know a one of the gang who would notice whether the dishes sparkled or not, although most of their moms probably would.
Oh—a surprise,
she said.
Who?
I said. My cousin Wally and his new baby sister?
Perhaps you know I had a homely, red-haired cousin named Walford, who lived in the city and had a new baby sister. Mom and Dad had been to see the baby, but I hadn’t and didn’t want to. And I certainly didn’t exactly want to see Wally, but I would like to see his wacky Airedale, and, if Wally was coming, I hoped he would bring the wire-haired dog along.
It’s a surprise,
Mom said again, and at that minute there was a whistle at our front gate.
I looked over the top of my stack of