There can not be a more good natured man in the world than Lt. Gikas. He had a car, a DKW, it was a little like a VW, except that the panels were flat and it’s 3cylinder motor only had 7 moving parts. As you can guess it didn’t weight very much. Every couple of days or so a group of larger students, would pick up his car and carry it off and hide it. The next day he would laugh and say something like, ‘You had me looking yesterday.’

Then one day, they saw a hay wagon parked down by the gym, so they put his car up on the wagon. Now not only did he have to find his car, he had to get help to get it off the wagon. The next day he parked his car under a tree and then put a chain around the tree and the front bumper. The students were stumped for a few minutes, then one of them noticed that there was another tree next to the one that the car was chained to, and the distance between the two trees, was about the same as the length of the car, so they picked up the back of the car and swung it around, wedging the car between the two tree. The next day word came down from above that students were not to touch faculty cars. Lt. Gikas was not the one that reported the incident. In fact later he told me that he was sorry that it was over, as it was a good game.

By Doug Collins

AKA Frenchie, class of 1958. He came to Elsinore from France for his senior year of high school specking very little English. So as good, well behaved teenagers we took upon our selves to teach Frenchie, English. We wanted to make it easy for him so we started with simple four letter words, you know the kind that you don’t use in front of your mother or school teacher, of course we didn’t tell him this as we didn’t want to confuse him small details. You can guess what happened next.

It was funny to us as when he would get frustrated or anxious, which was often, he would forget everything except for those four letter words. These long streams of unrelated and disjointed four letter would flow from his mouth, just like a stream after a spring thunder storm, and we would break in to laughter and the more we laughed the greater the torrent of words would become, until he would get red in the face and finally run out of breath and have to stop.

Another trick that we would play on Nesson, was to get behind him when he was writing. and in a low voice, but loud enough for him to hear us we would slowly say numbers like, 14, 25, 10, 38, etc., or we would start talking graphically about girls and what we wanted to do when we got home, and the next thing you know he would start writing down our every number or word until he would realize what he was doing and then that long stream of words would start again.

Thinking back now, I kind of feel sorry for all the embarrassment we caused him and I hope he has forgiven us uncouth Americans and that he has had a good life after he graduated from Elsinore as he was a really good guy.

Doug Collins, Class of 1958