Not that Gov. Ben Cayetano wants to return to the days of ruler-wielding teachers who hit first and ask questions later, but he did sound a wee bit nostalgic as he recalled the tough love doled out at Farrington High School when he was a youth.
"I went to the 50th anniversary of the class of 1945, Farrington High School, just to say hello, and here was my old ROTC sergeant, who's now retired and lives in Arizona, you know, a Portuguese guy, and I'm sitting there with him and he looks at me and he laughs and says `You know, Cayetano' ... He always called me Cayetano and here I am the governor of the state and he still calls me Cayetano. `So he says, you know, Cayetano, you remember how I disciplined you folks when I caught you chewing gum?' I said, `Yah, I remember.' And I do, I remember now, that in his class, we used to chew gum. It was all boys in ROTC back then, and he was, of course, a regular Army sergeant, and he would always try to discipline us and say we couldn't chew gum in class. But
he knew we weren't listening to him because he would find gum under the chairs all the time.
So one time he caught this one guy, George, I won't mention his last name, chewing gum in class and he was so fed up that he taught us a lesson. What he did was that that gum had to be chewed by every member of the class, and then the guy, George, who was the perpetrator, had to swallow that thing. So he says to me: `You remember that?' Remember! I'll never forget it. But I told him, `You couldn't do it today. ... And he looked at me and said ... `But look at you guys, you all came out OK.' ... Nobody wants to go back to those kind of days ... but there is a lack of discipline today."
He graduated from Farrington in 1958.
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