Where I attended school, we were all convinced that some of our teachers were actually escaped Nazi war criminals who had sneaked into the country via South America. There was always the kids' most reliable source to back it up: the friend of a friend of a friend whose parents knew it for a fact.

This was during the height of the cold war and the only thing worse than a Russian to an American kid was a Nazi. It was only the mean teachers that we thought were escaped war criminals. I am not certain any of us understood at that age exactly what a Nazi was, but we knew it was somebody mean! We had some mean teachers. Everybody has had a mean teacher: the one that always followed the rules to the letter and insisted the students did the same! Those were the war criminals in our Little Kids Book.

One day when I came to school the playground was all abuzz about one of our teachers who was supposedly setting up a gas oven in his home. It also happened to be one of the teachers we believed was a war criminal. A friend of a friend of a friend whose parents had seen it said that Mr. So-and-So had had a rather large gas oven delivered to his home. Well, to us that was proof positive that he was definitely a Nazi!

At that age, the fact that his wife was the operator of a catering service and perhaps wanted a professional oven never entered our heads. Forever after that, we would not walk by his house even if it meant taking a multiblock detour to avoid it. His house became a favorite "dare site". We would dare each other to walk in front of it and call the one who refused to do it a "chicken".

As I mentioned above, Russians were pretty scary things to American kids at that time. Once in a blue moon, we would become convinced that one or the other of our teachers were spies for the Russian Communists. One poor teacher made the mistake of showing up for school on a cold morning wearing a fur hat. Well, there was all the proof we needed right in front of our very own eyes! No friend of a friend of a friend whose parents knew for a fact! We had seen it ourselves: a Cossack in our midst right there on the school yard! Of course, we didn't know for sure exactly what a Cossack was, but it was Russian; therefore, it had to be some sort of a spy.