Bill: Alright. This goes back to probably when I was maybe a sophomore or junior in high school in Martin, South Dakota. A very, very close friend of mine, Billy Porch, was a class younger than I was, but lived right across the street. He had a farm and a ranch out north of Martin, but his dad owned the sale barn. So he was acquainted with the people out there and what was in the sale barn and everything.

Anyway, Billy gets this great idea. He said, “I know how I can get into that high school through the transom up on the roof.” And he said, “Dad's got a couple of donkeys out there at the sale barn. We can ride those into town—it's only about a half mile—and I'll get to that transom and meet you out there at the door. So we'll put those donkeys in the schoolhouse, and they're gonna crap all over the floor and it's gonna be a mess.” And he laughed. He thought this was so funny. 

And it wasn't bad, it wasn't hard to ride those donkeys in, of course it was late at night and dark. He got up on the transom, got into the school, come down and unlocked the doors, and we got the donkeys in there. It wasn't hard to do that, we just let 'em loose. And then we left and laughed, and laughed, and laughed. 

Well, the next day, when we got to school, we tried to just keep a plain face so nobody knew what was going on. It wasn't probably in about the second period over the loudspeaker, “Billy Porch, will you come to the principal's office?”

We thought, “Oh my goodness, what's happened now?” So he went. Well, come to find out, good old Billy, he got up there, and he had a pair of his gloves on at that time, but he took the gloves off to get into the transom. And he had his name in the gloves, so it didn't take much to figure out who did it. 

I don't know that he got into a great deal of trouble over that. I just don't remember what they did to him. I don't even know if they thought I was part of it, they probably did. But to this day, I still see Billy from time to time. We had a lot of good times together, but that was one that we probably could have and should have done. We laughed about it and it was a good time.

Note: The transcript above has been condensed from its original audio recording to improve the flow and readability of the story.