A terrible invention

Today I got brave enough to Google a few words from a song that terrorized me in the second grade, and continues to make me feel sick when I think about it.

At that time, there was a family living in or near Leeds. They had a son with a neurologic handicap of some kind. He was red-headed, very large, very loud, and was in my second-grade class. He was probably a good bit older than the rest of us. They called him Bobby.

Although it didn't last long, in the first and second grades, I was a pretty little girl, and Bobby seemed to take a special liking to me. And this seemed to be his favorite song, which he sang often:

"Oh, Johnny Rebeck, oh Johnny Rebeck,
How could  you be so mean?
I told you you'd be sorry
For inventing that machine!

The cats and dogs and horses
Will never more be seen--
They'll all be ground to sausage
In Johnny Rebeck's machine!"

As the song progressed, Johnny Rebeck suffered the same fate as the dogs and cats and horse. On the internet I found that it was really Johnnie "Verbeck" or "Trebeck."

It's just the hideous song I remember with terror, not Bobby. Even that young, and in spite of the song, I felt sorry for him. His younger sister was in some of my classes at the University, and she said that Bobby died young. The sister herself was later killed when her airplane, that she was flying solo, crashed in the mountains near Huntsville, Alabama.

Probably what keeps the memory alive is watching Alex Trebek on "Jeopardy."