Nacogdoches Classroom Burns, Luckily No Injuries Reported

It's all coming back to me now.  I'm a Sophomore in high school, and somehow believe that a career studying paramecium is the paramount destiny of my life.

Really didn't care much for the "sciences", and most of that was due to the boring instructors striking out in connecting with its captivated student population.  (Remember the guy doing the children's dinosaur show [yawn!] from the movie "Mrs. Doubtfire"?).  Thus was the personality of my glorious teachers.

But something unpopular happened to me inside the Biology classroom in 1975.  I was assigned a "lab partner" by the name of - Bambi.  Now, forgive me, for I am not knocking on those named Bambi, but in this case, the name fit accurately.

About halfway though the semester, barely passing the course, and trying to keep Bambi afloat as well, we began our "hands on" assignment that breached the cross hairs of Chemistry, requiring us to use a Bunsen Burner.  I only stepped away from the area momentarily to grab some eye goggles, when over my left shoulder I observed flames so high, I thought someone pirated in a video of "The Towering Inferno".

That one instance still haunts me to this day, when a similar "explosion" at my school happened a mere three weeks following the Bambi episode, burning a close friend of mine.

So, after hearing about the fire in Nacogdoches at the Emeline Carpenter Academy of Technology and Science, all I could do is cringe with painful memories.  Students were inside when fire broke out, but all evacuated safely.  The true origin of the blaze is unknown, for the time being, but stories are circulating over an electrical defect.