Cadaver lab - By Wade

When I was about 10 years old my dad, ever the bargain/thrift store hunter brought home a stack of plywood. The stack was huge, 20 to 30 pieces deep. The plywood wasn't your normal plywood, it was solid 1" thick plywood, not the 23/32" plywood you by at Lowe's these days. Each piece was heavy and had an oily strip about 5-6 feet long along and 2 feet wide, straight down the middle. My dad gave us strict instructions we were not to touch these boards. This was in the days when every scrap piece of wood we could find was dedicated to the building of club houses in the field behind our house. The new supply of wood gave us a new supplier of club house wood. This relieved Farmer Johnson (the name sounds cliche' but that was his real name) whose wood stack would receive a temporary reprieve from its many liquidators. We did not even attempt to resist, we began to pilfer, slowly, so as to not be detected. We took a panel here and a panel there over several months. My dad was legally blind so he didn't discover his wood had been taken until he went to find the wood for one of his many home improvement projects. My dad came unglued. He, not one to hold his temper back, first gave us a tongue lashing then personally escorted us to the club house and supervised us while we took every nail out of the wood and replaced the wood back in the stack. Dad then ordered us to go shower. I imagine that there was some amount of time we were grounded because that is the way things were. It wasn't until a few years ago while some of my brothers and I were talking that the real reason we got in so much trouble came out. My dad, who worked at BYU, had received a tip from the BYU cadaver lab that they were throwing out all their old cadaver boards. He went and picked up the whole lot. He later, when confronted about the story, admitted to the fact and laughingly gave me this morsel, "Those were nasty boards. It seems to me there was even green slime on most of them." That oily streak down the middle of the board was the oil that had sloughed off of the dead bodies and seeped off onto the wood... Gross!!!