More School Days

MORE MEMORIES OF SS#14 SOPHIASBURGH

I was behind a stopped school bus recently, and I couldn’t help but notice that it was only after the bus had completely stopped and activated its lights, did the kids leave the doorstep, walk the long driveway to the road, then cross the road, and finally get into the bus. And the bus never moved until the kids were seated. Safety is an issue today, and rightly so. Heavy traffic, questionable people in our midst, and the threat of lawsuits looming over our heads, there is no room for mistakes.

It wasn’t like that on Big Island. The majority of kids that attended SS#14 Sophiasburgh School walked to school, some of them a good two miles. For me, it was about a mile and a half. Until we got bicycles, we never thought a thing about it. It was what we did. Kids routinely accepted rides from strangers when they came along to expedite the journey home. It was an era when strangers could be trusted, and we learned to say please and thank you.

I still live not far from the road I regularly walked to school. Grade one was our introduction to school life; there was no kindergarten, and no pre-school. One week I was playing with not a care in the world on a week day, and the next week I was unceremoniously introduced into the school system. All fathers warned about the strap. Receive it at school and expect the same when you got home. I was either very lucky, or well behaved.

The walk entailed passing by Baycrest Marina. Al and Helen Owen and their son David owned a cocker spaniel named “Bing” who was of no particular concern as long as we walked, but in later years when we rode bicycles, he possessed an uncanny ability to remain invisible, then suddenly appear from out of nowhere with lightning speed. Other than a supposed haunted house that posed no threat in the daytime, and one neighbour whose turkeys presented some imagined threat to us as they gobbled in unison as we passed by, the walk was relatively uneventful.

Those early years from the age of six had special memories. My fondness for Hopalong Cassidy was reflected in the lunch pail I took to school. I still have it, and the thermos my mother always filled with hot chocolate. It sits proudly on a shelf in our living room, along with a school bell, and a Waterman’s ink bottle. Some of my Grade six essays and one of my very first colouring books are stored in a trunk in the basement. My mother taught me to cherish the past and never throw anything away.

Like most small rural schools, there were few kids. Once I survived those first five years of occasional bullying by some of the older kids, and they eventually got shipped off to high school, I arrived at school the following year, in Grade six, suddenly realizing that two of us were now the oldest pupils in the school. We made a pact that we would never bully the younger kids as two or three had done to us in earlier years. We became like family, and I remember one girl in particular who felt sorry for one of the younger students who was experiencing difficulty in a subject, and devoted considerable time to tutoring him at recess. We did things like that because we cared for each other.

Those were good times. One couple, the Mills, just two houses west of the school, had 17 kids, not an unusual number as larger families than what we see today were common back then. There were always Mills in the school while I was there, and continued to be for some years after I graduated. Whenever I see one of them today, I tend to dance around the subject of how the family is, as it will take fully 30 minutes for the person to answer the question. The house was fairly large – in fact, I was in it earlier this year to visit someone who had moved there, and still marvel at how so many children could be raised in even a relatively large house. One of the older girls remarked that often six of the girls would share a bed. Bedtime was always a race to the bedroom for the last ones in bed on either side would likely be the ones who got kicked out of bed in the night from the overcrowding.

One incident I remember involving this family, involved a pair of rubber boots. Kids always wore rubber boots to school and they were flung with reckless abandon in the mud room of the school upon arrival. I was one of the first to leave for home one night and noticed that someone had walked off with my boots, and had decided that it was one of the older boys in the Mills family. I had no choice but to squeeze my feet into a pair that came closest to my size, and head for home, guessing that the problem would work itself out the following day, provided everyone returned to school with the same boots in which they had gone home the night before. Of course, that set off a chain reaction of events with everyone going home with the wrong boots. Somehow it all got sorted out, although our feet never returned to to normal from walking two miles in boots two sizes too small! .

A truly special family, and thinking back, I still find it remarkable that a man and a woman could raise so many kids, and so successfully. All have done well.

Somehow, the same camaraderie never continued when we entered high school. It was a different era, a different time, and things seemed to be a bit more competitive than they were in public school when we were a “family.” It was not long after I entered high school, that schools became centralized and the small one-room schools were either demolished or sold and renovated into homes. Our one room school was one of them and very little remains of the original structure except for the east wall where we all parked our bicycles in later years. The outhouses and accompanying lilacs where we ate our lunches are gone. So are the swings and the teeter totter and nothing to suggest we once had a baseball diamond, albeit small. But I can still pause along the road that runs beside the house, and picture everything the way it was – Bonnie politely asking if she could please borrow my eraser, George and me leaping out of the swings, the small patch of hollyhocks that grew in stones on both sides of the back doorstep. Mostly, though, I remember the kids I once knew, and how we still like to get together and reminisce. Many of their parents are still living, while others have passed away. Some are still living in the same houses from which they once sent their children off on the long trek to school.

One teacher for all grades would be unheard of today. Did we miss out on anything? I think not, considering that most of us of the era can still remember that there are 5,280 feet and 1,760 yards in a mile, can still rhyme off the times table, do fractions, and do basic calculations in our head as we patiently wait for cash registers and calculators to spit out the same information for those who depend on machines to do the work for them.

And gosh darn it – as intimidating as it was, I still miss the school inspector on his unannounced visits to our school, leaning over my shoulder and critiquing my work.

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Photos:

1) Here I am in Grade 1 with my lunch pail (see photo #3), my wagon, and obviously a prize pumpkin, although I have no recollection of it. I am in the driveway, already to set off on my 1.5 mile walk to school

2) The class of 1956 at SS#14 Sophiasburgh School on Big Island: Back Row (l to r) Teacher Marion Sprague, Diane Marshall, Wendy Owen, Wanda Wager. Middle Row (l to r) Cheryl Marshall, Eleanor Thompson, George Mills, Terry Sprague, Allan Young. Front Row (l to r) Rex Wager, Clifford Mills, Neil Thompson, Lucille Mills, Lois Mills.

3) Guess which cowboy show was my favourite? I still have the lunch pail and thermos I used in Grade one. The thermost still has the original cork stopper.