Starting School

I did not learn everything I needed to know in kindergarten.  In fact, I did not attend kindergarten.  Because we lived twenty miles from town and the school bus only made the trip once in the morning to take children to school and once in the later afternoon to return the children home, there was no choice but to miss out on the first year of school that all of my classmates were experiencing. The bus, an eight-passenger two-door vehicle that required the front passenger to get out and tip up the seat so others could get into the back, drove into our yard at 7:30 in the morning.  As the youngest of seven who rode the bus, I sat in the middle front next to the bus driver for the 45 minute drive to school.

 I started school as a first grader at Clark Elementary just across the street from the high school in town. The two first grade classrooms were an addition onto the north side of the original red brick two story square building.  The bank of windows along the north side gave a clear view of the high school and the street where the buses came to deposit and pick up students from both schools.  The first graders had an entrance reserved just for them with ample space to help little ones with their snow boots and jackets.  My teacher was a lovely woman named Miss Story whom I adored and looked up to. Years later when I was in high school and had occasion to visit my former teacher, I was surprised at her diminutive stature; time had altered my perspective!

Life at school was certainly different from life at home on the ranch.  At lunch time, we all lined up and marched across the street to the high school cafeteria for lunch.  The cafeteria was on the third floor lined with long wooden tables end-to end.  Each student took a metal tray and slid it down the line for the cooks to fill a plastic partitioned tray with the lunch menu which always included a small carton of milk and a dinner roll dipped in greasy melted butter. On the first day when I sat down with my lunch, I patiently waited for someone to say the blessing as we did before every meal at home.  No one prayed; everyone else was eating and chatting away.  I decided to eat my lunch as well.  We did not have milk from cartons at home.  Milk came from the cow in the barn, brought to the house in a bucket and strained through a cloth into a large jar. Town water tasted funny too.  Ours came pumped by the windmill into a storage tank and then into the house. No one could leave the cafeteria without eating everything on their tray and drinking all of the milk.  Meals like chop suey or a dish of prunes made this a real challenge.

 I learned to read from Dick and Jane readers and began my lifetime of loving books.  I do not have many other memories of times in first grade other than once when I found myself in trouble.  I took Jocko, a monkey puppet that I had been given, to school with me.  Not surprisingly, I was playing with him, entertaining classmates seated close to me.  Miss Story did not appreciate this interruption; I was reprimanded and sent to the corner to contemplate my misdeed.  I was unaccustomed to being in such a situation, and it never happened again.  I was a model student desiring very much to please my teacher and my parents.  Overall, I loved school and found that I enjoyed learning and playing with my friends.