8-Room School House

Caribou county schools were consolidated and my

fourth grade was uptown in Grace, Idaho. I rode the

school bus. My teacher was Matilda Anderson. I remember well the bus rides to and from school.

The boys usually sat at the back of the bus and the girls in the front. The

high school age kids got the very back seats. One of the buses was a short,

little one we

called it the “Puddle Jumper”. It was the only bus that

could easily make the curves in the winding road that climbed to the top of

the hill in the ravine we called Sleepy Hollow. One day we wrecked coming

around one of the curves. No one was seriously hurt.

I used to catch the bus at the porch of the quarters building, the building where

employees would stay while they were there to overhaul the generators at the

plant. I remember a lot of bus rides in the wintertime and how the wind blew

and the snow would drift. There were big wooden-slat fences in

the fields,

parallel to the roads, so the snow would drift against the fence, trying to keep

the snow from drifting onto the roads.

There are three things I remember well about fourth grade: 1) A sign on the

wall that read “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop”; 2) Winning the second

prize in the declamation contest April 1, 1949, by memorizing and reciting “The Gingham Dog and

the Calico Cat” (The room mothers presented me with Edgar A. Guest’s Rhymes of Childhood); and

3) Mrs. Anderson almost always, before writing on the blackboard, rolling the end of the chalk stick

on her tongue. She did that throughout whatever she was writing; it made the chalk wet and in turn

made what she was writing heavier and whiter on the board. As the writing became fainter, she

would lick the chalk again. She had beautiful handwriting and I loved to watch the letters and words

appear on the blackboard. I love to write with beautiful penmanship because of her, even though I

donI continued my fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grades uptown in Grace, Idaho. My teachers were,

respectively, Beth Waldron, Frank Taylor, Mrs. Bassett, and J. Stanley Harrison.

In miss Waldron’s class I remember, before class work began, we always stood, put our hands over

our hearts, and repeated aloud the Pledge of Allegiance. We also had prayer each morning, then she

would read aloud a chapter of a book. These things happened every morning of each school day.

Miss Waldron was a tiny, petite person and I saw her from time

to time in later years in the Salt Lake

Temple and in Z.C.M.I. department store.

I remember Mrs. Bassett getting after me because she thought I had been running through the room

and hallway, which created a circle passageway perfect to do just such a thing. I really hadn’t and it

made me mad, so I sassed her. She pulled my ear and then I sassed her again and tore off to catch

the bus. I thought I was ‘big’ for doing that and it would win favor with the other kids as well. Even

if I was right, I knew I had no right to treat her that way and it was no way to get attention from

others.

Mr. Taylor owned and operated the Spudnut Shop in town, a favorite place for teenagers. I

remember more about the Spudnut Shop than about his class. I do, however, remember well going

through the lunch line. I always liked the school’s lunches and hoped the lunch ladies would give

me big portions. I remember especially how the honey and the peanut butter would be mixed or

whipped together. At recesses I liked to play hopscotch, jump the rope, jacks and marbles, climb on

the tricky bars, and play tetherball. I shied away from contact sports and activities.t all of the time because I am in too much of a hurry.

Our grade school was a two-story building with a

basement. The main and second floor each had

four classrooms – one in each corner with the

center of the building open and a big, wide

staircase on the east and west sides that went

between the two floors. Each of the classrooms

had a hallway to hang coats and put our winter

boots.

The basement housed the furnace and boiler, as

well as a small, comfortable apartment for the

custodian, Freddy Greenwood. It was fun to

sneak down there and visit with Freddy. He was a nice, sweet man and he loved us kids. I liked him

too. He was from England and I liked his accent. He was also the Grace 1st ward clerk and his

signature is on some of my certificates of ordination.

I remember was sitting at the lunch table and Mr. Harrison sitting with us at our table. We had

soup that day. Somebody had loosened the cap on the saltshaker and it happened to be Mr. Harrison

that used the salt next in his bowl of soup. All of a sudden that prank wasn’t funny anymore. Mr.

Harrison was from England and a very proper man. His penmanship was beautiful and almost like

calligraphy. He was also our art teacher. I was proud of my RSH monogram he helped me do for an

art assignment in shading with a pencil. He wrote a book, of which I have a copy, titled This Way

but Once.

I had great respect for him. He was well read and displayed a lot of wisdom. He also taught an adult

Sunday school class in our ward.