Wood Grove School.

  It was September 1951. Summer ended with the last batch of relatives leaving after spending their vacation with us at our new home in Lake Fork, Idaho. They claimed that Lake Fork was even more beautiful than Yellowstone Park and they made plans to return another year. 

Summer had been a glorious time for me, playing with cousins, nieces and nephews, riding horses, and playing in the river. Exploring this new place we lived in, I, in a make believe world of cowboys and Indians, outlaws and a sheriffs posse. We used our fingers as guns, saying, “bang you’re dead” as another outlaw or Indian hit the dirt. We fashioned bows from willow branches, used fishing line for the string and sharpened sticks for arrows. Thick willow branches made into stick horses that carried us through the forest up and down hills and finally back to the house when our stomachs signaled suppertime. When the 4^th of July rolled around I got my own cap gun with a supply of caps and continued to bring law and order to the wilds of our ranch. The smell of the smoking cap gun remains in my nostrils to this day. Summer at nine years old was all play and no work, but soon ended and the school year began.

I was excited looking forward to the coming year and the start of 4^th grade. I started school in December of 1950 at Wood Grove School; a one-room schoolhouse located two miles from our home, sheltered in a grove of trees along side a narrow dirt road. Off to one side was a woodshed, next to the woodshed was a small two room cottage and nearby were two outhouses marked HIS and HERS. I had settled easily into this new school, although it was much different than the city school I attended previously. One teacher taught all eight grades and did janitorial duties, such as building a fire in the potbellied stove through the winter months, sweeping the floor each day, and on a regular basis also treated the wood floor with linseed oil. Some of the older students, usually boys were assigned turns at chopping wood and carrying it inside to stack by the stove. A hand pump sat near the front door where students pumped water from the well and carried it to the anteroom for washing and drinking. All students drank from the same dipper, and hands were washed in a small basin of water and dried on a lone towel, before we gathered around a small table to eat our sack lunches.