High School

The following year I was in high school and during the time I was a high school student I took all the courses that were offered except for advanced farm shop and home economics. Generally my grades were good and all during high school I never took a semester test (the rule being that if a student had a B average he or she was excused from these tests). The six-weeks tests I did take. I realized now that it would have been to my advantage to have been required to take the semester tests as well.

During the years I was in high school, the school administered the every-pupil tests prepared by the University of Iowa — I did well enough in these tests so each year I participated in the most exacting tests given at the Iowa campus for proficiency in the subjects for which a suitable level had been achieved at the local level. I don’t recall specifically what subjects I qualified in, but included were General Science, world and American history, Latin, perhaps Physics and I think several others.

As a freshman I was also on the team from the manual training class that participated in the competition at Iowa State College in Ames. As I recall our team did reasonably well despite our having had no instruction in concrete work (and part of the competition was to construct a concrete home base for a baseball field).

The manual training class covered such items as woodworking, rope splicing, harness repair, tool sharpening, gas engine repair and some elementary drafting. It was from this class I suppose that I acquired my liking for woodworking. Included in the projects in the class that I made were an oak table for the boys’ bedroom, some “rubber” guns for games of cops and robbers, a tool chest, the sewing box I gave to my grandmother, and a set of bookends. The tool chest was for the tools that my father got for me from the lumber company where he worked at his second bookkeeping job. I used these tools later on in making the buildings and the machinery for the toy farms that Vincent and I played with for several years during the early years on the farm.

The sewing box, the bookends and the tool chest I now have, having retrieved them over the years. The tool chest I retrieved once when visiting my mother in the little brown house. I think it was just after my father died and I may have been on a business trip and I was just stopping by as I don’t think Jean or our daughters were along. The tool chest was up in the hayloft of the barn and had some parts of the toy machinery that I had made for our toy farms out on the Peterson farm. Dad had gathered these up when my parents moved back from the farm. I still have these bedraggled remnants of the tractors, plows and trucks that I made. We also had barns and corn cribs but these were all gone.


Sewing box


Wooden toys


Tool box

I packed the chest up with these fragments of toys and sent it back to California by Railway Express. I reworked the tool chest in part and it now serves me as mail storage. I also reworked the sewing box that I had made for my grandmother, improving on the workmanship skills I had in ninth grade. And I reworked the bookends also and Jean now uses them for her cookbooks.

[Note from Laurel: I have the sewing box and the tool chest. After my dad's death, my mother sent the toys to his younger brother, Vincent, whose daughter Julie sent me the above photo. The bookends are with my sister Muriel. I have asked her to send me a photo, which I will post at a future date.]