First Grade

As I’ve mentioned earlier I have very few recollections before I was six years old. That was when school started for me and perhaps it was this break in the established pattern of my life that caused me to have more recollections about my life.

My first grade teacher was Hazel Rice and she, like the rest of the female teachers in the Gowrie school (with one exception) was single. Probably a spinster as she stayed on for a long time in her position. I think the reason why the female teachers were not married was that it was subtly frowned on in the community for families to have two incomes — teaching posts were to be reserved for persons whose sole source of livelihood was the teaching job. The one exception was Mrs. Wood, the second grade teacher, but in her case her husband had some sort of disability so couldn’t work or was kept from continuous employment.

Also perhaps the reason why the female elementary teachers were unmarried was that they were newly graduated from college and the school district could hire them for less salary. They would teach for a few years, then get married or drift off to more profitable positions. It was certainly true that there was considerable turnover in some of the elementary teaching positions.

During more if not all my elementary grades, textbooks were not provided by the school — they were purchased by the parents for their children. Bowman’s drug store oddly enough was the local source of these textbooks in my earlier school years until the school took the function over, say around the time I was in junior high. Even then the books were not free, though they may have been partly subsidized by the school district. Later on, when I was in high school, I think the district provided the textbooks but my memory is not clear on this.

At any rate, my first grade class had our readers, purchased for us by our parents. There was however a set of primers belonging to the school which Miss Rice used on occasion and I remember how delighted I was at this new book to use. Probably it was that the first primer suffered from too much exposure. The school set of primers were kept in a cupboard on the north side of the room. The doors to the cupboard were glass paneled so these attractive reading books were always there as a distraction.

Another distraction in the schoolroom was a small-scale model of a medieval castle, complete with a moat and a little drawbridge which sat on a table at the rear of the room. Who made it or why it was sitting at the rear of the first-grade classroom I have no idea. Certainly it was an attraction for little hands and we were instructed not to touch it, though what harm that would have done I don’t know.