My School Days
A friend recently called my attention to a web site he had
established devoted to his school days in England. It was a worthy project and
worth a look. You will not know any of the people but the way in which the
material is presented and the very high quality of the photographic material is
exceptional. He suggested I do a blog on my school days. Of course I could not
do what he has done. I haven’t the records or resources but I could do a few
recollections and comments and show a few pictures.
Very early on I was interested in large wheeled vehicles
and eventually managed to make driving them a major part of my very memorable
school days. I did indeed have an early beginning.
I was also interested in airplanes which in those days all
had wheels which showed. This next photo demonstrates what Christmas was like.
It was always a somewhat bitter sweet time. I usually got what I wanted and then
had to suffer through the adults all playing with my toys and me not getting a
shot at them until much later. The plane under my arm was not of particular
interest to the big folks but the electric train (not pictured) was. I got two train
sets on two different Christmases, a Burlington Zephyr one year and regular
steam engine set by Lionel another.
I had a lot of good pals. In the picture next after the one below, taken of us
lounging on the swing in our back yard, are from left to right: me, Frankie
Kelly, Tommy Reese, and Roland Hiller – all gone now except for me. Frankie was
a very good artist. He made small clay figures (I own one of a weather-beaten
old cowboy) and he did a cartoon strip about a pony named Frosty which ran for
a time in the Pueblo steel company newspaper (CF&I).
Frankie was an alcoholic in later life and died of heart
failure at too young an age from smoking. Tommy Reese at just 18 met a very
tragic end at the beginning of the war. He enlisted in the Navy V-12 program to
learn flying and was on his way to Denver to enlist when the private plane in
which he was riding crashed in the Sand Dunes at the foot of Mt. Blanca killing
all aboard. I lost track of Roland very early. He came to none of the reunions.
I loved school, especially the library, and particularly
Miss Fair the librarian. My sister Dorothy had a boyfriend by the name of Judge
Mitchell. He had attended military school and had come away with a very nice
wool sweater that presumably no longer fit him. He was fond of me and gave me
this lovely treasure. I valued this
article and wore it daily for a very long time. Miss Fair finally gave up on
the idea that I would ever have it washed or that I might not even know how to
take care of it so she asked if I would mind if she washed it for me. I was delighted and became the proud possessor of a
clean sweater, so proud that I had to have a picture taken of me wearing it.
Our primary entertainment out of class was the building and
flying of model airplanes, a hobby I continued until just after moving here to
Ohio at the age of 91. Below are two of my pals, Bud Gibson and Harry
Archuleta. Bud flew B-17s over Berlin during the war and Harry was an Air Force
fighter pilot. Both survived without a scratch. It’s easy to date this picture
to about 1942 by the car and house in the background. The house was our fourth
home in Alamosa and the one I left to go into the Navy and the car is my
mother’s 1940 Ford of which she was inordinately proud.
Of course we did all go to school and it was great. I have
only the one picture of a fairly large group of us seniors in our physics lab.
Physics was taught by Mr. Miller who was also the Principal. Some found Mr.
Miller to be somewhat stern but I adored him. Physics class was a blast. Keep
in mind that this was 1942. We did a lot of interesting experiments but most memorable
was the construction of a nuclear reactor using ping pong balls and mouse traps.
Another was the design on paper of a cyclotron – or atom smasher - as we called
them in those days.
I’m the guy in the famous sweater looking down at some papers
in the middle of the picture. Eddy MacAfee is the person in the white sweater
at the left front. Leorabel Foster, second from right, generally showed up at
all our reunions. Her father had the Studebaker dealership and garage. Dixie
Lee Helms, another sousaphone player, is on her right. The only ones I am
fairly sure have survived to this day are Caroline Hodgson nee Myers, far left
looking down and maybe Grace Yoshida – I’m having trouble spotting
her. All have signed the back of this picture and I have an image of that on
file.
Eventually all good things come to an end; we graduate and
go our separate ways – mostly off to war in those days. The picture below
celebrates the occasion. That is me on the right and my good friend Billy
Guthrie. Billy drove tanks in the war and later became a government scientist
developing explosives. He attended all the reunions until his death. He was
probably the most misunderstood person in the town. I was one of his few good
friends. His dad was the city mechanic and drove the fire engine for the
volunteer fire department. Billy and I spent many days puttering around in the
city shop trying to construct interesting machines out of tin cans, solder, and
using blow torches. Right behind the city shop on the alley was the adobe
two-cell city jail. If they were to ever incarcerate anyone in there the prisoner could
easily dig their way out through walls. We never saw anyone actually locked up.
The rest of this blog will consist of anecdotal material
dredged up from pretty rusty memories. During my career of growing up in
Alamosa I managed to drive nearly everything that had wheels. My mother, bless
her, let me drive her new 1940 Ford whenever I wanted – which was quite often.
It was a great car for dates. In those days you could get a learners permit at
about 15 and I had a class A Chauffeurs license at the age of 16, This allowed me to drive the drug store van
(a very neat little grey panel 1936 Ford), a gasoline tanker for delivering
fuel to filling stations, a smaller tank truck for delivering heating oil to
individual residences, and the 1936 International school bus. Our school had
two. Mr. LaPlante, the Spanish and Latin teacher drove the other one. My most
adventurous drive, however, was as assistant driver of a flatbed truck out into
Kansas during a raging blizzard to buy some used tractors. We brought back two.
The farmers of the San Luis Valley were really short of proper machinery at
that point in the war. The local farm equipment dealer had scoured the country
for used machines and found these two in Kansas. We went and got them.
Two other ‘wheels’ stories are worth the telling: the case
of the midnight skinny dippers and the pregnant pig tale.
I had a regular late afternoon and evening job at Sherm’s
drug store as a soda jerk. I worked behind the fountain and had the added duty
of delivering prescriptions or picking up the cans of ice-cream mix in from
Denver at the railroad station with the Ford van. When we closed at night I
routinely took the van down to the car dealer garage next to the Walsh Hotel
and parked it inside for the night. Late one evening three of my friends came
into the drug store and prevailed upon me to take a little side trip on the way
to the garage. Why not go over the Rio Grande bridge leading to East Alamosa to
Norton’s swimming pool and have a dip? This we did, parking around back of the
fenced in commercial pool. We removed our clothes, climbed over the fence and jumped
in the pool. Then someone heard old Mr. Norton coming so we had to beat a hasty
retreat over the fence and into the van. I was terrified that we would be
caught and I would pay some horrible price for our sin so we didn’t bother to
dress and drove at top speed naked as jay birds back to the garage. We were dry
by the time we arrived at the garage so we managed to get dressed and put the
vehicle away without incident. I don’t believe this story has ever been told
before.
The father of an old first grade flame of mine, Dr. Berthelson,
was the only vet around in those war times for a valley of 8000 square miles of
farm land. He was definitely over worked most of the time. I got a phone
message late one day that he needed a driver to take him to a farm out near
Fort Garland to tend to a pig that was having trouble giving birth to a litter.
I beat it over to his office and we took off in his Chevrolet sedan. I drove at
top speed according to his instructions while he took a nap. It was dark when
we arrived at the farm. There was no electricity at that time in the area so I
was instructed to hold the lantern over the pig in the barn while Dr. Berthelson
performed the caesarean. We saved the mother but sadly lost all the little
piglets.
Encouraged by my mother we formed a small pickup dance band
during my last year of high school. She played the piano and drove the car, I played
the drums, Bud Gibson was our clarinetist, Buster Wake on the cornet, and Phil
Huffaker on the bass fiddle. I only recall two gigs, one at the Episcopal
Church and one at the Elks Hall. In retrospect I don’t think we were very good. The greatest mystery was how we got all that stuff and five of us into
the car.
Although all in my family were pretty musical I think I
ranked near the bottom. My Mother, of course, was a fine pianist, Dorothy
played the violin and Jean played the cello. My Dad did sing ‘The Preacher and
the Bear’ on request but that was his limit. I did a bit more than the drums. I
played the double B-flat bass sousaphone in the high school band and was the
drum major for the band when marching. Playing a sousaphone is a little like
playing the organ. An Episcopal priest once told me that if you wanted to be an
organist you had to buy the church. Similarly with sousaphones – no one has one
at home.
Then there were the movies. I believe I attended nearly all
the movies shown at the two theaters in town. The mayor, Earl Cole, owned these
theaters – or at least the Rialto. He always seemed to be silently standing at
the rear during the shows. No one ever really got to know him well. He must
have been a pretty nice guy. He gave me a lifetime pass to the theater. I have
no idea why. It was a little blue card that I treasured and carried for many
long years after I left Alamosa.
But I have a much better theater story. It was well known
in those days that ‘babes in arms’ got in free so one evening three of us
showed up at the box office and asked for two tickets. Bemused, the ticket
booth person gave us our two tickets and asked about the babe in arms. I said,
Phil Huffaker was the babe and I would have him in my arms. I was told that I
had to hold him on my lap for the entire showing. This I did after wrapping him
up in a large blanket. Phil was about six foot three. We were frequently
checked on by the usher to make sure we were complying. Maybe Mayor Cole was
amused by this escapade and decided I deserved a lifetime award for chutzpah.
I was taught to shoot pool at a young age by a Navajo
Indian and to shoot a gun by a cowboy Methodist preacher. There are a lot of
other stories I will save for another time.
