Just a few....

Just a few memories that were brought to mind when I heard that my eighth grade teacher's daughter was coming to my 90th birthday party next month! Thelma Earl and her folks came into our lives when I was in the sixth or seventh grade! Mr. Earl was a retired barber and of course Mrs. Earl came as a teacher to the Wawawai school! What a relief after the first couple of teachers we had! Mrs. Fuque was not bad but Mrs. Shawn did nothing but assign the lessons and then sit at her desk eating chocolates or sleeping from what I remember. I do remember that some of the kids, (not me, I was afraid of heights!) crawled out of the window and played around before she realized what was going on! Then Mrs. Earl came! There was no place for them to live since there was the three of them so the schoolboard, where Grandma Batty was the head of that, etc. decided to fix up the basement of the school as living quarters for the Earls!!! If I remember, (Thelma might have other ideas!) it turned out to be quite comfortable. Mr. Earl, having been a barber, cut all the men's hair in the area of the school! That was not all he did! It got very cold there in the wintertime and Mr. Earl would make big pots of soup and bring it upstairs for the students to eat with their sandwiches!!! And if it was not that kind of weather he would help us warm up our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the big pot-bellied stove in the classroom. He did all the janitor work, etc. Mrs. Earl gave piano lessons to all who wanted them! They cost us nothing! My folks bought a second-hand piano and so my sister Genevieve and I took piano lessons! Teresa,our younger sister benefitted from them by learning to play by ear at home after we would practice and go to school!!! So when she and our cousin June's sister Betty went to school, they both took the lessons! Mrs. Earl was a very diligent teacher and we really were taught spelling, (she would have spelling bees!) reading writing and arithmatic! Thelma has kept in touch, along with her Mother and her Father till their deaths, all these years. She called me last summer and told me that her best childhood remembrances of school and growing up were the years that her folks spent in Wawawai and the friendships that they made with the Clarence Batty family! We were the closest farm to the school and so I remember many evenings when the Earl's would walk up the road and spend the evening! Mr. Earl played the violin and so did my father so it was a very musical , what else can I say to describe it, happy memorable time of my life too! God Bless you Mr. and Mrs. Earl, (both gone now!) and Thelma too. I'll be very happy to see you again!!!