The back part of the building was about two stories high; that's where the auditorium with a stage was. The schoolyard was part grassy and part hard dirt. A concrete walk ran around the building, to each of the doors and out to the schoolbus stop at the road beside the school. I don't recall whether there was electricty or not but I don't remember it ever being dark indoors. There may have been some form of water for drinking...I'm not sure... but there was definitely no indoor plumbing. [UPDATE: In a recent conversation with my sister, Rosalie, she recalled to me a drinking fountain on the back side of the school around the corner from the side door.] There were 2 30-seater all wood outhouses, one for the boys and one for the girls. I know there were 30 because I counted them, 2 rows of 15. Of course, I didn't count the ones for the girls until a time when school was not in session (after all, I did live just across the road).

The outhouses were on opposite sides of a grassy field on which we played games as part of our school day. It was strictly forbidden for any boy to be near the girl's outhouse and vice versa. The boy's outhouse was next to the road that ran from Rylie-Kleberg Road to the New Kaufman Highway whereas the girl's outhouse was next to a field that was either overgrown with high weeds or was a corn field. I did hear some of the other boys telling how they had managed to go away from the boy's outhouse to Rylie-Kleberg road, over to the field and sneak through it to get behind the girl's outhouse where they peeped through knotholes or cracks in the wall to have a look at the girls. When asked what they had seen, they said that anyone who wanted to know would have to look for himself.

Several students would arrive well before classes and socialize or get involved in some activity, one of which was boxing (using boxing gloves, no bare knuckles). I was just about the smallest boy in the second grade, if not the smallest and I did not like any kind of fighting. As a result, I was always being called a coward or yellowbelly or being taunted about the yellow stripe down my back, none of which I ever believed to be true. I just couldn't figure why some of the others felt they needed to treat me that way. They often tried to push me into a boxing match but I refused, no matter what they called me. There was one of the older boys, maybe fifth grade, who eventually stepped in to tell everyone to leave me alone, that they should let me choose not to fight if that's what I wanted.

One day, for some reason, I agreed to put on the gloves with a first grader my age and size. I knew him to be a nice person who wouldn't be intent on beating me to a pulp and my "protector" told me that, if I did this, the others might not bother me any more. The two of us slugged it out for a while, knocking each other down from time to time. Each time one of us fell, some of the onlookers would pick up the fallen and shove him back toward the other. Somewhere along the way, I realized that part of the crowd was cheering for me, what a surprise; I had been being jeered as a coward at the start of the bout. Finally, we were both so tired that we just about had to hold each other up and could hardly move a muscle. Someone pulled the gloves off of us and, accompanied by cheers, we walked side by side, each with an arm draped over the other's shoulder through the crowd and over to sit and rest on the steps at the back of the auditorium.

Here's a couple of memory snapshots:

One of the other boys in my class was Buford Jett, who lived a short distance down Rylie-Kleberg Road across the road from another classmate, my cousin Willard. One day a mouse's nest was found in a deflated basketball by someone looking through the athletic equipment. The next day, Buford stood up in class to tell everyone that he, too, had found something in a deflated basketball. The girls started moving away from Buford, the boys drew near him as he began pulling from a basketball, one after another of his "mice" and waving each in the air. He had drawn baby mice on paper and colored them with pink or red Crayolas. We had a good laugh.

One day in second grade, Mrs Godwin, our teacher, told us that we had a special visitor and asked us to welcome him. The door opened and in strode an Indian in full feather headdress. The sight gave me quite a start and, as my heart pumped furiously, my first inclination was to run as fast as I could to get away from him, but I was frozen in place. Mrs Godwin introduced him as Chief Something-or-other and he spent several minutes answering questions from the class. I spent the time collecting my wits.

©Copywrite February 2000; ALL Rights Reserved