ONE ROOM SCHOOL...

From the Arvada Sentinel   April 30, 1981

Every August or September when I would compose the "Back to School" issue of the Nichols Family News (which I wrote for the family for 10 years), I looked in vain for a copy of this article.  I searched through folders, file drawers, boxes of stuff from Sweden, scraps of paper, and in places where it wouldn't be at all likely to be found.  And....I never found it.  The only thing I DID find in the back pages of one of my journals (1981) was a copy of the same picture published in an article about these kids in the Malmo newspaper while we were living there.

I think I during those yearly searches I found a copy of Ball Corporation's "Can Line" which was the house organ for Ball Metal Container Group.  Someone from the company had seen the above article and submitted it to Ball's publishing department.  I think I even won an honorable mention award for a "Human Interest" article, as pertaining to employees on temporary duty assignments.  I think those two items are still floating around somewhere down the basement.  May or may not find those some day either.

Anyway, I must have lamented to Brittany--and possibly several of the rest of the family, too--that I was unable to find this article.  So, imagine my surprise when I received this copy from Brittany on my 70th birthday.  She had gone through hoops, to  not only track down the Arvada Sentinel, but also wrangle a copy which she could give to me.  It was a copy of a copy from their newspaper archives, so parts of it were blurry.  I took it to the local copy store here in Johnstown to see if they could "clean up" some of the print.  I was told they needed the digital copy the newspaper sent Britty. 

She sent that to me.  I forwarded it to the print shop.  I got a beautiful PDF back with almost perfectly clean print.  But this stupid blog wouldn't accept a PDF format.  It had to be JPG, GIF, or PNG.  Whatever all the rest of that stuff is.  The copy store just sent it to me again, but this time the copy was in JPG form.  It is the same blurry copy as the one I got for my birthday--and totally unreadable here on this blog.  I am disappointed as I thought it might be fun to be able to read the article again now that nearly 36 years have passed.

So, get a magnifying glass and see if you can "read all about it!"

What you won't read in this article is that Harold, 11 years old and in the 5th grade, and Brice, 9 years old and in the 4th grade, would leave our house in Malmo while it was still dark with their bus passes around their necks and catch the bus down the street which took them to the center of town--Stor Torget--where they would change buses and finish their ride to the Swedish school.  Total travel time:  45 minutes including the transfer.  Then they did it all over again in the opposite direction when school was over, arriving home just before it got dark in the afternoon.  (Remember Malmo is on the same northern latitude as Anchorage, Alaska.)   I think that is pretty remarkable, but it was how all the kids got to school--public bus transportation.

Bottom line, it was a unique experience for Harold and Brice.  Burgandy was the only other school age child we had.  The company arranged for her to attend the BEST pre-school in the city, since Swedish kids don't go to school until they are fully six years old.  It was a challenge for her because they spoke NOTHING but Swedish at that school.  However, it turned out to be a pretty good thing.  Burgandy could probably understand as much or more Swedish than the rest of us.

BACK STORY:

When we arrived home from Sweden, there were still a couple of weeks left of school in Jefferson County School District.  I took the kids down to Stott Elementary to enroll them for that short time so they could get reacquainted with friends and reestablish themselves for possible summer play dates and fun.  After hearty "welcome home" wishes and curious questions about school  in Sweden, the secretaries quickly escorted Harold and Brice to their respective classrooms while I filled out the requisite enrollment forms.

However, before I finished with that task, there was a commotion in the hallway.  Mr. Cramer, the school principal, strode in and accosted me with an angry voice and demeanor.  "Get your children and go home, Mrs. Nichols.  We don't want them here.  They would only disrupt the activities planned for the last few days of the year."  I tried to explain my intent was only to give the kids an opportunity to reconnect without having to wait the whole summer for school to begin again.  That's when Mr. Cramer snarled how smart I thought I was bragging about my kids' experience in the newspaper!  Something along the lines of "little Miss Reporter".... 

I'll never forget how humiliated I felt! I was conscious of my cheeks becoming scarlet.  Burning tears threatened to fall as I turned and left to go get Harold and Brice.  The secretaries communicated their commiseration to me through their distressed facial expressions, but I was beyond being comforted at that point.  I only wanted to get out of the school--and never go back!  (Obviously, I must have.  The kids had to go to school in the fall for a few weeks before we left for New York.)

I had never felt like I was truly involved with what was going on at school anyway.  Just one of those parents on the outer fringes.  And that horrible scene pretty much sealed the deal that I was a peon--and the school was the ruler. (No pun intended!)  Mr. Cramer left the principal's position at Stott after a few more years--I don't remember just exactly when--but by the time we came back from Berlin there was a woman at the helm of Stott Elementary.  I heard later that Mr. Cramer had died of cancer.  He was probably in his 40's.  I think he might have been about the same era as I was. 

Funny how that experience affected me for so many years.  I still can't think of it without cringing.  While I have been trying to get this article in a print form so it could be uploaded to this blog, that whole experience--including the shame-- has flooded over me.  But for the life of me, I could NOT remember Mr. Cramer's name.  It took days of really concentrated thinking before I had that "AH HA!" moment one night when I woke up in the wee hours and couldn't sleep. 

James K. Cramer, Principal of Stott Elementary School.  Maybe he was having a bad day.  Maybe the cancer had already started, and he was in bad shape.  I don't know.  I only know what I thought was something newsworthy wasn't  newsworthy for somebody else.  Just goes to show, you never know what side of the line your efforts are going to land.

THOUGHTS OF WATER....

I grew up on the high windy plateaus of south-central Wyoming.  There was no water to speak of except for a couple of reservoirs north of Rawlins on the way to Casper.  The North Platte River was a few miles east of Rawlins which at that point in its meandering was probably not more than 10 feet across.  Oh, and Brush Creek in the Snowy Mountain Range southeast of Rawlins before Laramie.  It was swift and cold but not very commanding.  Lake Louise at the top of the Snowy Mountains was pretty but not someplace you'd want to lay a blanket and sit out in the sun.  Too chilly even in the very middle of summer.  The snow run-off was still icy.

In our town we had an old swimming pool that I remember going to a few times with my older sisters. It had broken and crumbling concrete everywhere and was generally in sore need of repair, but still viable as a city amenity.   But when the polio epidemic became like a plague  and continued into the early 50's, that pool was condemned and closed. 

At that time no one knew just exactly WHAT caused polio or how it was contracted.  We weren't supposed to go barefoot or to public  gatherings, especially those with water.  Heck, just about everything we did or had done was suspect of carrying the dreaded polio virus.  Because it was such a horrible disease leaving in its wake crippled children or children destined to exist in iron lungs--and those were the ones who survived the initial debilitating symptoms of the disease--everyone was very careful about not breaking the rules.

When Jonas Salk invented the vaccine for polio in 1955, everyone's life changed for the better.  People could just exist more easily knowing there was a shot that could inoculate one from the horrors of such an unspeakable disease.  But, it took a long time to restore and rebuild the infrastructure of what had been abandoned and junked during the polio "witch hunt", so to speak.

I was in the 6th grade when the new Rawlins Municipal Swimming Pool was completed in Washington Park several blocks northwest of my elementary school.  I was excited about "going swimming" with my friends.  But....I didn't know how to swim.  (Lois' kids took swimming lessons and they learned. I wonder why I didn't?)  My friends had all learned how to swim when their families had gone to the reservoirs for picnics and boating excursions.  But my family didn't do those kinds of things for recreation. We NEVER purposely went somewhere that was strictly for water fun.

I was a dunce.  I was a fraidy cat.  I was scared of the water.  I wanted to jump in and swim like the others, but it looked like a puzzle I couldn't figure out.  So I would sit on the side and dangle my feet in the water while the others jumped in, splashed each other as they ducked in and out of the water, and had a wonderful adventure.

Truthfully, it was really my mother's fear of the water that overcame me every time I put on a swimming suit and bravely strode out of the sun into the dark entrance of the Rawlins pool to pay for my ticket.  By the time I crossed through the dressing room and walked back into the sunlight of the open pool area, I  was already embarrassed about my lack of swimming ability AND my unwillingness to put myself into a situation that made me look even more stupid than I already was. 

My mother was deathly afraid of the water and often told of an experience that happened when she was pregnant with the twins (I think that's the pregnancy). Some of my mom's family and some of my dad's family all went regularly to Bear Lake in Idaho for an outing.   My parents talked often of these excursions as being fun times for the husbands and wives as well as the dozens of kids they had among them.  But this one time, my mother was very ill in the first trimester of her pregnancy and no one knew she was pregnant.  Otherwise no one would  even have let her near the water (there were so many taboos and old-wives tales about being pregnant, etc.)

Apparently, my dad's brother Afton was a prankster and made things lively.  He was ten years younger than my dad and not married yet, so probably a teenager.  When my mom said she didn't want to go into the water because she didn't know how to swim, Uncle Aft said if he threw her in she would learn sure enough.  There was a lot of hooting and hollering while he picked up his sister-in-law and dunked her into the water...until after she went under and didn't come up.  I'm not sure if it was because of her pregnancy or her fear--or both--but the aftermath was that they had to pull her from the water and revive her.  She was unconscious.  A reason to be afraid of the water.  And she repeated that fearful story as often as she thought necessary to warn me of the dangers of water.

After I graduated from high school, my friend Teresa Spencer was given permission to drive to Colorado to pick up her brother Freddy at the end of his work week where he assisted on the road crew paving the highway through the hogbacks near Morrison.  She asked me if I would like to come along for the ride.  She would drive during the day, and Freddy would drive when it was dark to come home.  My parents said it was okay.

We got to Colorado early enough to have some time on our hands before Freddy finished his work.  There was a recreation facility nearby which had a big outdoor pool with a slide.  Teri suggested we go swimming.  I told her I couldn't swim and was afraid of the water.  She said, "That's nonsense!  You just come right back up after you jump in."  What she didn't add, probably because swimming was so second nature to her, was that, sure, you came right back up.  But  by heck, you better know what to do with yourself before you went right down again!

We jumped into the pool.  We both came right back up.  But I went under again.  And I had NO clue how to keep myself afloat, let alone swim, dog paddle, or otherwise get myself out of the water.  So, before I knew it, Teri had jumped in and brought me to the surface of the swimming pool where I sputtered and heaved and pretty much was a wreck.  She continued to swim until time to pick up her brother, but I was having a miserable time and just wanted to go home.

I went to BYU that fall.  We had to take eight credits of PE at that time to graduate.  I wanted to do the showy stuff.  Ballroom dancing.  All classes full by the time my name rolled around to register.  Bowling.  All classes full.  Fencing.  Ditto.  Can't remember what I finally took, but it had to be awful.  Sophomore year rolled around.  There was a brand new PE building with THREE Olympic sized pools--and enough classes for just about the whole school to take swimming lessons.

One promise I made to myself, probably when I was "drowning" the first time, was that I  WAS going to take a swimming class SOMETIME so I would at least learn how to tread water in the awful eventuality that I might be drowning for real.  I would be able to keep my head above water.  Here was my opportunity.   And so, I signed up to take beginning swimming.  Thankfully, I wasn't the ONLY person in the class who did NOT know how to swim--even a little.  Level playing field, for the most part.

But I hated that class!  It was at noon in a beautiful brand new facility with windows at the third story level where students could gaze down through to the pool area and the swimming classes.  And there were lots of gawkers at noon!   Each Tuesday and Thursday I would just go through the motions so I could pass the class and in the end know that I had just a couple of skills that might keep me alive if I ever found myself under water.  I could hardly wait for each of those horrid 50 minutes of class torture to end.

One day the teacher said we could go early, as soon as we did such and such.  I finished as quickly as I could and took off for the dressing room--completely forgetting the rule NEVER RUN in the pool area.  Yup!  I slipped and fell to my knees while dozens of people were watching from their  eagle height perch at the windows.  I jumped up and walked as quickly as I could without running--and without looking like I was in pain--to the dressing room where I collapsed onto the bench and wanted to scream and cry my knee hurt so badly.  It didn't take long for the bruises to appear.  Perfect tiny blackish purple window panes thanks to the ceramic tile which lined the pool area.  It took days before the pain in my knee went away.  And weeks before the bruises finally turned brown, then green before they faded.

I knew the requirements for a swimming certificate and for a passing grade from day one.  All the other requirements for the class paled to this last one--jump from the high diving board of the largest pool.  When the day came I literally had to force myself up the ladder to the platform and out to the end of the diving board. 

Even now, I do not know how I made myself step off into space.  I am terrified of speed and height. the exact combination this feat produced.  As I sliced the water  feet first, I could feel my swimming suit try mightily to disassociate itself from my body.  Thank goodness my crotch kept it on, though I'm sure it was buried at least three inches into my internal organs by the time I bobbed to the surface.

And the first thing I did after that dive was get out of the pool, climb that ladder again and dive a second time.  Just to say I had done MORE than was required of me.  I have told some people I dived three times.  As I review that experience, NO.  I don't think it is in my nature to do any more than ONE MORE.  I'll just say I dived twice.  The second wasn't as paralyzing as the first, but close!

At the end of the semester could I say I had learned to like the water, even a little bit?  NADA!  The only thing I could say is that I had met the requirements which said I knew the rudimentary basics of moving through the water and keeping afloat.  A swimming certificate.  It didn't change how I felt about---and still feel about, to a certain degree--water, water sports, cruises, lakes, oceans, big bodies of water, and the smell that accompanies water.  Especially tide water which STINKS!.  I can handle wading in a stream.  I kind of like that--which got me into a heap of trouble one time.  But that is a story for another day.

I used to look at the genealogical sheets and see that my great grandfather Huggins was born in Toms River, New Jersey.  Wow!  That sounded just a little bit romantic.  And to think he left there and came all that way across the Great Plains as a pioneer to the Rocky Mountain West.  Once in an airplane we passed over that area and Ross pointed it out to me through the window down there along the shore.  I wanted to see it in person. 

When I was working for Data National Corporation, I had business in New Jersey and made a detour to see Toms River which is on a cape.  It was a raw day.  The sky was grey, the temp was chilly, the wind was sharp and the smell was AWFUL!  It wasn't at all like I had imagined that place with an interesting name.  I gave a silent prayer of thanks that my great grandfather had left New Jersey and gone west as a pioneer, suffering who knows what kind of privations to settle in the tops of the Rockies where most bodies of water are about no bigger than the bathtub.  Now THAT is my idea of perfect water.  No need for a bathing suit.  No expectations to sit out in hot sun.  No scratchy sand infiltrating every pore of my body.  No stench of the tide or the ocean.  Just clean water in a manageable quantity.

Do I still know how to swim?  Probably not.  I haven't really been in a swimming pool with my complete body immersed for over 20 years.  And I pay $55 a month to my HOA for my neighborhood pool which I can see from my back yard!

I think I could still tread water, though, and maybe even float on my back.  I did kind of enjoy that now and then.  But will I purposely seek out a vacation that would require me to be a water nymph?  Nah!  That's why I'm going on a RIVER cruise.  Get to keep my clothes on and dry.

TARGET PRACTICE...

AT FIRST

NOW

___________________________________________________________________________________                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

I just realized recently that every time I talked about "retiring from United", it was nothing but target practice.  In fact after reading President Uchtdorf's First Presidency message in the January 2017 Ensign, what I was really doing was putting a date out there and then trying to draw a target around it.

First, it was" the MINUTE I reached my amended 15 years as a flight attendant seniority".                  January 6, 2016.  Scrap that!  Still no contract for the flight attendants, so hang on for a possible signing bonus--maybe even another buyout since I was sixteen months shy of having enough seniority for the last one. 

Then, I drew a target for the end of May 2016.  Got the profit sharing in February.  Surely by May we would have a new contract, maybe a signing bonus, too.  But there was definite news there would be NO additional buyout--just natural attrition, so why pay people to leave?  Dunno....?   So, scrap that, too.

Please by the end of summer 2016 so I wouldn't have to go to yearly requalification ONE more time in September! I hate that month of preparation and testing.  Drew another target. 

Oh, we got the contract in July.  NO signing bonus.  Why would they give a signing bonus?  Their reasoning:  People would just vote to ratify the contract for the signing bonus and then jump ship, not caring what kind of provisions they voted for since they didn't plan to be there.  Take the money and run...!     Another practice run for retirement.

In August I found out another important factor.  United Airlines requires SIX MONTHS notice before an employee can retire.  That's a huge commitment to stick with once the ball has started to roll.  What if this?   What if that?  What if...?  What if...?  What if I find out down the road I have made a HUGE mistake in the date I choose to retire?  These are some pretty BIG "ifs".  Another target drawn on the blank paper.

In addition, I was really hurting because I had accidentally shot myself in the foot, as well.  I had "looked ahead" and thought "Why not take my vacation by the end of May so I would be sure to leave nothing behind?"  Well, I got the vacations I wanted in those first five months....and then I stayed.  That meant I went from May to the end of 2016 with NO vacation.

By then I was at my 71st birthday--AND had a brand new car with payments.  Then the retirement plans got more definite.  "I'll stay at United until my 72nd birthday and use some of the increase in pay--which we DID get with the new contract--to pay down as much of the financed cost of my new car as I can."

And THAT was the plan Louis and I agreed upon.  At the beginning of 2017, we transferred all the ACH withdrawals for the mortgage, the insurances, the utilities, etc. from my bank account to his so we would have enough time during this year to tweak whatever needed to be adjusted before we were minus all contributions from me except for Social Security.

I began to ready the retirement papers which would have to be submitted in June to satisfy the six month requirement.  I thought all was set.  Noooo....

I have been talking with some of the other flight attendants about my retirement, now slated in my mind for the end of 2017.  Wrong!  They asked some important questions....Why go clear until the end of the year and quit then?  Profit sharing is announced the end of January and disbursed the end of February.  "You must stay for that!"  That sounded reasonable.  That means a few thousand dollars to pocket before I fly into the wild blue yonder for good.

Plus, next year after having passed my 17th year mark with United Airlines (not as a flight attendant, but as an employee), my vacation is increased to 33 days.  Then the other flight attendants suggested, "Bid for three 11 day vacations each of the first three months of 2018.  That way you won't even have to work much since it is the slow time of the year.  Stay through the first quarter and retire on March 31, 2018."

Well, why not?!?!?!  What's another three months after 17 years?  I will have to do yearly requal in September 2017 anyway.  Might as well have something additional to show for it.  Paperwork for retirement will have to be submitted by September 30, 2017.   And then, I will be holding the short stick.

So, THIS time I fixed the target first, and now I am aiming for that bull's eye. 

Red letter day!  March 31, 2018