The following is the letter to all of them and my memories for grades four and six in elementary school. Long...but may be interesting. I'll include the rest in a different blog or else this one would be B. O. R. I. N. G. !
Dear Nichols Kids—2nd
Generation!
Once again it is time for school bells to
be ringing with the promise of fun, frustration, and friends to make every day
at least interesting, if not downright outstanding. School is a terrific
springboard for the rest of your life whether or not you think you are never
going to use all those useless facts for which you have to be tested. Surprise!
Those very same “useless” facts or parallels to those “useless” things
are going to pop up all through your life.
So, just remember that everything you’re doing now is a
preparation for the future.
I loved school! That’s the bottom line. I looked forward to going back each year and
was excited about learning new things.
As I got older and those new things were trig functions and memorizing
lists of species and identifying smells in the chemistry lab, I truthfully
didn’t enjoy the classes as much as the ones where we learned about people and
places and language. I was really
keen on grammar, though! But for the
most part, I just enjoyed being in a classroom where a really good teacher
opened new vistas, even in subjects I really didn’t care for.
The preparation for my own school years,
and the preparation for the school years when your parents were growing up was
pretty similar—purchase supplies from the lists prepared by the teachers and
get some new clothes. Then label
everything and choose what you wanted to show up wearing on the very first
day.
School began the day after Labor Day for
most of the years I went to school. Even
though it was still warm—even in Rawlins—the girls usually chose one of the new
winter sweater and wool skirt outfits. There seemed to be a secret competition
as to whose new school clothes hit the mark best. By the second day of school
we had shed those heavy clothes for cooler duds until the temperature warranted
all those great winter clothes we had picked from the Sears catalog or JC Penny
or Ferguson Mercantile in downtown Rawlins.
My mom and I didn’t usually shop for my school clothes at Smyth’s
Department Store. That was where the
name brands like Ship and Shore, White Stag, Jantzen, and Bobby Brooks were
sold. (Now I can afford them at WalMart! Who knew I would one day be able to wear
those coveted labels?) Still I loved looking at my new supplies and just knew I
was going to look soooo cute in my new outfits.
But this year, for two reasons, I decided
to leave the shopping to you and give you a different kind of Back to School
experience.
First, it has been a very hectic summer
with my schedule at United. Rarely home
and while away only minimum layovers. My
time has been very limited to go wandering in the stores looking at all the
array of school supplies available.
There are hundreds more things to buy than when I went to school over 50
years ago. That’s a lot of shop-time and
decision making I didn’t have this year.
Second, since I am in the latter third of
my life I thought you might like a peek at what I was doing the same grade/year
you are in school right now. So, I am
giving you MEMORIES this year.
When I first decided to do this, I was just going to send to each
of you only the pertinent memories for your school year. Then I thought
maybe you might like to learn what was going on in my life for the school years
the other 2nd Generation Nichols Kids are experiencing in
2015/2016. This will be long. And you
may choose to read only about your corresponding school year, but, either way, I
hope you enjoy a glimpse into the past.
If not now, you might get pleasure from this letter sometime down the
road when you are more interested in Momma G’s life. Like after I am dead and
gone. Ha Ha Ha! Your parents are sure I am going to live
forever! But I’m not….
So here we go blasting into the past for our school age NK2G. In the following pages is the hot skinny on what some of life was like for me the same years of school (or not) that you are in now. I hope you kind of get a kick out of some facts about myself you probably would never have known otherwise. If not, keep this in the back of your drawer and share it with YOUR kids someday. They may enjoy hearing about the woman you called Momma G.
Much love to you all…
Georgia Carol Huggins Nichols-Bateman
Briggs: Fourth Grade
Jeremy and Orion: Sixth Grade
Cameron:
Freshman
Mackson:
Junior
Chardonnay:
Senior
Cheyenne:
One year after HS graduation
Savannah:
Two years after HS graduation
Fourth Grade 1955-1956:
I
attended Mountain View Elementary School in Rawlins, Wyoming, just a few blocks
west of where I lived. It was one of three elementary schools in Rawlins which
looked exactly the same and had been built about 1950. The second was Sunnyside in the northeast
section of Rawlins. The third one was Pershing on the south side of the railroad
tracks where all the Hispanic kids went.
The kids in the middle part of Rawlins went to an old stone building
called Central School which housed both elementary grades and Rawlins Junior
High. (I went there for seventh grade.)
Fourth grade meant an anticipated move to
the big kids’ part of Mountain View School.
One of the secondary entrances to the school marked the division between
the lower elementary grades and the upper elementary grades. Why, just the year before in Third Grade my
classroom was the very last one for the little kids, now I was in the very
first classroom past the big double doors.
There was NO reason for any younger student to be in our part of the
school. That alone meant I was growing
up.
My sister Beth and her oldest child Corinne
had lived with us in 1955 while her husband Shirl served as a doctor in the
Navy. That summer, before I began 4th grade, we took a long road
trip to Seattle where Beth and Corinne boarded a Navy ship so they could go
live in Sasebo, Japan where Shirl was based following his duty at sea. On the way back to Rawlins, my dad took us to
Portland, east through Idaho, and then after Yellowstone down to our home.
My teacher in 4th grade was
Patricia Jerry. I liked her a lot. She had brown hair, was probably in her late
20’s or early 30’s and wore penny loafer shoes with nylon stockings. Never high heels, but always a wool sweater
and skirt. Her glasses were wire-rimmed,
and I don’t ever remember seeing her without them. It was a good year. There were two classes
for every grade, and for this year my cousin George Huggins was in my class
again.
I don’t know if this is a national thing or
not, but just like your parents learning about their own state of Colorado in
the Fourth Grade, I learned about the state of Wyoming. I still have in my school memory box
downstairs a project I did about Wyoming.
It was a homemade paper scrapbook I had made with pictures of Wyoming
and tidbits of history I gleaned from tourist brochures and maps of the
state. I titled it “TOURAID PREPARED
ESPECIALLY FOR WYOMING” and got an A grade with this comment from the
teacher…”Excellent”.
I missed the last three days of the fourth
grade because I had the mumps! What a
bum time to be ill as school was over the third week in May. Not only was I housebound, but in those days
(the 50’s) we had to stay in bed the whole time of recovery, too. At first I didn’t care because I was so sick,
but as I started feeling better, I hated lying in bed, looking out at the
beautiful spring of the year—just beyond the windows. School was over. I wanted to be up and doing.
”Sixth Grade 1957-1958: This was the last year for elementary school,
and I was still at Mountain View. (There
was no Middle School then. Seventh and
Eighth Grades were Junior High and went to a different part of town for
school.) Our classroom was waaaay down
the hall from fourth grade, next to the last set of doors that went outside to
the playground on the north side of the building which we always used and never
went around the building to the west side with fourth and fifth graders. We had our own “baseball field”, a section of
rocky dirt that we managed to scrape out a rough diamond with home plate and
three bases. We played practically every
day, and I was a fairly good player who could hit the ball better than most
girls. But there was NO power behind
that swing, and I was usually “out” by the time I reached first base. Sometimes our recess times (15 minutes both
morning and afternoon—and we HAD to go outside) were spent in small gaggles of
girls, gossiping about the boys and the boring school work we had to do. (I didn’t confess out loud I didn’t think ALL
the school work was boring. Plus I
always got my work done in school and never had homework—until the seventh
grade.)
My teacher that year was Marilyn
Waldron. She was a young married
woman—probably in HER 30’s, too—but the difference was that she was NOT a
widow. In our school system only single
or widowed women could be teachers. No
one who currently had a husband, and goodness no—not ever a divorced
woman! But the long-time 6th
grade teacher I was scheduled to have as my teacher got sick and left just
before school started. Miss Ashcroft,
now Mrs. Waldron, began teaching again, and the other teacher never came
back. That was all right with me. I loved Mrs. Waldron. She was always pleasant, easy going, and I
don’t remember ever feeling like school was hard in her class.
This was the year the girls separated into
groups of “mature girls” and those who were still on the childish side. I was one of the latter. For the life of me, I just didn’t know how to
get along with the boys—now that they were no longer just people who were
classmates we could be friends with but potential boyfriends. And, this was the year I began to go through
a really UNATTRACTIVE stage which lasted at least another half dozen
years or so.
My compensation was a solid friendship with
Anne Campbell who lived a couple of blocks away from me. We walked together to and from school every
day—including for lunch because EVERYBODY had to go home for lunch—talking the
whole time and then extending our visit for half an hour or so on the corner
before we went our separate ways after school every day. Then when we got to our homes, we called each
other on the telephone. We often spent
the night at each other’s houses, and my dad invited Anne to go on day trips
and even vacations with us. We always
had a lot of fun together. Their family
had fun board games like Scoop and the early edition of Careers and some
others. At my house we still played
dress up, and my mom always fixed us terrific breakfasts and treats for when we
were playing down the basement.
1958 was when the Hong Kong flu came around
for the first time. There were only
three people in my class who did not get sick.
I was one of them. “Sickly” as I was with frequent strep infection and
bouts of croup, it is a miracle to me that I never contracted that disease. Most kids were out at least two weeks with
this illness, and our classroom frequently had only half in attendance over a
period of several weeks that winter. It
was a lonely time for those of us who were at school.
In the spring of that year we all marched
down to Sunnyside Elementary School for Field Day. This wasn’t an annual event for the end of
school, so it was exciting to receive permission to get together with all the
rest of the sixth grade classes and play outdoor games all day long. My mom packed my lunch for me where I found a
package of Twinkies for my treat. We
didn’t have this kind of junk food often, and I LOVED them! They weren’t chocolate like most other
treats, and the cream wasn’t too sugary either.
The cakes were longer then, and they also had a short shelf life staying
at the grocery store only seven days maximum.
At the end of that wonderful day, I sported one of the worst sunburns I
have ever had in my life. Ouch! But it was worth it, and a great end to my
elementary school years.
No comments:
Post a Comment