My first grade school days began in the fall of 1929. However I seem to recall Mother telling that I had been taken to school earlier but being the frightened country girl that I was- went to a neighbors’ house instead. Of course, this was soon discovered so the teacher said (in front of me) that I had plenty of time and could begin the following year. And that was the way it went.
Another incident that should be related was the way I begged to enter school while on the farm. That happened each time the school bell pealed in District # 41 and I was certainly not old enough.
Once a scholar though, I proved that I liked school and then there were many music clinics-band, piano, organ, choir- during my life besides a stint at the University in Marshall. At that point Mother remarked, “Aren’t you ever going to quit schooling? “Don’t you ever get tired of school?”became a later comment by her. Secretly though, she wished she had had the opportunity to go to more school after her years in District # 41.
My first and second grade teacher was, Miss Hasslin and her beautiful, shiny finer nails intrigued me. Not knowing anything about nail polish, I slicked my tongue over my nails but found out that it only disappeared. Later I learned her secret. We began number booklets in first grade in January. In April we started a garden in our sand box. The red chairs at the front of the room were the scene of story time, then word cards to learn pronouncement lessons. Some students could not get the hang of “the,’ “thee, “then” etc. because they had become accustomed to “dah”, “dee”, “den” etc.- the Scandinavian tongue. It took lots of practice. A few students began first grade who could not speak English so I was one of the students who had to translate what they said for the teacher. A word that I stumbled on was “vineger” where I mixed the “n” and “g” around and said viginer. I gave a student whose name I drew a handkerchief at our Christmas party as he always wiped his nose on his shirt sleeve!
Our third and fourth grade teacher was Miss Francis Larson. We made the move from the southwest corner of the 1901 building to the southeast corner. Here we wrote answers in math on our papers, exchanged papers across the aisle and corrected our neighbors’ work. It was here that I thought how much fun it would be to become a teacher. As fourth graders we were a part of a new subject in school-that of religious instruction. The class was held on Fridays in the northeast room of the 1901 building just before noon-11:30 and began on October 14 in 1932. It included members from grades 4, 5 and 6 whose parents signed up for the same. The local pastors took their turn in conducting the class- Pastors Nils Giere, David Dale and I. O. Melom. Release time was thirty minutes each week. This was where I first accompanied – the group sang a hymn, What friend we Have in Jesus.
Our fifth and sixth grade teacher was Agnes Lindberg. Often our arithmetic problems were written on the blackboard. Here my nearssightedness was discovered and I began to wear glasses when I copied 9 for 7 or the other way around’ etc.. These years we had individual cards that were filled with problems or questions on individual cards for Math, History and for example Geography…a map with dots and numbers to identify the city, river, country or mountain, etc. We would have music wherein a piano was rolled into the room, the third and fourth graders were invited to join us and we would sing from the Golden Song Book. If a teacher could not play the piano, a high school student was brought in. In the spring Miss Lindberg was gone during her appendicitis operation and we had Miss Irene Ramsland as her substitute
A big move came when we were seventh and eighth graders-we were taken into the new 1929 building to a upstairs room in the far southwest corner. We now were close to the high school students; well, we hung our coats on the hooks along the hallway just as they did. Miss Lenore Steffenson was our teacher and on the strict side. For talking out of line we had to memorize poems. One was entitled “Joseph.” As an eighth grader I had Stenward Bjorndal sitting across from me