Friday Harbor School Daze

8-13-07

School started for me in September 1926 in the Friday Harbor school which included all grade and high school students on San Juan Island. The school grounds were located on Second Street on what I believe is now a parking lot adjacent to and NW of the county court house and other administrative buildings. Our house was located on the corner of Reed Street and Blair Avenue on what appears to be a parking lot on the western side of the Friday Harbor Post Office. Right across the street is Printonyx, 470 Reed St. From the front yard of our house we could see the school grounds only about 2 blocks away. Along our line of sight was the dark green house of Virgil W. Frits, the founder of the Friday Harbor Journal, located on the western side of Second street right across from the school grounds.

On the first day of school my mother led me the short distance from our house up to the edge of the school grounds. Rather than take me in and introduce me to the first grade teacher she just left me alone to find for myself. As a result of being left alone I was totally confused and scared and didn’t have the foggiest idea of what I was supposed to do. So I started to cry. Who should come along but a young boy named Wallace Mullis. Wallace , obviously knowing the ropes and kind of heart, took me by the hand and led me into the first grade class of Mrs. Ruby Langle where I was soon comfortably involved in class activities.

(My mother was probably afraid to go into the school since she herself had never gone to school. She had suffered a brain concussion as a baby while still living in Canada and for some years afterward experienced occasional epilepsy seizures. At that time there was little known about epilepsy. My grandparents were afraid to send my mother to school so she never went.)

In the first grade I was put on the north side of the room with the other class dummies. I sat behind Sam as I remember since at times when the teacher gave us a written assignment and I didn't know the answer I would look over Sam's shoulder and copy his answer. That worked for awhile until I discovered that sometimes Sam had the wrong answer.

After a month or two the teacher introduced us to the clock and tried to teach us how to tell time. I hadn't the foggiest idea what a clock was even though I once owned a watch. (Earlier, when I was about 5 years old, a man named Dick Welles, brother of Henry Wells who ran the Friday Harbor Drug store gave me a watch. Dick worked part time as a hired hand on my grandparents farm in the valley on ValleyFarms Road when he gave me the watch. ) In the classroom it finally dawned on me that those kids like Jack Paxson and Wallace Mullis seated on the South side of the room were a lot smarter than me and knew all about clocks and could tell time.

In the fifth grade we had Mrs. Hoffman for awhile and Mrs. Jensen later in the year. Around that time I was invited to a birthday party for Jack Paxson near the Jensen shipyards. I remember the event because at the party Mrs. Jensen gave each of us a big white bar of ivory soap and a knife with which to try our hand at sculturing. My glee quickly turned to frustration and disappointment as I botched up my first attempt at carving; I created a very sick looking soap horse.

Moving up to 1932 we were in the 7th grade and I think either Ted Vannover or Walter Nichols was our teacher. A group of 4 or 5 of us boys were standing outside on the shool grounds between the old school house built before 1900 and the newer school house built in 1912.

Bob Henry, whose father was a business man in charge of the Friday Harbor pea cannery, gave us the the rundown on what was happening in the outside world. I knew absolutely nothing about the politics of the outside world so I was all ears to hear the real scoop. It was a presidential election year and a relatively unknown named Franklin D. Roosevelt was running against the well known president Herbert Hoover. We were in the middle of the great depression and Bob explained to us that Hoover was by far the best choice to fix our eonomy and that Democrat Roosevelt would do terrible things to the country. To make matters worse, according to Bob, Roosevelt was crippled so badly from infantile paralysis that he couldn't walk and had to be pushed around in a wheelchair. Well I took that evaluation of the president with a grain of salt. I had been to movies a few times and I had seen Roosevelt riding in the back seat of cars and waving at people from the rear platform on a campaign train. I knew then for sure that Roosevelt wasn't crippled and that Bob was exaggerating because of his father being a Republican businessman. It was a good 30 or 40 years later while reading a history book that I discovered Roosevelt was indeed handicapped and that Bob had been right after all.

To be continued. Grandpa Andy