Recollections

Aldergrove Secondary, by Dick Chell and Maureen Pepin, Leona French

Alice Brown, by Harry D. McTaggart

Blacklock Elementary, by Merv Grigg 

Several years ago while teaching PE to a class of intermediate students, I had the class sit on the gym floor while I issued the necessary instructions for the ensuing activity. When I was finished, I gave them the green light to stand to begin the activity. Everyone got up, with the exception of one boy. I suggested that it was time to get up, but he said, “I can’t”. I, of course, said , “Why?” He replied, “I’m stuck”. “What do you mean, stuck? How can you possibly be stuck?” “My finger is stuck in a hole,” he answered. Sure enough, during the instructions he had found a hole in the floor that was used to secure wall apparatus when it was in use. I guess he had tried to get it out but managed instead to get his finger lodged securely in the metal-lined hole in the floor. My first impulse was to treat the whole incident rather lightly, but one look at his panic-stricken face made me realize that action, not laughter, was necessary. So I sent one of the other students to the staff room for liquid detergent. A few squirts of this miracle liquid later, the finger and the boy were extricated and class continued as usual.

County Line School – Reminiscences of Frank Croquet 

Frank Croquet, who attended County Line School in 1918-1919, remembers that he and his friends walked the two miles from Kendall Road (62) with their school bags slung from their shoulders, carrying books and lunches. He remembers tasty sandwiches of homemade bread and wild blackberry jam. In the winter there was so much snow that the school was closed for three months.

The principal of the school, Mr. Sangster, lived in Vancouver and came out on the BC Electric on Sunday night, boarded at a home on Coghlan Road during the week, and returned to the city on Friday night. One Monday morning, Mr. Sangster failed to show up as he had missed the Sunday night train. The students waited around until noon, ate their lunches, and went home.

In 1919, a massive fire at the Beaver River mill meant that Beaver River became a ghost town, and the Croquet family were forced to move to Lombard. Because there was no connecting road, the children moved to Bradner School.

County Line – Reminiscences Mary Simard (nee Gjertsen) 

Mary Simard remembers that after the fire of 1931 burnt down the school (except for the chimney), the grade 8 students continued their education at the Presbyterian Church and later were bussed to Langley High School for a monthly fee of three dollars.

Water that was brought from the little creek just west of the school for drinking was not polluted in those days, but the families were concerned about all the students drinking from the same dipper. Tuberculosis was rampant at the time, and even spitting on the school grounds brought on serious punishment.

School-wide annual medical examinations were conducted by Dr. McBurney. Students were called up one at a time for a quick check-up of ear, nose, and throat. Notes were sent home to parents if a problem was detected. However, with no Medicare and money being scarce, it is doubtful if many students could afford medical help.

In the mid-1930s, manual training for boys and home economics for girls were taught in the closed-in basement of the school. As there was no electricity, the boys had hand tools only, and the girls used treadle sewing machines.

County Line School, by Hazel Harrower (nee Harding) 

Hazel Harding was appointed to her first teaching job at County Line in 1940. She remembers the hectograph, which was a mimeographing device that used a slab of gelatine.  She mixed gelatine powder with water and poured it into a wooden rectangular frame. A special purple pencil was used to make the original copy of printing or drawing. The first paper lifted from the pad was hopefully very clear, but the purple printing gradually faded into the jelly until the copies were useless.

Langley High School, by Sharon Fisher 

Sharon remembers that one day at Langley High School, the students were called to the auditorium to hear a famous violinist named Arthur Rubenstein. His appearance had been paid for by a local service club, probably the Lions.

The students filed from their classrooms into the auditorium, chatting as usual, but in reasonably good order. However, when it came time for Mr. Rubenstein to play, he rudely announced that because the students were so ill-behaved, he was refusing to play the concert, and then he walked off the stage.

The principal, Mr. Roy Mountain, and the visiting Lions Club members were dismayed at this turn of events. Mr. Mountain told the students that if anyone ever asked them if they had heard Rubenstein play the violin, they can say “no”, but they have seen him play the fool.

Milner School, by Jennie Medd (nee Estey), quoted from “Growing Up in the Valley,” pages 62-3) 

I applied for a school at Milner and got it in November, 1912. It was a one-room school, and I believe it had been rather unruly. One day the chairman of the School Board called on me, and he told me that one of the teachers had become so annoyed, she had taken the slate and smashed it over the youngster’s head, then told him to go home with the frame around his neck. He rather admired her for her spirit. But some of the parents didn’t like it quite so well. They told me that the lady that had gone just before I arrived was a large woman and a fairly good disciplinarian, but she simply couldn’t stand those youngsters, and had refused to stay any longer. When I arrived, they gave me until Christmas to be finished off. But I thought, well, I’m not going to be driven out by a little group of youngsters, no matter how unruly they seem to be. However, after a time I succeeded. I gave one boy a jolly good strapping~I took one of the big ones—and that settled them all.

It was rather a large school of 44 children. They had all the grades from grade one to the entrance class, and at that time they were writing the government examinations, which meant a great deal of work for the senior class. They had thirteen written examinations to take and they had to pass their exams with a good standing or they weren’t allowed into high school. And by the way, we had no high school in the place at that time; they had to go either to [New] Westminster or Vancouver, in order to attend high school.

In a one-roomed school you had to group classes together, and actually it’s a very unsatisfactory way to teach them. In those days, you must remember we didn’t have the things to work with they have these days, either; no coloured papers, no coloured chalk, nothing like that, that would make life attractive.

The inside of that school was just about as unattractive as anything you could possibly imagine. The floor was more or less rough, no attempt at paint, and the walls were a sort of drab grey with shiny black blackboards, one at the front, one at the side. The windows were high, so that the light didn’t get down to the desks too well. We didn’t have electric light. Our water supply consisted of a bucket with the old tin cup.

And one of the children had to carry it from the neighbouring blacksmith’s shop every morning, that was his little job. There was an old stove in the middle of the room, with the long pipes that had challenged these youngsters. At the front of the room there was a platform, and on that stood a table with just one little drawer in it—that was your teacher’s desk—one chair and a tiny cupboard for supplies. And the supplies consisted of a box of chalk and some blackboard erasers. That’s what you started to work with. However, you tried to make things as interesting as you could, and the children seemed to respond, and we got along very nicely after I settled them, once and for all, with the big boy getting it. They decided, well, that person, she’s pretty little but she means business, so they settled down. And the girls were very cooperative. I enjoyed life with them, very much.

That lasted just a year. And then we moved down into a very nice new school house, two rooms and very attractive. The rooms were bright and the windows lower. The blackboards now were green. And the whole place had an air of refinement that made you quite happy to be in it. It was very modern, and had a basement with running water and toilets with basins, just as the boys and girls have today. And we had a furnace. In a very short time we got an assistant, and then it was much easier. The little ones moved into the other room. They were happier and so was I.

Otter Elementary and Otter School, from the notes of N. Sherritt, Danny Cummings

Two little boys from Otter School, both from pioneer families, decided one day that they had had it with their teacher, so they decided to bring some dynamite to school and set it off under his desk at noon. In those days little boys knew all about using dynamite to blow stumps.

The little Mclnnes boy arrived at school with his two sticks of dynamite, but the little Williams boy, who was to bring the caps, had to stay home to work.

The result? One little boy dismissed from school, one little boy got off “scott free”, and one teacher lived to tell the tale.

Otter School, by Danny Cummings (early 20th century), quoted from “Growing Up in the Valley”, page 62) 

I really belonged in Lochiel School, but the trail wasn’t open. So I went to Otter School. It was a one-room school. It had a big box stove in the middle, and pipes went way back. The kids were fully as hard to control as they are today. There was a teacher there and he had two boys, and one of them was a pretty bad boy. I remember one day (I was just a little kid – seven years old), the father and the son started to fight. They upset the stove pipes, and all us kids were crying, and they fought it out right there, the father and son.

Then when I was about eight they opened the trail to Lochiel School and I started going to that. But Otter was a tough school [in] those days. The next teacher that came, some of us kids had no use for him. He was over 70, you know. If you did something wrong, he would tell you to go to the anteroom, and maybe leave you there for half an hour. And then he’d come out and take your head and put it between his legs and give it to you. The kids got down on him, and they put four or five sticks of powder and a fuse under the school, right under his desk. At noon hour they lit it, but they had no cap on it, otherwise it would have blown the whole thing to pieces.

At Otter after that, they got a little girl in to teach. She didn’t weigh a hundred pounds, and the people all said, “Oh, well!” Inside a month you could hear a pin drop. Everything was lovely.

There were only twenty teachers in the whole municipality. An awful lot of them were town girls, and they fitted in awful good in the country. They knew all the parents, and boarded at one of the parents’ houses. And they used to take a lead in everything, them days. They never got home weekends, and if the community wanted a play, they put on a play—or the Ladies’ Aid, they’d join in with them.

Patricia Elementary School, by Betty Lou Chell 

In 1951-52, I was teaching at Patricia School, located on the busy Bellingham Highway (264). It was a one-room school which meant that if the children were outside at recess or lunch time, I had to be there too to keep a very watchful eye on them and the road. This was long before the days of paid supervision, and one was expected to be on duty from 8:30am to 3:30pm. I was concerned about the road, and being a brash young teacher and possibly unaware of correct protocol, I decided that something had to be done. The most direct route seemed to be to contact Harold Stafford, the Superintendent, and Vern Mercer, the Secretary Treasurer of the District. I phoned each of them every day for a week. They became so fed up with my calls that they decided to pay a visit.

The circumstances couldn’t have been better if I had orchestrated them. When they arrived, there was such a flow of traffic coming up from the border that they had to wait five minutes before being able to turn into the school yard. The next week a fence was built. If one wanted to have something like that done today, there would be committees struck, feasibility studies ordered, budgets consulted, and maybe a fence within five years.

Patricia School, regarding Ailie Caldwell 

Ailie Caldwell taught at Patricia from 1954 until 1956. After she found commuting to Vancouver every weekend too wearing and the costs of renting at the Blue Star Motel too expensive, Ailie and her three children received permission from the School Board to place an 18-foot travel trailer near the windows on the south side of Patricia School. Their trailer was close enough to run an extension cord for electricity, and the school outhouse andhand pump served the family’s other needs.

The three girls attended local schools until Ailie had to move to Alberta to be close to her dying mother. When they returned in 1962, the girls attended Aldergrove Secondary.

Ailie taught at Willoughby and Aldergrove Elementary, completed her Master’s degree at Western Washington, taught Kindergarten, worked at Trinity Western, was on the steering committee for the creation of the Langley Fundamental School, and taught at Langley Central until she retired in 1981.

Springbrook School, as told by Vickie Jenkens (nee Sharko) 

In the 1930s, Vickie lived in the Springbrook area where the freeway crosses 232 today. For awhile, the students from Springbrook had to bus to Fort Langley while awaiting placement at Sperling School. Vickie says she hated school and disliked the roundabout way of reaching Fort Langley School, especially when the road was flooded.

One day Vickie did not get on the school bus with the other children, but hid behind a stump. All day she sat there, ate her lunch, and then went home when the others returned after school. When she reached home, her mother asked her if she enjoyed her day behind the stump. Unknown to Vickie, her mother could see her hiding place all day. Her life as a truant was over.

South Otter Elementary, as told to M. Pepin by Leona French 

One day in the winter when the roads were rather snowy and treacherous, Leona was headed to South Otter Elementary where she had never been before. As she drove carefully south on Otter Road (248), she suddenly came to “Jump Off Hill”, which she did not realize was there. Imagine her horror when she saw a school bus coming up the steep hill towards her. She couldn’t brake because of the road conditions, and she couldn’t look. She just closed her eyes as she passed the bus and continued down the hill to the school.

I guess that the bus driver had quite a sense of humour. The next day he arrived at Aldergrove Secondary School where she was working and presented her with a large foil medal for being the “only teacher who could drive with her eyes closed”

South Otter School, by Darlene Hargrove (nee Gartner) 

Darlene Hargrove taught at South Otter from 1979-80. It was her first year of teaching. The children were not the only ones to receive an education that year. She had been raised as a city girl, and some experiences were very novel for her, such as the time a pig’s testicles were brought to school for “show and tell”. On one field trip to a farm, a Kindergarten child with long blonde hair had a fabulous time with a goatkid. She came home with a shagcut, and the kid had a tummy full of hair.