"Up Street" to Rockville

I had Miss Ruth Tyler at the Ogden's Corner School (1-room, 5 grades), for grades 2 through 5. then I took a bus from Ogden's Corner to East District School in the center of Rockville. At that time Miss Tyler transferred to East District School, and I again had her, this time in a class of maybe 25 kids for grade 6. This was when my nerves (due to Chorea) tormented me the most. I remember once I told the teacher I was sick, she referred me to the school nurse, Miss Dornheim. I told the nurse my nerves bothered me, but she said "You can put them in your pocket." Not much help there. At that time (or was it the next year), we had a weekly class in basket weaving taught by Mr. Clough, a retired principal.

The next year Charlie Thrall and I were "promoted" to grade 6A with Mrs. Alice Denson. Initially, in going to school in Rockville, we had a lot of time on our hands for the one-hour lunch time. So we formed a "gang" and went down Market street to the railroad tracks, and played amongst the freight cars. When I told my mother, she seemed a bit worried. So she arranged for Charlie and me to eat lunch with hot chocolate at Grandma Blankenburg's at 8 Ward St. (down the steep hill) in Rockville. We ate there during grades 6, 7, and 8.

Mrs. Denson was an anglophile, and during our time in grade 6A, there was a British coronation, probably George VI. Her son, Alfred Denson was heavy into television. This was in 1937. She came across to me as bragging about all of this.

The following year Charlie and I were in a smaller 7th grade with Mrs. Kibbee. Here is her picture. It was a much more home-like atmosphere, and she was a very relaxed person, not trying to prove anything. My nerves were also in much better shape by then. She would fix her lunch in the classroom by heating her soup on a hotplate.

She had a reputation apparently from earlier years of dispensing a "Kibbee special" to recacitrant pupils. It was apparently a cuff of the hand across the upper part of the back of your head. I never saw this happen or heard of it happening during my own time in her grade. She was of Welsh extraction, and jokingly, good-naturedly somewhat downgraded herself because of this. Remember the nursery rhyme (now probably forbidden) : "Tommy was a Welchman, Tommy was a thief". Or, did you ever hear of someone "Welching" on an agreement? Now you know. The Welch were brought under control by the English. So you know how that was.

In the summers we used to ride our bicycles over to the old swimming hole right by the state highway. Here are a few photos from that time.

The above 12 photos are from my 7th and 8th grade times in Rockville. Starting from the upper left, top row, we will number all the pictures as 1 thru 12. #1, Brewster Skinner, 2, Arthur Francis, 3, Bill Thrall at swimming hole. He was Charlie's older brother who got married but died very early. 4, Harry Osteen; he became an undertaker, 5, Clarence Koch from Talcotville (he was born prematurely), 6, Alfred Baxter, 7 Donald Neff my second cousin, with a hammer-lock on Donald Miller, son of my grandparents first apartment in Rockville after they retired, 8 Charlie Thrall looking skywards, 9 George Risley, who was the Sheriff's son, bright, but wouldn't study. They put him in the "Opportunity Room" for dumbells. He took it as a joke. Later during WWII he was in the merchant marine, and in this way made a fortune on the black market after the invasion of France. Still later, he was President of one of the banks in Rockville. 10 I can't tell you, 11 Eugene St. Louis at the ole swimmin hole, and 12 Charles Brendell, son of one of the co-owners of Tensted - Brendall Hardware on Market Street, Rockville.

One evening somewhere around this time, I went with my Dad to a Farm Bureau meeting. At that meeting the speaker said that farm families were 25 percent of the total population of the country, and had 9 per cent of the national income. That was the evening that I decided to go into "radio" for my living, rather than farming. Note that the term "electronics" had not yet been in the U.S. vocabulary as we know it now.

Time to quit.