Lower Education

There seems to be lots of discussion these days about how best to educate the young ones. Full day vs half day kindergarten, pre-school, pre-pre-school, nursery school, womb school, and the like. Back in the wilds of Atomic City school started when you were six years old and was called the first grade. Before that you were left to wander around like coyotes and pick up what you could from ultra-violent cartoons on black and white TV. They were the BEST! Neither Sesame Street norThe Electric Company were around yet and Morgan Freeman was probably still in high school.

I actually started my quest for enlightenment in a one-room school in Lone Mountain Lodge, Montana. My dad was a diesel mechanic and was working some kind of construction job there. I'm not sure where it was/is. I vaguely remember hearing the word Bozeman. We were only there a year then moved back to Atomic City. I was quite happy to leave because it was even colder than Idaho and the school had no indoor plumbing. It did make me glad to be a male.

Second grade we were back in A. C. enjoying big city life. There were around 150 people living there then. We had school in an old barracks building that had a pot-bellied stove and actual flush toilets. My Dad thought it was inadequate so he bought the old grocery store and converted it into a rather nice school that we could use for church on Sunday.

There were two big room in the front, one for the class room and the other was the play room. It gave us a place to go when it was too bleeding cold to go outside for recess. It had TWO restrooms, one for the girls and one for the boys. It even had quarters in the back for the teacher, Mrs. Freckleton, who was from Moore, Idaho but lived there during the week with her son Danny who was in my grade. He was an overachiever when it came to living up to his last name. I have never in my long life seen anyone with that many freckles.

Mrs. Freckleton was an absolute gem as a teacher who somehow managed to keep 25 or 30 kids in 8 different grades anxiously engaged in a good cause all day long for the whole school year. She could play the piano and taught us to sing. I attribute my love for reading to her. She was my only teacher until the fifth grade when she retired.

Anything I learned in the fifth grade was purely accidental. We didn't start school that year until after an election to decide whether we could keep the school there or be bused thirty miles away to Moreland. There was some difficulty finding a teacher to replace Mrs. Freckleton. My sister LeAnna who had graduated from High School a couple of years earlier started the year and was replaced by my mother's cousin, Mrs Rowe. She was nice and did a fine job until she had a nasty car wreck in January or February and had to quit.

Then came the evil Mrs. Heck-I-forgot-her-last-name. She was a huge pain in the behind. Her only redeeming social value was that we were able to drive her crazy. So much so she decided she couldn't stand to have all six grades all day.so for the rest of the year, the first three grades went in the morning and the last three in the afternoon.

It was the best thing since Sugar Pops cereal. I could sleep in until cartoons started and watch them every day. I was in heaven. But alas and alack, that was the end of our little school in Atomic City. The next school year we were all bused to Moreland and the Snake River School District. We still managed to get a man on the moon before the end of the decade.