School Days
When I was two and half years old we moved to Hawk Pride Mountain,
When I was old enough to attend school I went to New Bethel Elementary School.
I went to New Bethel for six years.
My second sister next to me went to New Bethel from the first to the fourth grade.
My third sister attended New Bethel from the first to second grade.
We would ride the school bus eleven miles to school.
On the school bus we would sing song to pass the time.
Some of the song we sang on the big yellow school bus were Sugar Shack, Hang down Your Head Tom Doodle, Found a Peanut, and Honeycomb.
Bertha Hester taught me in the first and second grades.
She would start the day by reciting the pledge of allegiance to the flag and we would say a prayer.
We learned how to read from the Dick and Jane books.
Mrs Hester had large cardboard wheel that had beginning to read words on it and we would practice everyday from this wheel.
Recess lasted thirty minutes and most of the time we were outside.
Some of the games we played outside were ring around the roses, drop the handkerchief, and hopscotch.
We also like to swing, turn flips, jump on a jump board, play baseball, and kickball.
I remember one hot day our class came running into the school building from recess and we all lined up at the water fountain and then disbursed to the restrooms.
On this peculiar day my best friend and I was lagging behind.
So to catch up with the other students we started running down the hall.
I was running down the hall pretty fast when someone opened the lunchroom door.
Wham! I ran smack into it.
I did not have time to stop and the lock on the door hit my forehead.
I was knocked to the floor, blood pouring down my face.
I was taken to first aid room where a bandage was placed on my forehead.
I spent the rest of the day laying on a day cot that was in our classroom.
Each classroom had its own cot for when students were sick or hurt.
Some of our school actives included cakewalks, donkey basketball games, and special assembled programs in the gym.
I played the witness against the Litterbug in The Litterbug Play.
I played the part of an Indian girl in the Indian War Dance program.
Everybody's dresses were homemade from a feed sack.
Having fun with friends and family
My favorite television show was Bonanza which aired between 1959 and 1973.
The show was about a rancher named Ben Cartwright and his three sons, Dan, Adam and Little Joe.
We were pre-teens, so we still like to ride stick horses and we were married to the Cartwright men.
My neighbor friend Juanita and I liked to play dress-up.
Juanita’s aunt had given her many of her old discarded dress and we loved to dress-up in them.
She had a rainbow of dresses that varied in length, some were pleated while others had straight skirts.
Some of the dresses were covered in pearls, beads, and buttons.
Some of the dresses zipped up the back while others buttoned up the front or even laced up both front and back.
There were red high hills, black flats, brown loafers, beaded ballerina slippers to put on our feet that matched the dresses.
There were hats of all shapes and sized, some with feathers, some with nets and always one that matched the dress we were wearing.
There were hats and well as handbags that matched the dresses.
Most of the dresses that we played in were way too long, we didn’t mind because we were dressed up to paint the town.
One of my favorite shows that aired on television was Adventures in Paradise.
The star of the show was Garner McKay, he was the captain of a large schooner that sailed in the Pacific Ocean.
Juanita and I would pretend that we were riding on Gardner McKay’s large schooner.
We would place large boards over logs and rock them back and forth.
Once, I wrote a letter to Garner McKay’s fan club asking for a picture and they sent me one.
I placed his picture in my scrapbook and I still have that scrapbook and his picture.
Dad made us a swing using a long cable rope that he threw over a huge limb of the oak next to our house.
Next the took a old wooden plank, which he notched on either side and slid it between the rope for us to sit in.
We lived on the side of a hill and when we swung we thought our feet could reach the big blue sky.
My handy-man dad built us a go-cart. He used on old wagon frame, built a wooden platform atop the frame.
He attached a lawn mower motor onto the back side of the wagon.
The go-cart had to be cranked like cranking a push lawnmower.
Our steering wheel was made of rope.
There was no stop button, we either had to pull out a spark plug or run out of gas.
It was a lot of fun.
Sitting in our front yard under the hickory nut tree sat an old car without a motor, it was just a shell of a car.
But to us kids it was a toy.
We discovered when we put our legs inside the steering wheel, that we could make it rock back and forth. When we would get out of the car our bodies could still feel the swaying of the steering wheel.
It the fall of the year we would go looking for hickory nuts.
We would get the largest paper sack we could find and head to the woods.
We would fill the paper sack full of a variety of hickory nuts.
When we had enough we would head back home.
We would then look for something to crack the nuts open with most of the time it was two fairly large rocks.
We would have to be careful cracking those nuts between two rocks because some times we would mash our fingers. Boy did that hurt!
We would fill a plastic bowl full of the cracked nuts but still we could not get the goodies out without a pick and our pick was a bobby pin.
This was an all day process.
Where we lived were just a few houses and woods all around us.
We had to walk quite a ways but behind our home was a creek that winded down the mountain. There were all sorts of rock formation. There was this one rock that we climbed upon that was as large as most peoples living rooms and once on top of it, we could see for miles.
Above the creek was this cascading waterfall, I think about twenty feet tall.
There was a creek above the fall that was filled with moss and it could be very slippery when you got close to the edge.
The water flowed constantly it never dried up even during the dry seasons.
Below the fall was a pool deep enough for us to swim in and we did on many a hot day.
We even went into the woods when the woods were freezing cold, just to get a icicle from the frozen falls.
Behind my neighbor’s Juanita’s house was a bluff about fifty feet high that was called Horseshoe Bluff. (Cherokee Indians once lived in this area)
Juanita’s grandmother was a full blooded Cherokee Indian, she lived next door to Juanita.
We were told not to go near the bluff.
There were many rock formations around the bluff top.
We had to walk several miles to reach the bottom.
We found that by climbing down from the top of a very strong tree we could reach the bottom.
People have fallen off that bluff, I guess they were not familiar with the area.
