Story #15 in the Harry Forbes Remembers series
In April of 1925, when my sister Agnes was six and I was seven years old, we both started school. My parents held me back a year so we could walk the one and a half miles to school together. I was in for a rude awakening about the different grades in school. The only ‘grades’ I knew about were road grades where one grade was higher than the other. I had visions of long benches along the wall of the school where there was a low bench then each bench was higher than the other. You started school at the bottom bench in Grade One, then in Grade Two you sat up on the second bench and so on until you got to the top or Bench Number Eight. It didn’t work quite that way.
There were twins, Doug and Dave Plain, a grade ahead of me in school, a little older than me and four inches taller. One of them used to beat me up nearly every day at noon hour. When the bell would ring, out their handkerchiefs would come and they’d wipe all the blood off my face before I got back into the school room. After one year I was finally able to lick one of them, then the other one would beat me. At the end of two years I was able to lick both of them, one at a time. From then on they were my best friends for the rest of their lives. They are both gone now and didn’t get very old. I asked our teacher about this years later and apparently she never did know about it.
My sister Agnes and I both skipped Grades Five and Seven. She was a year younger than me and smarter so it made me work like mad to keep up with her. In 1931 when she was 12 years old and I was 13, we had to write our Grade Eight exams. They had to be written in a school where there was a principal. We had to go 12 miles to the two-room school at Hatton to write the exams. To save Dad from having to take us there, he gave us his 1928 Chevrolet car to drive. There were no graded roads to Hatton from our place then. On one of those trips on those rutty roads, I ran over a gopher. I made my sister promise not to tell our parents that I had driven so fast that I ran over a gopher. If they knew they would not let us have the car again.
The first teacher Agnes and I had was still living in March 2006, she was 101. She wrote three books. When she was 99 years old, she wrote the last one being helped by her four sons, one daughter and grandchildren. She still lived in an apartment by herself. Agnes and I phoned her every Christmas. She still thought she could dance an old time waltz. How many 86 and 87-year-old students can still visit with their Grade One teachers to wish them a happy birthday? This dear old lady passed away Christmas Eve in 2006.
(Note: Harry ended up living longer that his Grade One teacher, and he did one better than that. He was still writing and editing his last book when he was 104. He wrote a total of seven books if you include the one his daughter is editing since he passed away. He asked Medicine Hat Cowboy Poetry to help publish it. His Grade One teacher may have influenced him to be an author being he published his first book “Our World” in 2006.)