Soon after entering first grade we moved back to Centralia, where Dad had a job selling Essex cars. I vividly recall some events in that school. My teacher was very strict, ad one day I was talking when I was supposed to be listening so she marched down the aisle, yanked me out of my seat, turned me over the desk and spanked me. I was mortified, and terribly afraid that my parents would hear about it, so bribed my little best friend for weeks, until the same experience befell her on one of my luckier days. Needless to say, the lessons learned in that classroom were etched in my memory from that day to this.
The second grade found us "out in the country" where Dad was working in a slaughter house processing beef and pork. Jack and I were playing around near where Dad was killing hogs one day, when all of a sudden we heard a commotion and Dad yelling at us to get home right now. We ran out of the room where we'd been playing and just before I jumped into a pile of manure I could see out of the corner of my eye that Dad was crouched under the scraping table and a huge hog was on top of the table trying to get hold of any part of Dad that he could see poking out from under the table. We ran for home yelling at the top of our lungs, but before help could get back to Dad he'd managed to get hold of a big knife and slit the hog's throat, since the only rifle handy had been broken in two places by the hog when he stepped on it while he was circling that table in his frenzy of rage. Another time, one of the sows in the feeding pens, had given birth to a dozen pigs, but had killed all, but one, when my Dad found them, so he jumped into the pen and grabbed the remaining pig. He brought it home and we raised it in the house by feeding it with a baby bottle first, then scraps as time went on. When it grew too big to keep in the house Dad gave it to the yeast salesman, who called onthe small store next door, and became absolutely entranced with that pet pig. he promised over and over hat the pig would always be just a pet, and would never be eaten.
The two-room school house that Jack and I attended was certainly an unique experience, for sure. Our teacher's name was Katie Peters, and just the fact that I remember her name says a lot. There were five grades in her classroom. Jack sat in the first row, since he was in the first grade, and I sat in the second row as I was in the second grade. We had lots of spelling tests and if you received 50 perfect spelling tests you were invited to choose a book out of a large trunk she had, full of all kinds of books. Also, each time you received a 100% on the test you could go outside for thirty minutes and play on the swings. Spelling was always very easy for me, and I was always out there, all by myself, trying to convince myself I was having fun. That year I was awarded two books and the ones I chose was a music book and a small red New Testament, each inscribed as follows: Presented to La Verne Boone for fifty perfect spelling lessons by K Peters. My first awards duly noted.
Miss Peters had a habit of taking out her large black lunch box from her desk about thirty minutes before we got out for lunch, and she would proceed to eat with great relish in front of thirty starving pupils. One day, when she opened the lunch box, a rather large snake crawled out of it. I think it had been put in there by some of the older boys from the other classroom, because when the screams and yells brought them to our door the investigate some of them seemed to be trying to stifle grins.
I'll have to back up a bit for sometime in the preschool era, probably when I was about three, or thereabouts, we came to California for a short period of time. Dad brought my maternal grandfather to the Pomona-Chino area. He was seriously ill with asthma and his doctor advised him to get out of the rainy northwest. They decided to settle in Chino as my grandmother had a sister living nearby. Dad went back to Washington and gathered up his family to head south once more. We lived in Victorville, California during this time, where a friend obtained a job for Dad in the cement plant. Apparently that type of work didn't appeal, or perhaps Mother and Dad missed Washington, anyway, it was rather a short stint, and back the trekked. For awhile we lived in Chealis, then came the short move to Winlock, followed by another to Centralia, then, came the move outside of Chehalis where Jack and I attended the country schoolhouse. Is it any wonder that I have the sequence of jumping from place to place a bit out of order? From now on the old memory will be a bit sharper, I hope.