<Begin Segment 17>

AI: Well, so now, as I understand it, the school buildings were not yet ready?

RC: No.

AI: And so, high school didn't start until later in the fall. Is that right?

RC: Close to November.

AI: About November?

RC: The children were out harvesting the sugar beet crop. And I've got to hand this to the Idahoans: the children, the seniors and juniors, those that were old enough to, their parents would let them get on trucks and go out to harvest sugar beets and potatoes. It helped them financially. They earned money for their folks. And the kids went out as a lark. That's the thing that I liked. They were out from behind the barbed wire. And it was something that the Idahoans profited by. The sugar crop, (...) the sugar beet crop supplied a battleship, you might say, with enough ammunition for (...) one battle. That was how valuable the sugar crop was to the country as a whole, you see. And they (became) very experienced at picking the potatoes up and putting them in sacks and getting the sugar beets up in the right manner. And later on, in the next harvest season on the project, when things were ready, the farmers on the project would come to the school. We had an Ag teacher and they contacted him (that they) were gonna send four (...) or five trucks over, and (they) wanted so many youngsters to come and harvest carrots or these big, big tall white radishes, or potatoes, or clear land. We went out and -- I always looked forward to -- because I liked to garden -- taking a bunch of kids out, and we just had a ball. We became dirty as pigs. [Laughs] That dust was terrible. But there were always showers that could be taken. But it was another way of becoming acquainted on, on a level that I've never seen since, you see.

AI: Well, now once the school -- now was Hunt a junior, combined junior and senior high school?

RC: Yes.

AI: And so then, once the junior/senior high school started up, you were teaching both, was it tenth and eleventh graders?

RC: Tenth and eleventh, yes, and public speaking.

AI: And so, tell me a little bit about the conditions of the school then, when it started up that fall.

RC: Well, it was almost time for the pot-bellied stoves to be lighted. [Laughs] Where those that sat in front roasted, those that sat in the (...) back almost froze, for a while. So we had to keep moving. And it was, it was done very quietly. The youngsters that got cold came up and got warm. Every once-in-a-while the stove would explode a little and the lid from the top, and the black smoke would come out. And somebody would quickly grab the lid and get it back on. And the boys were good about keeping the pot-bellied stoves going. And I think one of the hardest things was, in teaching English, was the inability to have a blackboard. We had big rolls of paper. And we would nail it on two-by-fours. Then we'd have a black, heavy pen to write on. And when we would finish, why, we could just rip it off, you see, or we would bring it over so that we could refer back to it. With social studies, why, it was not that difficult (...). We didn't use the blackboard all that much. We did a lot of talking and reading aloud and discussing and so forth. And our writing always reverted back to the history program. It gave us subject matter other than the life they were leading there or their past life. And sometimes it was an unhappy thing to refer to their home in Seattle, or Portland, or wherever, because they still had wonderful memories of their past life. So this gave us an opportunity to come up with subject matter that they could learn about and give their opinions right there.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.