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“Tap, tap, tap.”

My jump rope tapped out a rhythm on the sidewalk, as I made my way to Miss Schultz’s afternoon kindergarten. The tapping sound took on different nuances as the sidewalks changed. In front of our house the sidewalk was cement, but as I passed the cow pasture that wrapped itself around our lot from gentle rolling-green hills in the back, up to Harris Street on the east, the sidewalk that followed the barbed-wire fence next door turned into redwood planks with gaps between the boards. Sometimes, if we were lucky enough to have a penny to spend at Hinshaw’s corner store on Harris and K Streets, the penny would slip out of our hands and fall down between the cracks. This was a real tragedy, as pennies were hard to come by. Then the only thing to do was to try to find a piece of gum to put on a stick and fish it out.

As I skipped along, I could see the big redwood snag still standing in the pasture, echoing the eight-foot-high redwood stump in our back yard that my sister and I used as a play house. Sometimes at night when the moon was full, I could look out my window from my bed and see this snag, mute evidence of what had once been a redwood forest. In the moonlight, the snag would magically change into mysterious shapes-usually the face of a witch, scaring me half to death!

At the corner, J Street turned into a dirt road going south, and here I crossed Harris, looking carefully to left and right, as it was a street busy not only with cars, but with the street car line that ran down the middle.

“Tap, tap, tap.”

I headed north on another wooden sidewalk on J Street by the empty lot overgrown with alder trees, blackberry vines and salal. Deep, redwood storm gutters, down which torrents of water rushed when it rained, edged this walk along the unpaved street. The J Street street car line joined the Harris Street line here, and the big, gray street car barns that housed the street cars at night were across the street. Sometimes kids would put a pebble from the oiled and graveled street on the car track, and watch as the street car pulverized it to dust. Other times, but not so often, someone would put a penny on the track and take home a flattened portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

“Tap, tap, tap.”

In front of Don Celli’s house, the sidewalk changed again to cement, but this one was grooved with ribs in the concrete, like the old-fashioned washboards used in many homes then. It was a great temptation to drag the toes of my shoes over this ribbing and listen to the music it made. After wearing out the toes of a good pair of patent leather Mary Janes, I decided I shouldn’t do this.

“Tap, tap, tap.”

The closer I got to the school, the more cement sidewalks were tapped by my busy rope. Some sidewalks were cracked and broken, with grass and weeds growing up through the crevices. Others were perfectly smooth. How wonderful it was to be able to let a five-year-old go to school all alone, and feel sure that child was safe. I’m not sure how far it was, but I think it was nearly a mile. Finally, Marshall School loomed in the distance, its three-story bulk sitting there, solid and formidable as a rock. A path had been worn from the corner of the playground across the grass to the graveled kickball field, and the girls’ door to the first floor of the building.

At the other end of the building was the boys’ door. To my left, as I climbed up the little slope, were huge stacks of redwood slabs and bark as big as a child, that were used to fire up the wood burning furnace. These piles were out-of-bounds for students, as they were piled higher than our heads, and could possibly fall over on someone.

To my right, across the street, I could see a yellow Victorian house with a sign “Kain Apts.” over the door. Perhaps, because I was near-sighted, or perhaps because 1 had heard tales of the Lindberg kidnapping, I thought it said “Kidnappers!” Such an imagination! As if kidnappers would advertise their profession.

The first floor of the school was formed by a concrete slab with heating pipes running under the cement around the edges of the rooms. These pipes carried heat to the upper floors, but the warm strip of floor was nice to sit on in the basement, while having lunch on cold, rainy days. A cement foundation extended upward from this slab about one-third of the way up the wall, ending in a row of windows covered with screening to protect the glass from wild kickballs or baseballs. Under these windows were benches that served as seats for eating lunch, and that were handy for a game of jacks.

The school bathrooms were down here as well, one for the boys and one for the girls. These bathrooms had an acrid disinfectant odor that was sickening to me. I hated to go in, and always held my breath to keep from smelling the awful odor. The water tanks of the toilets were hung near the ceiling, and it seems as though they were made of some dark-finished wood like mahogany. Long chains hung from them to work the flushing mechanism. The seats were the same dark wood as the tanks. The toilets themselves were sized from adult-size to child-size, and the further one progressed into the bowels of this cavern, the smaller the seats became. It was altogether a stark and cheerless bathroom, and I would run from its depths to the play room outside, gasping for breath, the odor permeating my whole being and staying with me, an unwelcome guest, for long minutes afterward. Outside the bathroom was a long sink with several faucets, and glass containers of strong-smelling liquid green soap. At one end was a drinking fountain. Near the back of the basement was a cupboard for lunches that was locked when school started, and unlocked at lunch time. The huge dinosaur of a furnace was in a dark, scary no-man’s-land between the boys’ and girls’ basement rooms, where no children were allowed.

Each of the next two floors had a big square hall with four classrooms (one at each corner), and each classroom had its own cloakroom. Tall windows equipped with brown roller shades lined the outside walls and slate blackboards encircled the rest of the rooms. A long pole with a hook on the end was ready to open the upper parts of the windows. The wooden desks were fastened to the floor on long strips of wood. A broad staircase ascended from the basement on both sides of the building — one for the girls, and one for the boys. Another broad staircase rose from the sidewalk at the front or north side, to the second floor, and was for the use of adults only.

The second floor contained the teachers’ room and first-aid station, with supplies such as iodine, mercurochrome, gauze bandages and tape. Bandaids had not yet been invented. Outside the teachers’ room was the school telephone: a black box fastened to the wall.

Miss Schultz’s kindergarten was in a room at the back of the basement, as was a room for teaching deaf children. The afternoon kindergarten was held in a bright, warm, sunny room, and the teaching was quite advanced for its time - 1932. We painted and sang; we danced and cut out pretty things from colored paper; we played in the doll corner and played rhythm instruments; and we had a huge earthen crock of real clay. Kindergarten was the way kindergarten should be — a time to explore, and to learn how to share. We loved our teacher, and I think she loved us. She was a sweet person who did not marry until she retired from teaching, as she was, I understand, the sole support of her mother. When I had grown up, I heard she finally married the man who had waited for her all those years.

It is interesting to note that nearly all the teachers at Marshall School were “Miss.” I remember only one teacher who was “Mrs.” (Mrs. Kinney) and perhaps she was a widow who had had to go back to teaching. During those Depression years, married women were not hired to teach school, as jobs were so scarce. The thinking behind this was that a married woman had a husband to take care of her, so she had to let someone who really needed a job teach school.

My first grade teacher was Mrs. Hansen. I remember her as being “a gray lady.” She seemed to wear gray dresses, and maybe her hair was gray. She also wore heavy stockings and “sensible” shoes that laced up and tied and had a chunky medium heel. We did a lot of work with phonics charts in her class.

One day I observed another child carving his initials on his desk with his pencil. That seemed like an interesting thing to do, so I did the same. I had just managed a nice big “N” when the teacher saw what I was doing. I had to bring 50 cents to school to pay for the damage I had done.

There was another first-grade teacher, Miss Elsmore, who was principal at the time I was in first grade. Even the really bad boys were afraid of her because it was rumored that she kept a length of rubber hose in the bottom drawer of her desk and would not hesitate to use it, if necessary. My little sister was in her class and having trouble with spelling, so she wrote her words on her desk before the test. Well, Miss Elsmore caught her and proceeded to turn her over her knee in front of the whole class and spank her bottom! Poor little Betty!

In second grade, I had Miss Asselstein — a young, pretty, vibrant girl, probably just out of college. She spent recesses teaching those who were interested to tap dance. We also did a play about American Indians in second grade. We made costumes out of burlap sacks and had to have brown powder all over our faces, arms, and legs to make us look Indian. When I got home that afternoon, my mother wasn’t there, so I tried to scrub the stuff off by myself. It wouldn’t budge. I ran sobbing out to my father’s shop. That poor man thought I had fallen into the fire and burned myself!

The third-grade teacher’s name just doesn’t come to me at all, maybe because, as was sometimes done at that time, I skipped half a grade at that point.

Fourth grade was in Miss McKinnon’s class. She was a nice teacher, tuned into the needs of her pupils.

My fifth grade teacher was Miss Swithenbank. Some kids called her “Miss Swimming Tank” behind her back. They thought they were being so clever.

That year Walt Disney had completed his full-length animated movie “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and the class did a puppet show about the movie. We all made puppets from socks and odds and ends of materials. My puppet was supposed to be “Dopey,” but the teacher ended up making most of it for me. We were to have a puppet parade for the whole school, and the teacher pinned pieces of paper on us to put down on the floor so the puppets wouldn’t get dirty. When it was my turn, she very nearly pinned it through my skin! I tried not to cry, but stood there, stoically, while she tried to pin this paper to me with a safety pin! All of a sudden, she realized what was happening, and was very sorry. Actually, the paper was useless, as our hands were so busy keeping the strings from tangling, we could not take our papers off to use them. I still have my “Dopey” puppet. It is very like the Dopey in the movie.

Miss Knudsen was the sixth-grade teacher, and also the principal when I was in sixth grade. She was a formidable adversary, and stood for no nonsense. Some said she had eyes in the back of her head, and could nail miscreants without even looking at them. But really, 1 think she was so nearsighted, and got so close to the blackboard when writing on it, that she could see reflections in her glasses. In sixth grade we were required to learn some poetry by heart. What a drag we thought that was, but I still have “In Flanders Field” and “The Daffodils” embedded in my memory, to take out and dust off when I wish, thanks to Miss Knudsen.

The wooden floors of the school were swept each day with an oily compound, which soaked into the wood and made the building vulnerable to fire. It must have been in 1938 that the sixth graders were in a parade, marching for new schools. We had to wear blue jeans or blue pants, and red shirts. Somewhere, someone got red fire hats, and as we marched, we carried fire hoses and signs asking for new schools and no more fire traps. A few years later, the new Marshall School was built on property just across the street and the old school was torn down to make room for the new playground.

In those Depression days of grammar school, we put on a lot of programs. I was in “The Skater’s Waltz” one year. Our mothers had to make red skaters’ costumes for us, and the hems all had to be a specified number of inches from the floor (I think 19 inches). The hats, sleeves and circle skirts were trimmed with lengths of cotton batting to simulate white ermine. As we “skated” around in a circle, with one leg extended gracefully behind, I found I had to hold up not only myself on one foot, but my partner as well, because she leaned so hard on me.

Another time, I was in a minuet dance. We wore costumes from Colonial days and did a courtly minuet dance in a circle.

One time the group was to dance for the people at the T.B. Sanitarium. I knew what tuberculosis was. And I had no intention of catching it. Greta Garbo might have died beautifully of it in “Camille,” but I didn’t plan to go that way. So for the only time in my life, I lied. Deliberately. I was so scared, I told my teacher that my mother said 1 couldn’t go. That didn’t stop the teacher. She immediately got on the phone in the second floor hall and called my mother. She took the receiver off its hook, rattled the hook to get the operator, gave the operator my phone number — 597 — and waited while the operator connected the line, manually, and rang my home telephone, again, manually. I ended up going with the group and dancing. I did not contract T.B., much to my relief.

We did a play about Cinderella one year, and I was chosen to be Cinderella. Maybe because of my long straight braids, the teacher thought I would look sort of waif-like. But the morning of the play, my mother worked and worked to curl my hair, which has always defied curling. I’m pretty sure this was not the effect that was wanted, but we were stuck with it. It was exciting to try on the “glass slipper,” and then pull the matching slipper from under my apron where I had been hiding it.

Rainy day recesses, and there were many in Humboldt County, were spent playing games in the basement or marching around one of the upper halls to the music played on a Victrola. We marched singly. We marched by twos. Then fours, and eights. Then divided back to twos. It was great fun.

We also learned ballroom dancing. The boys lined up on one side of the big second floor hall, and the girls lined up on the other. Then we had to choose partners, sometimes it was “ladies choice,” sometimes it was boys’ choice. Sometimes we formed two circles and walked around in opposite directions until the music stopped. Whomever you happened to stop by became your partner. The boys seemed to hate this form of recreation, but 1 loved it, except for the times I had to dance with one boy whose hands smelled of Lifebuoy Soap, the granddaddy of deodorant soaps. Then my hands would smell the same way. In addition to ballroom dancing, we learned square dancing and the Virginia Reel.

On nice days we were allowed to take our lunches outside and picnic on the grass. Years before, all the playground equipment had been removed when someone was injured on a slide or swing. However, there were a few spots where the grass was worn down to the bare clay earth, and these places made perfect hop scotch areas. My best “token” was a small piece of fine chain that would land on the squares I aimed at without fail. I treasured this trinket because of its accuracy. Other times we played jump rope with a long rope, two people turning the ends and the rest taking turns jumping. We also played singing games such as “Upon a Little White Daisy.”

Looking back over 60 years, I think the schools did a pretty good job, considering what they had to work with. We had no audio-visual aids, no T. V. or computers, but we learned to read and write legibly and to spell and do math, in spite of classes of 35 or 40. School curriculum was based on an orderly progression of learning, and the pressures children encounter today were not there. Now children are expected to learn to read in kindergarten, in my opinion, a waste of the special time of being five years old. More kids are falling through the cracks, because of so much pressure. Although times were hard in the 1930s, families and schools were strong, and we learned respect for ourselves and our community.

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The story above was originally printed in the Fall 1995 issue of the Humboldt Historian, a journal of the Humboldt County Historical Society. It is reprinted here with permission. The Humboldt County Historical Society is a nonprofit organization devoted to archiving, preserving and sharing Humboldt County’s rich history. You can become a member and receive a year’s worth of new issues of The Humboldt Historian at this link.