Our granddaughter started attending school “in person” this week after a year of Covid-Isolation virtual schooling. Our daughter is telling everyone how fortunate it is, the bus stop is at the bottom of our driveway. Our granddaughter is excited because part of the social experiences of school are the gatherings at the bus stop and the rides to school.
I googled for images of the early school busses and there are no pictures of anything similar to my experience seventy-five years ago when I started school in the farming community of Sand Hollow, Idaho.
School was eight miles southwest along the graveled roads to Notus, Idaho. I was at the end of the bus route. My playmates along Sand Hollow Road north, Patsy and Jerry Stewart, went to the New Plymouth, Idaho, school. The bus was a blue box on the back of a flatbed truck. We sat on the benches around the edges. History says that was the seating arrangements of the first busses.
I have a scar where my left knee got hooked on a nail as the bus came to a stop and I hurriedly stood to get off at my stop. It was no big deal. Mom put on a little mercurochrome. I don’t even remember a band aid.
Each school morning, the bus driver picked up Virginia Butcher first. She got to sit with him in the front cab. The Butchers lived closer to school, where the driver started each morning, than he drove to start his route at our house. Virginia was still in high school, but that’s the first love story I watched in real life because they also went to the Baptist Church in Notus and I think I remember when they got married.
One day in second grade, I missed the bus home. The Notus School had all twelve grades in the same building. Elementary kids got out earlier than the upper grades. Dickie Randall and I went out to the field behind the school where he decided to dig for some worms and we forgot the time. Dickie and I started walking home. About a mile later, one of the sons of a neighboring farmer, from over the hill from Dickie’s farm, came by and offered us a ride home. Mom had cautioned me to never ride with strangers. I didn’t know them. I refused to get in the car. Dickie got in. They drove slowly as I continued to walk. I walked and they drove about another mile when Dad came looking for me. I wasn’t scared, I just followed rules. There was no discussion in the car. When we got home, I had my usual chores. Dad went back out to the field.
Another time, the small bridge over a drain ditch, three miles from our farm, was out of commission. The bus driver let the ten or so of us students off the bus and we all walked the rest of the way home. Again, there was more discussion about the condition of the bridge than of wondering why I was late. That was all part of life.
Today, 2021, as I run an early morning errand, many of the mothers are out with their children at the bus stops. There is concern if the students get home a few minutes late.
On the other hand, I was fortunate to have a bus. Grandpa Sam had to walk the three miles to their school in Bully Creek, Oregon, in the early 1940s. My mother-in-law remembers going to school in South Seattle on a horse drawn wagon around 1915. The very first school buses, known as school hacks or school trucks, started out as horse-drawn carriages around 1886 — and most people didn't take them! Walking to school was expected, and these early buses only picked up kids who lived REALLY far away.
Going to school and riding on a bus has been the same for close to one hundred years.
![The picture is worth a 1000 ...]()
The picture is worth a 1000 words!
Mom and Grandma were banned from the kitchen on Mother's Day. 11-year-old found a recipe for Japanese Pancakes.
Here's what it looked like. I will post the recipe later.
It's my understanding that one can google Japanese recipes. I did so and found the Japanese Pancake recipe.
It's intimidating to use my electronic devices, but I'm working to do the best I can and keep learning. Exciting times ahead with the resources in my household!
![MY DAD THE FISH MAN]()
MY DAD THE FISH MAN
“Miya sama, Miya sama”, from Gilbert and Sullivan’s MIKADO was heard out of the Dodge truck as Dad loaded it each day - Japanese can goods from our basement cellar storage, Tofu from Amano’s, Gas at Kagi’s, Bread from Home Town Bakery, Dairy from Home Dairy and Fish and groceries from Ontario Fish Market.
The customers were the wives of Japanese farmers within a 70 mile radius from Ontario, Oregon, called the Treasure Valley on the Idaho/Oregon border. In the early years, 1940s and 1950s. We were all so poor we didn’t have time or cars to go in to town for groceries.
Dad liked playing his violin, his musical saw and singing in the church choir. He installed a musical horn on his truck with four notes. As he entered each farmer’s driveway he played a short musical tune.
Usually, the wife was out helping with something like weeding onions or thinning beets. She heard Dad’s music and came in from the field to do her shopping from the shelves along the walls of the van and the huge icebox that held the fish and meat products in the back. Soda pop was in crates in front of the shelves.
Dad bagged the groceries and carried them into the farmhouse kitchen and maybe had a cup of tea while he got paid and wrote out her order for his next delivery.
Dad was also the carrier of news and gossip. I often helped him in the summer, when school was out, so he could get home sooner. It was my job to close the icebox, clean off the cutting board and knife used to cut off the amount of fish or meat the customer wanted and take down the scale.
As I sat back down on one of the soda pop crates and went back to reading my Nancy Drew book, I could hear wafts of Dad’s laughter out from the kitchens.
On the way home on Thursdays, from Caldwell Ice Company, Dad loaded all the walking space on the truck floor with 100 pound blocks of ice for the Ontario Fish Market to put in their cold storage. We cut up the ice with ice picks for sale and for the ice boxes.
“The Fish Man” is unique to the Japanese Ethnic communities in America and mostly along cities on the West Coast where there were rural communities of Japanese Heritage residents. Japan is surrounded by the sea and my grandpa remembers the “Fish Man” walking to their farm houses, shouldering a pole with a basket on each end with samples of fish for sale.
In Japan there are still businesses with a fleet of vans with food items that supply households that are remote and sometimes the elderly that have a hard time going shopping. With Covid-Isolation we are experiencing door to door deliveries, but we don’t shop from a motor vehicle nor do we get serenaded with a musical horn.
![NOTRE DAME HIGH SCHOOL S...]()
NOTRE DAME HIGH SCHOOL SWIMMER
Our grandson, Zac, qualified for the Long Course Summer Junior Nationals. He did the 100 Fly with a smoking 56.35 at the Irvine Spring Cup Meet.
The butterfly stroke is one of the most difficult swimming strokes. It requires an exact technique, strength, rhythm and takes a lot of practice.
He goes to Notre Dame High School, not the college. I love their slogan: 'Educating Hearts and Minds'."
Swimming has been one of his family's main sports. Swimming develops flexibility in muscles and joints, strengthening muscles groups of both the upper and lower body without dangers of impact injuries. Mostly, it takes Practice, Practice, Practice - and many years of parent driving to practice and swim meets!
The USA Swimming Futures Championships and Speedo Summer Invitational will take place the first week of August 2021.
Go Zac!!!
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