I was eight years old and we had recently moved to Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan from our birthplace a hundred miles east at Melfort. Some of the adults I lived around could swear a blue streak and of course, I loved to practice the exact intonation and lilt of every word that I heard from these adult friends, neighbours, aunts, and uncles etc. We moved to the farm at Etomami in 1962, grade three, but by grade four were bussed into Hudson Bay, to Blake Beattie school. The bus drivers were a father and son, Cliff and Jack Moen.
If you can believe it, I think I might have been the only nine-year old blonde child in the class that year, or at least the new kid, and I felt the need to capitalize on that fact and show off, as children sometimes do. I seemed to know a lot of swear words, almost as many as some of the other kids in the place. I really enjoyed the power of how it felt to roll the words right off my tongue. I had a dirtier mouth in those days than most garbage dumps, but boy was I ever proud of myself. I remember standing by the chain link fence practicing some really questionable vocabulary with some of the other nine-year olds. We would let off a blue streak of lingo that would curl your hair, then smile and walk back into the school smug, like we owned the place. Someone had brought up the word fornication, but none of us had a clue what that was about. I had been filled in by the bigger neighbourhood girls about sex the year before, but never put two and two together. We were over by the fence using our adult language, so as to not corrupt the littler six and seven year olds I guess.
I didn’t make the connection, but it seemed that I was also fair game for kissing at recess and noon hour. There were no teachers on the playgrounds back in the 60’s that I can recall. It was so bad, one other girl and I would go to the far corner of the playground every day at noon hour only to be mobbed regularly by what seemed like all the boys in the school. They would actually line up and take turns kissing us. There would be one line for her and one line for me. It was amazing how regimented this procedure was and how she and I tried to fight them off, but in the end, how we succumbed. This seemed to be our duty. We would both be on the ground with all these boys and their runny noses taking turns to give us either a dry little peck or one big, fat slobbery kiss on the lips…Never on the cheek and nobody even considered trying for two. It was a wonder we didn’t all die from hoof and mouth. The oldest boys who were 16 and still in grade four, (with no hope of advancing any further in grades) didn’t ever partake. When I think of it now, I realize that they probably egged everybody on and then stood back and watched. Somebody had to create some recreation on the school grounds in those days and I guess they were the self-appointed rec techs. Playing dodgeball and softball were about the only other things we did. So, for the rest of the six to nine year old kids, they could really have used some other form of diversion. You can see then, one of the reasons why teachers had to start taking turns doing noon hour supervision on playgrounds.
Mrs. Martin was our grade four teacher and she let us play more games inside the classroom than any other grade I was in before or after. “Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar” was a rounding game that was great fun. Mrs. Martin hinted to the whole class about something I'd never heard of before, having your mouth washed out with soap. The mere mention of it was enough to end the swearing extravaganzas because none of us could even fathom it. Furthermore, we had no idea any adults had been within earshot. We knew we were being bad.
The sixteen year olds were either really nice or mean and bullies. The girls were much worse than the boys. I remember being terrorized by one of them when she approached me sitting waiting in the car while my Mom ran into the police station. (Mom had backed out from the angle parking downtown and gotten into a fender bender) This girl approached the car and was bullying me through the car window. After that day, she thought she owned me. I was scared stiff of her and was really happy to graduate to grade five and Stewart Hawke school, because I knew she wouldn’t be going. That "hold them back rule" they still employed in those days proved to be good for something. Not like today where everybody keeps getting moved to the next grade because of all the supports available.
I started at Stewart Hawke school when I was in Grade 5. My teacher was Mrs. Saughmyhr from Clemenceau. The drive in to school every day itself, was enough to do this poor woman in. Clemenceau is at least an hour south of Hudson Bay . In those days they were building the road into Hudson Bay and it did nothing but rain. Anybody trying to get through had to be dragged behind a huge road building machine called a Euclid
Right off the bat, Mr. Kondra told us to stay off the ice at noon hour. We did this religiously for quite some time. One day however, when it was particularly boring hanging around, there were several kids out enjoying themselves sliding on the ice. After awhile, some of the kids from our class went out and joined them. Pretty soon, just about everybody I knew including me, were out sliding on the ice and just about everybody in our grade five class. Surely, if we were all doing it, it must be OK, right? Wrong. Mr. Kondra walked right by us and smiled. We all thought, hey, he’s changed his mind and it’s okay after all! When the bell rang, he quietly asked whichever ones of us were sliding on the ice to line up at the front of the classroom. Be darned if he didn’t break out a huge leather strap and strapped each of us twice on each hand, one after the other. Not one of us cried or made a noise. One boy, not because he was a smart alec, but because he seemed to have a severe dry eye problem that caused him to blink excessively, kept pulling his hands away, so that was kind of humorous, but you didn’t dare laugh, because we could tell our substitute teacher was in no mood to be tampered with.
Of course, my older brother found out I got the strap and went marching right to Mom and Dad with his gleeful news. I was able to worm my way out of another strap at home, because I guess I did some fancy talking and they got played out listening. After awhile, I found out that Mr. Kondra owned a local motel and then I felt bad that as a substitute he had been relegated to dealing with rotten, fat, ugly kids like us. Mr. Kondra has passed away, may God rest his soul.
I remember the clerk helping her was a lady who years later when I was a teenager, asked me why I wasn’t in school one afternoon when I had a spare. Guess she thought I was playing hookey. I found out the reason her face was so wrinkled was because she was a smoker, but that did nothing to deter my habit. Anyhow, the point I am trying to make is that when we got home, I tried it on and both cups crushed in instantly under my sweater and looked unbelievably bad. I was horrified. What was worse, was the neighbour lady was there giving her recommendations as well. She and Mom suggested I try a blouse instead, see-through white was the only color I had, but at least it was looser. They both suggested I fill the cups with Kleenex. Had it only been Mom, I may not have done it, but the neighbor lady (and I can’t think of who…either Ann Maluta, Shirley Hardy, Shirley Anderson, Emily Foster or hmmm...??) insisted that women do that type of thing all the time. I was hooked and unfortunately duped.
So the next day, and secretly feeling proud as punch and oh-so-grown up, I wore my new bra with at least three Kleenexes stuffed into each cup and trotted off to school. My best friend, Penny Densen, cocked her eyebrow and bluntly questioned the wisdom of the Kleenex, but I thought what on earth would she know about bras when she didn’t wear one herself and I had been assured by my own Mother and the neighbour lady that this was absolutely the way to go. After all, I would have killed in those days to have boobs that big. Since there was only one other girl in the entire grade six class who wore a bra, my arrival at class in a bra, raised quite a sensation. Even Mrs.Watkins, the teacher who was generally exceptionally professional, seemed to notice. She was the mother of one of my brother's friends to boot.
The snickers started first thing in the morning and were mainly from girls. The boys I guess were somewhat dumbstruck, because by grade six, most of them didn’t have a whole lot of interest left in girls…They had little idea of what dumb girls were all about anyhow and were mostly plain nasty. Those were the days when bra snapping by boys and girls alike was not considered sexual harassment…no one had even heard of that word yet….imagine, this was the year 1965. At noon hour, Penny and I would eat our lunch, then walk round and round the school until the bell rang. A group of more seasoned girls led by a ring leader, started walking the opposite way round the school, linked arm in arm with each other. We had no choice but to meet them face to face for the next few hundred rounds. Each and every time, they chanted off their little song about “Falsies”……I had never heard the word before, but certainly figured out what it meant by about the second round.
Unfortunately, once you start wearing a bra, it’s too late to turn back, because there was a reason you had to start in the first place and it ain’t going away any time soon. I endured with that one bra for quite a long time, checking every chance I could to see if any small bras were in stock at MacLeod's. One day, I got lucky and my collection of one was added to with my babysitting money. Nobody seemed to notice or care at that point. By then, several other grade six girls had starting wearing bras too and everybody was having a snap happy whale of a time..
On the contrary, some things you can forgive yourself for, but others are rather questionable..
The principal of that school was the scariest looking man I’ve ever seen from a kid’s point of view. His name was Mr. Raczkewicz. I believe he gave Doug the strap once, but I don’t remember what it was all about. By Grade 7, I had Mr. Raczkewicz as a home room teacher for part of the year and found out he really wasn’t all that bad after all. He actually laughed and smiled quite a bit. I heard through the grapevine from someone who knew him that he was a really likable fellow. When I was in grade one or two at Thatch Creek country school near Melfort, we had a student teacher named Mr. Palko. When I got to Stewart Hawke, there he was as their new phys ed teacher. I was so happy to see him and he seemed happy to see me too. Years later, his daughter babysat my kids!That same year, they started to renovate the school and we had to use the gym for a classroom. We did a lot of singing and art work and phys ed in those days. One day we were practicing a song, I think it was “Canada” for the 1967 Centennial Year and our upcoming performance.., you know, "one little, two little, three Canadians...we love thee....now we are twenty million"...either that, or we were doing work on the matts like somersaults or vaults or something. Suddenly, a mouthy little kid came flying up to me yelling that a boy was stealing my stuff. I flew down off that stage to find the boy bending down at my bag of belongings under my desk. (I had my contraband cigarettes in there, so there was no way they could be found!) I am embarrassed to say that I hauled off and lambasted him a good one in the ribs with my right foot. I actually knocked him right over, knocked the wind out of him and made him cry. In reality, all the poor kid had been doing was picking up garbage like he was told to do by Mr. Palko. I suddenly realized what a total idiot I had been. I am not a violent person as a rule. I could have maimed him for life! All because of needing to hide my cigarettes. I have regretted my actions from that day forward and always wanted to apologize or make it up to him, but somehow I never got the chance.
If this kind of life existed in the middle years back in the 1960’s imagine what is going on today?
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