13 Read Island School Days

 As a kid my schooling began when I was 6 years old, but normal it was not.  My first year was at a little log cabin school right in the middle of the island.  It had been around some time even by ‘44 when I attended, and by then it was very old and run down, as it had been built by the first crop of settlers to homestead on Read Island.  There was only a half dozen kids counting all of the grades and one of them was a native lad by the name of Gordie McMillan, he would come up to you put his arm around you like a buddy and then unaware to you, place his leg behind you and flip you over on your back.

Because of the difficulty of getting to school that first year, I only attended briefly before my mother pulled me out.  The half-mile by boat and a mile down a narrow trail, through the dark forest, infested with cougars was more then my mother could handle.  She did not want her little Bobby eaten by a cougar. This caused the decision to send my sister and I off to our grandparents, and it was not until our move to Bird Cove that our schooling began on Read Island. 

I will never forget my first full year at the Read Island school with Miss Evans, an old maid schoolteacher who read from the Bible every morning but for story time after our noon lunch break she would read adventure stories and exciting accounts from the Greek mythologies which I found quite fascinating.

That year we all played our own version of football a game we really loved to play except for Ian who was different and didn’t fit in.   I have often thought about Ian over the years.  You see Ian today would be considered mentally handicapped or we might say had a learning disability.  I have felt sorry for Ian but realized that I learned a valuable lesson about accepting the less fortunate because he came into my life.  Today we used terms that show respect for those thus challenged but back then he was referred to as an idiot as he had a pointed head and would easily lose control, and in his excitement poke his fingers up his nose and whinny like a horse.  Because of this he was subject to much teasing which bothered me and I vowed to respect those less fortunate then myself.

The school had an old gramophone that we all loved to play.  As it was a one-room schoolhouse we could only play the gramophone during the noon hour.  We all loved to gather round and play the half dozen or so records that we had but the one we used to play over and over again was “Love Letters in the Sand.”  As the school had no electricity, in order to get the gramophone to work you had to wind it up with a crank. The tone arm had a needle the size of a darning needle and the music came out of a large built in horn, it is amazing to me that it made music at all.  I thought it was a cool machine.