D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
October
2008
Ranchwoman: When Chalk was Precious
Page: 2Nearly all these schools had dances in them. Because that was the people's entertainment. They'd find people somewhere to play for these dances.
There were three schools going on at one time, right after WWI, because of all these people that were in here with the Homestead Act. To begin with, they were glad to get any students. Later, after 1946, they needed to have nine kids to keep the school open. If a family moved, the school board had only over the weekend to find some more students. One year they went to Tyrone to get a family, and teacher Mrs. Rideout would bring them.
The community furnished everything for the school, but the county furnished the chalk. They tell a story about Grandpa J.L. McCauley bringing a box of chalk in his coat horseback from the White Signal store down to the McDonald School. He had to get out and open all those gates and it was snowing, but he had that chalk protected in his coat. It didn't break to pieces. Back then they kept it in wooden boxes and it was very, very precious.
Granny (Evelyn McCauley McDonald) used to tell this story about when Otto Prevost was the teacher and she was going to school. He said, "If another kid breaks a piece of chalk, I am going to whip him." Granny was just five years old or so, and she broke the next piece of chalk. She was so scared she was going to get a whipping she wouldn't tell who broke the chalk. And Mr. Prevost thought it was another kid and that kid got so scared he wet his pants.
Granny went home that night and was feeling so bad she'd broke this piece of chalk, and she told her mom she'd broke that chalk. Her mom says, "Now, Evelyn, you're going to have to go back and tell Mr. Prevost that you did that." So she went back to school the next day and you know she was scared to death, and she motioned for Mr. Prevost to come over and she told him that she broke that chalk.
And he said, "Because you told me the truth, I will not whip you." But chalk was expensive and it was during the Depression, and everybody knew the value of a dollar back then.
Grandpa said the first blackboard they ever had wasn't a very good blackboard. It was kind of like an oil cloth stretched over a board. But he said later they got a better blackboard. And I was just reading a letter that Grandpa wrote to Aunt Jane right after his dad died in the spring of 1922, and he wrote that the teacher was going to get them a new blackboard. So you see, those things were so precious to them. Grandpa said they also brought their own pencils and paper.
They didn't have water because there was no well over there at the McDonald School. But he said they'd get a bucket and they'd get the water down here at the house, because it was just about a quarter of a mile from the McDonald School, and stick a stick through it and two of them would carry that bucket of water over. They all drank out of the same cup. Grandpa said he didn't know anybody that died from it.
The county would furnish $8 a cord to anyone that would haul the wood.
They had a board of education in White Signal, and local members would serve on the school board. It was up to them to find the kids. There was a sad case where one brother accidentally shot the other brother, and that dad had thought it was more of an education for those boys to be out herding goats than going to school. So not all parents thought education was important.
One time, during WWI, Grandpa said they had an influx of children. They had 18 children in one room. There wasn't hardly standing room. Yet some of those boys were 18 years old, and Grandpa said he didn't think they were taught too well because they weren't too patriotic.
They had an 18-year-old teacher from Albuquerque, who was quite timid. Some of these unpatriotic children came in one day. They'd washed their hands, and they went over and dried them on the flag. Grandpa said there was smoke on the water after that. This little teacher expelled them all, and they went home and told their dad. Grandpa said his own father and Marvin Poe and Charlie Morrell were on the school board, and this necessitated a school board meeting and the parents were to come. When the meeting was over, the parents and the kids who'd dried their hands on the flag went home and never did come back.
Grandpa (Jonnie McDonald) said his last year the McDonald School had only five students, and he got the measles so they had to close it down and he went to White Signal. In those days they sent out state examinations, and they'd give you three chances to pass it — one in March, one in April and one in May. Grandpa took the test at White Signal. Of all the children that ever graduated from the eighth grade, they never had one that ever failed that test the first time. Grandpa said he thought that was a compliment to the one-room school.
After that, Grandpa went to high school in Virden, NM, and did his senior year in Silver City. They had a bus, and Fred Prevost drove the school bus. So after they graduated from the eighth grade they'd ride the bus into high school.
There's lots of stories about those teachers that taught in these schools. There was one teacher who kept being late. She was late a lot. So she came in to school one time and there were no kids there. They'd gone up and climbed Tullock's Peak, a hill there right by the White Water turn-off. She went over to the McCauleys and said, "Well, where's all the children?" Grandma McCauley got really upset about that and said, "Well, where are they? Why weren't you there?"
Granny talks about coming home from school, because they'd walk home. Maybe it was a mile from that school to her house. She talked about it snowing so hard that they couldn't see. Granny got snow-blind and couldn't see where she was going, and Uncle Jim and Aunt Bertha went off and left her. Her dad, J.L. McCauley, came by in the wagon and picked her up, but would not pick the older kids up. Grandma McCauley was angry with the older kids for leaving her.
When Jerry was going to school at the last White Signal School, their teacher was Ruth Rideout, and she was a crackerjack teacher, a really good teacher. She had a son, Hugh Rideout, who was about Jerry's age, and they were at recess, out there playing a game. They had a piece of tin they'd propped up there, and they had yucca poles and they were pole-vaulting over it.
Hugh pole-vaulted over it and knocked the tin down. And Jerry, being the big dodo of the school, went over there and said, "You're gonna put that back up!" Of course Hugh was the new kid, and Jerry was just going to make him put that right back up.
Hugh said he wouldn't do it.
And Jerry says, "You are going to put that up!"
Well, that yucca pole that Hugh broke when he pole-vaulted had a pointed end on it, so Hugh stuck it in a piece of cactus and broke it off and swatted Jerry up the side of the face with that cactus!
Jerry says, "You know, we were the best of friends after that. He never did put that tin back up."
To read all the previous "Voice of a Ranchwoman" stories,
see www.desertexposure.com/ranchwoman
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