Searching for designer labels, etc.. Whereas we were satisfied with one pair of jeans a year costing about $3.00 and running shoes at $1.00, parents are now shelling out for Nikes or Addidas costing $100.00 and grunge outfits costing $200.00. Surely we must ask ourselves if this is progress!
School was of necessity a large part of being a teen-ager. I was 13 in June 1934 and entered Rivers high school that same September. Junior High Schools were not known in small Manitoba towns before the war. When you reached the end of classes in Grade 8 you had to write the High School Entrance Examinations set by the Dept. of Education and if you passed you were in, otherwise you had to study your failures during the summer and write supplementary exams or "supps" as they were called. High School classes in Rivers of those days were conducted in the same building as Grades l t0 8; two rooms plus a small lab at the front upstairs of the building pictured earlier being assigned to us.
High School was organized differntly from grades 1 to 8. Courses were more specialized and teachers had skills in particular fields of learning to teach the classes they handled, regardless of the particular grade you were in. There wer three grades, 9, 10 and 11 and three teachers, Peter Scwartz Buhr, Mildred Musgrove and W. I. Stewart, who was aso the Principal. Miss Musgrove taught English grammar, composition and Latin; Mr. Buhr taught maths and French while the Principal taught Physics, Chemistry, Literature and Music. Basically, just two rooms were used for the three grades with certain subjects not requiring pre-requisites being taught to combined classes in alternate years. We continued to write departmental exams for each of the three grades to achieve promotion in June. I still enjoyed school and passed with good marks, usually in the top four or five of the class. I confess that on the finer days of the year I engaged in a certain amount of window gazing and clock watching, feeling the restraint of achool attendance a bit of a drag as all studenmts do at times. That old Seth Thomas wall clock sure seemed to move so slowly on such days!
As in the case of most young people there were some pranks and more than a few laughs in those halcyon care free far off years. One I remember was where Walter Daniel and John Lusney poured hydrochloric acid and sulphur through the small holes in the bottom of the window sash connecting the lab with the classroom where the liquid was then able to run along the brush rack at the bottom of the blackboard generating sulphur dioxide and permeating the whole classroom with its rotten egg smell as it went. Soon all the class was turning up its collective nose. When Eldred Miller, the teacher realized what was going on he went out to the lab, but by then the perpetrators had disappeared to enjoy a good bit of private laughter!
Eldred was the youngest of our teachers in grades 9 to 11. He was a farm raised boy, quite serious and down to earth, yet with a sense of humor. He did one great thing for the teen aged boys when he organized a gymnastics program for us in the anglican church parish hall. Nobody in our group had ever heard of exercises using formal gymnastic equipment such as parallel bars, a jumping horse, a trapeze swing and tumbling mats. These moreover he contrived to get made with the help of shopmen from the railway and some donations of old pipes and lumber. The equipment was portable so it could be set up and taken down whenever we used it for our weekly sessions. The activities were strenuous and competive enough so that even the toughest boys such as Tom Richardson and Frank Sinclair did not regard them as sissified. Tom was the best on the horse and "Sinc" on the parallel bars, with the less tough Percy Bellamy excelling on the mats. At the end of the season, Eldred arranged a performance at the school so that we were able to demonstrate our gymnastic prowess before our fellow students. Needless to say our schoolmates (including the girls) were greatly impressed by what we had learned. Eldred deserves an everlasting vote of thanks for coming up with this activity which no doubt contributed to our not hanging out in the local pool room which had a bad reputation amongst parents and teachers alike.
Mr. Buhr was a chap who was very knowlegable and who had a BA in languages so that he did well as a teacher. His only fault was that he was sincere to the point of naivety. He always took our questions as being serious both in and out of class, even though half the time some of the boys were pulling his leg. However he never did more than give us a silly smile each time he realized he was being had. During the war he was given a government job censoring mail, because of his knowledge of languages, including German and French. In later years when I was working in Toronto I went out to Coburg (where he then lived) with my daughter Maria and was able to convey to him on a more mature level that I did appreciate his language teaching at school.
An example of this in my own case was Mr. Buhr's teaching of French. In grades 7 and 8 I had taken French as it was compulsory in those days in all Manitoba schools. (This was quite amazing as Manitoba, of all the provinces was the one which outlawed separate schools such as French Roman Catholics would have preferred). Our grade 7 and 8 teachers were not French and while they taught us how to read and write the stuff, their pronunciation was awful. Buhr was able to help in this respect, and in view of the amount of contact with French speaking people that I have enjoyed in later life I must give credit for this as well as the basic teaching in French grammar which was provided by all the teachers including Mr. Buhr. Sadly, he was one of the few teachers I was able to follow up in later life and express to them their part in the very fine education we received in Rivers School.
Mildred Musgrove also taught us in grade nine, but left to go elsewhere. She was replaced by Eldred Miller, I do not believe she ever married but I believe I heard she was still living last year (1995) which would mean she would be in her nineties. Though Mildred was a good teacher, the manner of her being dismissed by the local school board was rather sad; I believe to this day that it was influenced by the bad-mouthing which we students gave her in our homes. This was only based on the insufficient reason that she was a bit ascerbic in her manner and could on occasion be sarcastic in class. In hindsight it is pitiful to realize the conditions of living for a small town school teacher. Public school teachers in Rivers were only paid $400 per year, high school got $600 and the principal $1200. In addition, the social life of teachers, particularly female teachers was severely circumscribed because in such small communities they were expected to always be examples for we young people. Marriage opportunities were not that great during the depression as there were few young men who had steady jobs; the unemployment rate in Rivers was around 30%. It was not so tough for the men who had employment; Eldred Miller for example was able to marry a sweet, quiet girl, aptly named Angelica Hintz, who was one of our Grade 12 students. It did not happen until after her graduation from the school, otherwise it could have been the subject of much unseemly gossip!
Our Principal, Mr. Wilfred I Stewart was really a remarkable man; he must have been in order to have survived in as principal in that small town for about 25 years! Nor did he have a university education, he only had Grade 12 plus first and second class Normal School. Before coming to Rivers he had worked as head of a brokerage office in Saskatoon making the then princely sum of $250 per month. When the crash came in 1929 the office was closed and he was out of work for a time.
In the classroom he taught everything firmly and logically, writing his statements on the blackboard in a bold well written hand. When marking exam papers he loved to give what he called "goose eggs" (0)'s for wrong answers and Christmas Trees (^) for questions which he considered too easy for us. Of course we kids made fun of him behind his back as we did or most teachers. I don't know who originated the nickname, but we called him "Old Salty". Aside from that we got away with very little as he ran a tight ship. For example he was death on students smoking in the school premises and on one occasion when he smelled cigarette smoke underneath the stairs he warned us all that he was on the lookout for the guilty ones.
He was the first teacher to ever make me take an interest in literature and its relation to real life. He showed great feeling for the characters in novels, plays and poems that we studied and showed us that what the author was saying was not just useless drivel, but had something to say to us about life and its philosophy. For example, his teaching of "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray and of "The Deserted Village" by Oliver Goldsmith was outstanding, if not epic. He was able to make us empathize with the humble greatness of the people who had inhabited these villages. Perhaps some of the lines he recognized in the Deserted Village were saying something relevant to his own life: "There in his mansion skilled to rule, The village master taught his little school. A man severe he was and stern to rule; I knew him well and every truant knew; Yet he was kind, or, if severe in aught, The love he bore to learning was in fault. The village all declared how much he knew;"
He prided himself on teaching us what was correct, but was not afraid to acknowledge an error when he made one. One outstanding example of this remains in my mind to this day. It was in a physics class where he was taeaching us about Romer's discovery of the speed of light by observing the orbiting time variation of Jupiter's moons as measured when the earth was moving toward or away from Jupiter. The meaning of the observation as explained by Mr. Stewart was plausible and we all accepted it at first; however, I divined that there was a different way of looking at it and I gave my explanation. He did not agree at first but said he would consider it. Next morning he addressed the whole class and said "Bob was right".
One of the other things he did was to instill in us a love of music of all kinds. He added band music and classical to the country music which existed in all western towns (and which I also love very much). He was instrumental in getting a school band started in which he himself played the cornet. Through his efforts we learned about John Philip Sousa and other great band composers and their music. For my part I learned to play the cornet, (loaned to me by Mervyn Henderson), though I never became very proficient at it. Some however, like Adolphe Schmidt became very good. He played the trumpet and was later able to play in local dance bands.
On the classical side Mr. Stewart was able to persuade the school board to buy an RCA Victor radio gramophone which cost the then large sum of $47.50. This was half a month's pay for the average Rivers wage earner and it was the first electric gramaphone in town; none of us had ever seen anything before but the old windup Victrolas! To use it he procured a musical syllabus and accompanying 78 rpm classical records containing examples of symphonies and opera with selections coming from the greatest composers and artists of that day. We were thrilled with Verdi's "Aida" and with various works from Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Shubert and others. I still thrill to old recordings in my possession of Caruso's soaring "O Sole Mio" and Amelita Galli-Curci's lovely coloratura "Lo Hear the Gentle Lark" and the Bel Canto voice of John McCormack in opera and song. This exposure, together with two years of piano lessons from Grant Wilkes and a brief exposure to the violin with Alex Whyte created a lifelong love of and appreciation for music which I still can enjoy at age 74, though a bit deaf on high notes in my left ear.
Another musical tradition established by Mr. Stewart was that of assembling the whole school for the singing of carols at 9 o'clock each morning of the week before Christmas Holidays. The whole 250 students would be gathered in the main hall and on the steps leading down on both sides from the second floor facing each other. Accompaniment was provided by one of the teachers on the piano, Adolphe Schmidt and Mr. Stewart on the trumpets and Albert Radcliffe on the violin. This scene and the joyful sound of all our young voices belting out "It came upon the midnight clear", "the first Noel", "O come all ye faithful", "Once in Royal David's city" and many others is one to which my mind still turns with feelings of pleasure and nostalgia approaching tears. Yes, I still owe a great deal to the efforts of W.I. Stewart with music to light up my life!
It is a sadness to this day, that once I left Rivers I never had the chance to speak to him again. However, I did have the good sense when I was in university to write a letter to J.T. Bowman, chairman of the Rivers school board saying how good an education I had received in Rivers and mentioning W.I.Stewart in particular.
My last year of schooling in Rivers was Grade 12, starting in September 1937 and extending to June 1938. Up until this time Rivers had not had a grade 12 but because there were about 10 or 12 of us ready to take it and because there were no jobs and because it was too expensive to take the equivalent lst year university under depression conditions our parents petitioned the school board to start one. While schooling up to then had been free (that is, paid out of taxes) parents were expected to pay $120 for those of us taking the year. In hindsight I can see that this would cover the cost of an additional teacher and as the old grade 2 room was just used for music we were given posession of it so there was no cost for added space.
The new teacher hired was a young woman by the name of Mary Macdonald, who had recently graduated from United College in Winnipeg. Because she was younger than our other teachers (and better looking to us boys who were now conscious of such things) coupled with a scintillating personality she blew into our lives like a breath of fresh air. She related more closely to our youthfullness and we listened to what she taught us. Such things as letting us "young adults" be trusted to sit out on the school steps to study on fine spring days were guaranteed to endear her to us. She taught in Rivers for a couple of years after I left, but regret that I never saw her again once our graduation exercises were over. Over 40 years later I learned from Blanche Clark (our engineering librarian) that she was married and living in Calgary. I intended to phone her to recall Rivers Grade l2 but kept putting it off and missed my opportunity; the Alumni Journal reported her death in 1994.
The impact of the war and the tremendous changes it brought about in Canadian life can be seen in microcosm from what happened to the dozen or so in our class, all seen so expectant in the accompanying photo taken on or near graduation day: