Small Town Life

I think I have mentioned a few times that I went through high school in Chemainus, British Columbia. It was a town of around 3,000 people (at that time), and the largest employer was the local lumber mill. There were two schools, an elementary (K-7), and a high school (8-12). No middle school or junior high. The kids went straight from recess to smoking out by the garbage cans.

When I started there, 7th grade was part of the high school. I was there for the last month of Grade 7, and came from three years in a Catholic parochial school. It was the following year that the high school didn't get a new class coming in from the elementary school across the creek.

We usually had between five and six hundred students. There was no music and no theater. I had to take art by correspondence one year. There was very little in the way of sports--track and field and basketball pretty much covered it.

We had a yearbook, but kids today would laugh at it. Administrators taught classes. The school nurse probably knew all the moms by their first names.

There were 42 kids in my graduating class. The ceremony was held in the school gym. We dressed for it at school. No caps or gowns--the girls wore their first formal dresses, and the boys, their first suits.

I had been out of school for some time before I learned that all of this was not the way it was for everyone.