Catch of the Day

Play Equipment

2012-02-17T11:12:00.000-05:00

As I've worked on this schoolhouse project I've been amazed at the individuals who have stepped up and shared stories with me. Last fall, quite by accident, I met the man who purchased the play equipment when the school closed. It was in his backyard, well used through the years of his children and grandchildren. Would I like to see it?

Would I ever!

My husband and I ventured to his house a couple of weeks ago, camera in my hand, fully intending to take pictures to use in the book. I was underwhelmed, if there is such a word. I don't know what I expected, but this is what I got:

It was sort of sad, sitting there neglected at the edge of the woods in his back yard. His children have grown and don't want it any more. Their children have grown and the newest generation has much more exciting equipment to occupy their time and energy.

But oh, the memories I've heard about that one little merry-go-round. About girls tucking in their skirts so they wouldn't fly up while they spun around. About pushing and jumping on and going in circles. About wasting time in the mornings watching the buses arrive.

I have found one photo that gives life to this merry-go-round.

Yes, proof of happiness.

This picture was taken the last year of the school's existence, 1972-73. These two students represented Mr. Leonard's homeroom in the junior high homecoming court back when the seventh and eighth graders were considered minature high schoolers... "junior" high schoolers to be more exact. They copied high school activities, even the homecoming concept of queen and court.

Junior highs have faded away now, replaced by the more appropriate middle school structure that recognizes this age group as more than a younger version of the teenage experience. But for those students who came through Pilot Mountain School the three years it was a junior high, this pre-teen experience was a joy to remember. I have seen this joy in their faces. I have heard it in the stories I collected.

And I pass it along to you.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Stormy Weather

2012-01-12T07:25:00.000-05:00

A tornado!

It might be January, but the weather outside is more like an extreme version of March. Yesterday evening's six o'clock news was full of warnings and tornado possibilities and live eye witness reports. Some of those very reports came from people living in the Salem community that I mention often in my Pilot Mountain manuscript. It's barely daybreak now and the morning news is just posting damage reports.

There were injuries, to what extent I don't know, but no deaths recorded. Homes destroyed, though. Trees on cars. Schools in Burke County are on a two hour delay, but is that enough? Will there be electricity so the children can write about their scary night?

Lessons learned at school today might not be straight from the teacher's well designed plan book, but they will be remembered. And some day, fifty years from now, a story catcher will gather today's stories in her net.

Life goes on.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Christmas Dinner

2011-12-26T08:19:00.020-05:00

Yesterday might have been Christmas Day, but Christmas is not over yet. Today is our family celebration on my husband's side. Most everyone will be in this year, everyone except my daughter and her husband in snowy Taos, New Mexico, and her cousin and family in Maryland. We will gather to eat, but not all in one room. We've grown that big. The women get the table, the men get the tv trays, key word, tv.

We have our list of food assigned to bring, the usual meats, casseroles, desserts. Two items on the list stood out to me this year, not just because they sound delicious, but because they have a connection to a story I heard while I was interviewing former Pilot Mountain students. It's a Griffith family quirk that I also found alive and well a hundred miles away in this valley.

The first meal I ate at my future husband's house those many years ago was Sunday dinner. That meant roast beef, a southern tradition. It also meant mashed potatoes. Everyone at the table served themselves an ample helping of potatoes and commenced to denting in a little well at the top of the pile, so I did, too. I'm from the north, western Pennsylvania, and when we had mashed potatoes, we also had gravy. So that first Sunday dinner meal, I waited for the gravy to be passed around. No gravy.

Peas.

Everyone put a generous scoop of green peas in that little well, even dribbled them out like green lava from a crater. Never heard of such a thing as peas on potatoes. Couldn't imagine the taste, either. But there they were, eating peas and potatoes like it was an everyday occurance.

Fast forward a lot of years (and a lot of peas and potatoes) and there I am listening to a man tell how he learned to like peas. He couldn't stomach the taste of them until his family moved to the South Mountains.

So what happened, I asked.

The first day he ate in the school cafeteria he saw students making dents in their mashed potatoes and spooning their peas into those dents. He was extra hungry that day, he remembers some sixty years later, and wanted to eat everything in sight, even peas. He tried it their way. Liked it. Learned to eat peas with, and then without, mashed potatoes.

So is this a cultural thing? Southern? Mountain? A mommy thing? Or am I just behind the times in culinary delight?

As for me, give me a lonely pile of peas beside, not on, my mashed potatoes.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

New Project

2011-12-07T09:08:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I started a new project, not that I have finished the Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse project or anything, but the timing for this offered a window I couldn't pass up.

My mother's eighty-five year old cousin lives way, way back in the Smoky Mountains (yes, another mountain project) just off interstate 40, not all that far from the Tennessee state line. She has asked me for several years now to write the story of her life as a circuit riding (horseback) preacher for the Salvation Army. As I interviewed her yesterday I couldn't help but connect elements of her story to those I've caught from Pilot Mountain.

One especially stood out...the mountain language. In a previous blog, (click here) I wrote about people who moved into the South Mountains as children and found a culture and its language vastly different from any other.

This cousin is, like my entire family, from the coal mining region of the western Pennsylvania mountains. She left our home village and moved to Pittsburgh in the mid forties, war era. She never felt at home in a big city, always missed her mountains, and eventually moved south when she joined the Salvation Army. She found mountains, and even though these were called the same, Appalachians, these were not the same people. When she first arrived, she could not speak their language, athough they both spoke English. The southern Appalachians, specifically the Smoky Mountains, are very isolating, undeveloped even to this day. The early Scotch/Irish settlers kept to themselves, retaining their customs and their old English accents and vocabulary, wary of strangers with Yankee accents.

Enter this tiny missionary, from the Alleghney Mountains, from the big city, and most important to the locals, from anywhere but Max Patch, North Carolina. They couldn't understand her. She couldn't understand them, not their language, not their customs. She invented her own system of sign language in a necessity-mother-of-invention way. She made comical missteps simply because she didn't understand this mountain life.

Adapting to her new home is only a part of her story. Her faith journey is the rest.

I can't wait to go back and capture more of this exciting story.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Christmas Drama

2011-11-26T10:04:00.000-05:00

Yes, I'm already thinking Christmas, have been for a month now and it has nothing to do with Black Friday or the thrill of buying presents, decorating the tree or baking the goodies. Oh, the drama of it all! But I'm thinking drama in a different sense, a dramatic presentation.

Every year the church I attend holds a Christmas trail at our church park the week after Thanksgiving. (Details here.) By default I have become the director, but that's okay because I am fortunate to have eager volunteers that step up even before I ask. We present the story of Christ's birth using our walking trail as a background, with twelve scenes and numerous actors. Counting them and the workers in the parking lot, the picnic shelter, the bonfire and the hot chocolate tent, we need over fifty people a night just to operate.

This is entirely outdoors, so the weather is like an additional character. Sometimes on the hill the wind cuts through the thin costumes and freezes even the sturdiest of Roman soldiers. Most often, though, the weather cooperates and walking through the woods under a blanket of clear stars becomes a highlight of the evening. Many visitors say this has become a tradition to start their Christmas off, grounded in the true meaning of the message.

At Pilot Mountain School, before religion was removed from education, the teachers held a yearly Christmas Pageant, complete with the manger scene and adoring shepherds and wise men. I know this because several of the people I interviewed burst out in recitation of their parts as we talked in a once learned, never forgotten sort of way.

I'm sad though, for the schoolchildren of today who won't have innkeeper stories or donkey-gone-wild stories to tell their children and grandchildren. The child actors in our Christmas trail do have stories to tell of roasting hot dogs over the shepherd's fire between groups, of eating the chicken that was cooked over the fire in the traveler's scene, of pretending the shepherd's staff was a machine gun during the scene. Behind the scenes is probably more meaningful to them than performing the same scene a dozen times per night.

We will be ready to welcome visitor on our trail this week, starting tomorrow, skipping to Thursday through Sunday. It's not the same experience as viewing a manger scene on a stage in the school auditorium, believe me. It is the same story, though, told for two thousand years. In the end, that's all that counts.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Veteran's Day 2011

2011-11-11T09:12:00.000-05:00

Some days are sacred. They have meaning above and beyond a number on a calendar. November 11 is one of those days. It seems even more notable this particular year because of the numbers involved.

11-11-11.

At the eleventh hour today I will stop and breathe in the fall air and remember those who have sacrificed their time and energy, and all too often, their lives. I’ve been to the walls of names. I’ve touched the letters and cried about war.

I found this picture posted by a friend on facebook this morning. I traced it back a few levels to

Greg and the Morning Buzz

an early morning radio show in New Hampshire. I don't know who designed it, but it speaks volumes to me in a picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words kind of way, so thank you, unknown artist. And thank you veterans who made it possible for a radio show to be free to broadcast and for me to speak my mind on facebook and twitter.

For several years now I have been involved with AFS, a nonprofit organization that sends students across the globe to live with host families. Peace through cultural exchange is the short version of our mission statement. Here’s the actual:

AFS-USA works toward a more just and peaceful world by providing international and intercultural learning experiences to individuals, families, schools, and communities through a global volunteer partnership.

Each hosted student is assigned a liaison who maintains contact throughout the year. I am liaison for a student from Germany. The American school he attends here also has two other AFS students, one from Japan, one from Italy. The student from Japan is taking US History this semester and was studying for a test this past Tuesday while I met with her host family.
I asked what the test would be on. World War II she answered.

Then she remarked about something I’ve noticed all along: these three exchange students are from the three countries of the axis powers. I am blown away by the irony. Here she was sitting in an American school studying about Japan and Germany and Italy and the war of two generations ago through an American point of view. For these students, American or not, WWII is something for the history book, something they have gone beyond.

There must be a better way than war. We can’t change the past but we can influence the future through the youth of the world so that there won’t be a need for another wall of names. Ever.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Happy Birthday Mom

2011-11-03T10:01:00.000-04:00

Today my mother would have turned one hundred years old. She was a Pennsylvania coal miner's daughter. That sentence alone tells the story behind her resilience and I really don't need to say more, but I do want to fill in the details.

Her first family chore was to go outside each morning at daybreak to see if the signal flag was flying at the entrance to the mineshaft down the side of the mountain. If it was up, her father could work that day. If it was not, no work, less income and the family went hungry.

She lived through two world wars and the Great Depression between them, Viet Nam with my brother flying helicopter rescue, and nine-eleven and all its horrors on the screen in front of her, knowing too well that one grandson was witnessing it in New York City and one granddaughter was witnessing it in DC, live, up close and personal.

Susanna Frances Fish Holsopple

Yet those times of troubles did not define her life. The ordinary, day to day joy of living did. She traveled in a camping caravan in the thirties, gypsy like, open sky sleeping. After that experience of surviving on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches she never ate another one, nor ever, ever prepared one for me. My childhood summers were filled with travel. Often, when she was a bit homesick, she would pile my brother and me into the car and drive (no interstate highways then, I might add) from our new home in North Carolina through the rugged mountains of West Virginia into western Pennslyvania, back to the old homeplace, just for a short visit, just to reconnect to her roots and absorb the strength to face the challenges of living as an alien in a southern culture.

I've felt her influence quite a bit during this Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse project. From her many stories I learned what questions to ask about school life in the 1940's. She was a beginning teacher in a one room school at a crossroads called Eighty-four in Pennsylvania. She wrote about her experiences there in a handwritten, limited edition (two: one for me, one for my brother) memoir. She wrote about carrying the coal inside each morning to heat the school. She wrote about preparing the soup on top of the stove so that the depression era mountain children would have at least one hot meal. She moved next to teach at another one room school in a secluded village called Seldom Seen. When we moved south, she taught second grade at the nearby school, stressing phonics and vowel sounds to children who could not understand her accent.

She never got over the travel bug. She and my dad went to Europe several times and when he died in 1981, she turned next to her grandchildren as travel partners. She promised a trip the summer before each child's twelfth birthday, with one stipulation. The destination had to be a place she had never been. My niece chose Ireland; my nephew, Greece. She took my daughter to Holland to see the spring tulips and my son to Kenya on safari.

She lived to be ninety-two glorious years old. I must say, she did pack a lot into those years! She was a true member of the greatest generation.

But the greatest statement of her life is this. She was loved.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

A Courthouse Visit

2011-10-28T09:19:00.000-04:00

I made a solemn visit yesterday to the Viet Nam memorial at the Burke County Courthouse. I hadn't planned it, otherwise I would have taken my camera, but the chance was there before me, too good to pass up.

When I visited the courthouse earlier in my research, I didn't imagine that one day I would need to walk among the monuments outside just as I needed to dig through the documents inside. But I did. I needed to see how two former students from Pilot Mountain School were memorialized, remembered forever.

Both were killed in action during Viet Nam.

I saw their names, touched them, felt the chiseled numbers that told exactly what day each was killed. I copied the dates to make sure I had the information correct in my manuscript.

Then I left. I had the freedom to come home, to write this blog, to watch an uncensored television show. All those names at the courthouse garden allowed me to do that and for that I am grateful. For that I will make certain these two men are included in my book. I owe it to them.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Saturday at Pilot Mountain School

2011-10-17T08:34:00.000-04:00

There's more to Pilot Mountain School than its past.

There is also a present and I was witness to it last Saturday.

The Pilot Mountain campus is also the work center for a business called Turning Point Services which provides in-home care and support to adult clients identified with developmental disabilities. Every year TPS sponsors a softball game. This year I dragged my lawn chair out of hibernation and plopped right down in the midst of proud families and cheering fans. It all began with a flag ceremony, followed by a choral presentation.

In this game, there were no outs. Everyone made it to first base and beyond. There were no losers, either. What a concept!

The game was held on the field behind the school where once upon a time children played marbles, where they played softball or football or jumprope, where past meets present. Now there is a walking track for these same clients to participate in community on a daily basis.

During a break in the action I walked around to the front of the school to photograph the fall leaves. The color in the higher Appalachians in western North Carolina was at its peak Saturday, but not here in the South Mountains. There were only a few red and yellow patches to tease leaf-peepers like me. I didn't find fall leaves but I wasn't at all disappointed. I found inspiration, not in nature, but in words.

In the front of the school is a two sided sign. The front side is for the world to see driving by on the highway. It announces the name of the school in huge bold letters. The back side, however, is more of a reminder to those who are inside the building looking out. Isaiah 40:31 the sign simply says. I looked it up and here's the full verse, NIV translation.

But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary; they will walk and not be faint.

Those clients at Turning Point Services soared like eagles Saturday. They ran and their spirits never grew weary. They walked and never grew faint. They were renewed.

So was I.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

An Arrowhead and a Story

2011-10-13T09:08:00.000-04:00

The fall of the year is when many elementary classrooms across the state discuss the Native American culture. I suppose dried cornstalks and colorful Indian corn make the perfect background for discussions, not to mention the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday and the chance for children to wear feathered headbands or Pilgrim hats. Art lessons mean weaving paper strips into fake baskets. Music lessons have the beat of drums in the background. Arrowheads become the featured attactraction during show and tell.

Cherokee arrowhead

There were plenty of arrowheads in the farmland around Pilot Mountain School. For hundreds of years, this was the designated hunting grounds for two ancient tribes in North Carolina, the Cherokee and the Catawba. They traveled the South Mountains in search of food for their families and left behind many a broken arrow with its carefully honed arrowhead. Seasons changed from one year to the next and eventually the shaft rotted and the weapon shard settled into the ground beneath layers of leaf debris.

Arrowhead found in Tennessee

Until.

One day...

...when the farmer in the field turned over the sod and there, barely recognizable in the caked mud, it saw the light of day for the first time in hundreds of years.

A storeowner near Pilot Mountain collected Cherokee artifacts. I caught this story early in my interviewing process.

· My grandfather was a collector of Indian artifacts. His collection of artifacts is now in the Cherokee museum. The kids would follow the plows and pick up the arrowheads for him. They’d trade my grandfather for candy. Being older, wiser and smarter, my brother would get out early in the morning right after it had rained. The ones barely covered up would be the ones that would be soon exposed.

Now these arrowheads fetch hundreds of dollars on internet trade, not exactly candy anymore. To me they also fetch out a certain sadness for greatness lost. I'm always looking for story. What story could you tell, Cherokee Arrowhead?

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Columbus Day Musings

2011-10-10T09:15:00.000-04:00

I read a poster online today that says something to the effect, "In honor of Columbus Day, go straight into someone's house and tell them you live there now."

Food for thought there, and I've done a lot of thinking, especially in relation to what I've heard from people I've interviewed during this project.

By the time their ancestors, the Eurpoean settlers, arrived in the Pilot Mountain area, the native Americans had already lived there for thousands of years. Well, they had not exactly lived there as in huge villages, because that very spot had become a neutral territory between two tribes. Both had agreed to disagree and maintain a buffer between them, the Cherokee in the higher Appalachians and the Catawbas in the piedmont. The South Mountains and the foothills between were designated hunting grounds by a treaty.

The few families that did live there eventually adapted and intermarried into this new society or moved on when they saw their land taken over. Those that chose to remain were eliminated by the notorious "Trail of Tears," the process in the early 1800's by which the Cherokee tribe was relocated to land further west.

But there was one man who refused to move from the South Mountains, refused to be dragged away from what he had known his entire life. He lived alone, hiding in a cave under Raven's Rock. I heard his story from a man who was a student in the early years at Pilot Mountain. His grandmother told him. Her grandmother told her.

He had explored this cave and found a knife, showed it to his grandmother. That's when she told the story of this unnamed Cherokee. He had hidden alone in the cave for years and when he became too old to survive in the ruggedness of the mountains, he found shelter in a white man's cellar. The family took him into their home, into their lives. They weren't making any political statements. They were answering the pleas of a fellow human being.

Today in honor of Columbus Day, I honor this Cherokee who wouldn't give up.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

October Poetry

2011-10-08T10:24:00.001-04:00

Today is a perfect fall day, not too hot, not too cold, clouds so sparse I can count them on one hand. This is the kind of day poets write about when they are in a good mood, when the shadows have disappeared and all appears well.

Photograph by Vanessa McMillon

Poetry and autumn go together, at least according to one former Pilot Mountain student as she spoke about one teacher, Mrs. Seals, and the impact she made on her life.

Mrs. Seals is the one that would have us recite poetry. When the school would start we’d learn “September, the golden rod is yellow, the corn is turning brown.” I still say it every year. My husband says, “Well, it’s time for the poem.” Then next, “October’s bright blue weather.” I kind of got into that world. It was an escape for me. I could get a book and sometimes I would stop on the way home from school and sit and read or I would just sit in the broomsage and look at the books. The fall of the year it seems like that poetry would really get started and I would relate to everything.

Sixty plus years and her heart returns to the same poem, over and over and over. She doesn't need comfort food. She has comfort poetry!

We should all be so lucky.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Writer's Conference

2011-09-23T08:23:00.001-04:00

I'm not at home this weekend. Starting today I'm at a conference in Charlotte, NC sponsored by the Carolinas Regional SCBWI, the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. You read that correctly, children's book writers. Me.

Beyond the adult nonfiction/memoir collecting and catching, I have written and published a few things for children and for teachers of those children. My nonfiction article "Finding Forty-two," about baseball great Jackie Robinson was in Highlights for Children. Coming soon in that same magazine, a fiction piece based on my father-in-law's yearly battle to keep the birds from devouring all the cherries on his cherry tree. I also have a picture book in the works with a fall 2013 release date, this one based on the tree farms here in Caldwell County and my experiences working with AFS students adjusting to living in America.

Writing is writing, back to basics whether for children or for adults, just telling a good story, even in the nonfiction texts. Sounds simple enough, doesn't it? Ha. Try staring at a blank page for an hour.

That's the theme of this year's conference, "Filling the Blank Page." I've been to enough conferences to fill many a blank page, but there's something about being in the midst of the community of writers that keeps calling me back yet another year. Sure, it's about craft and marketing. More than that, to me a conference is about re-energizing, becoming enthused enough to crank up the computer Monday morning.

So while you are reading this, I am among friends, writer friends. I can't wait.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Speaking about my Project

2011-09-21T08:56:00.000-04:00

Here I go again, getting the cart before the horse, or more specifically, the speaking engagement before the book. I first did it last February during a reception at Pilot Mountain School open house with only a "coming soon" flier in hand. Former students and teachers attended and shared their memories giving me additional insights into life at the school.

Today, however, there is a difference and the cart is way ahead of this horse. A friend of mine who has been my springboard of ideas and knows the project from the beginning days asked if I would present a program about Pilot Mountain School at a monthly meeting of senior citizens at her church. This set of listeners does not know about my project. They don't even know the school existed since they live in a completely different county thirty minutes away. On the other hand, I have a story to share, one I feel they will connect with, about struggles, faith, daily living and overcoming poverty of the mid twentieth century.

Most of all I will present the life of a former missionary to China, Lettie Hamlett. I've posted about her before, so in case you missed it, please click on her name, go back and read her story. It's amazing, and it's one worth sharing today.

I guess today is the first test of how well strangers to the school will react to its story. Can I convince them that there are universal truths underneath all the bare bone telling I'm doing? If so, then this manuscript is worth every nano-minute I've devoted these past two years.

We'll see.

Catch of the day,

Gretchern

Not the Ordinary Wine Tasting Tour

2011-09-14T07:56:00.002-04:00

I've been married to my wonderful, patient husband for 43 years as of this September 14. It's quite an accomplishment to say the least, especially since I've added on this project and dragged him through some of the most unusual situations a marriage could endure. Even our anniversary celebration this year was connected to the Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse project. I was doing "research," but in this case he was an eager participant.

We went on a moonshine tasting fundraising tour sponsored by the Catawba County Historical Society. You read it right, not the ordinary wine tasting for us, no this was actual moonshine. Legal. (I asked.) I should have known it was going to be a different kind of night when we arrived in the parking lot and first thing were given mason jars filled with instructions.

Although the illegal distilling trade was well established in the South Mountain area around Pilot Mountain, the bootleggers there had no monopoly on the market. Nearby Catawba County was equally as prolific, as we discovered on this tour. And a tour it was, four airconditioned, comfort coach busloads of mountain dew singing modern day yuppies peeking into the speakeasy world of prohibition. We followed the same route NASCAR driver Junior Johnson once ran. "Here's where the largest bust..." the guide pointed to the lake's edge. "Here's the garage where the cars were adapted to the trade." We drove past delapidated buildings that once were fine dining establishments covering for backdoor liquor markets, brothels (who would have guessed) and the jail where a notorious bootlegger tapped into his own confiscated kegs there behind the courthouse while the law/kin folk looked the other way.

When we returned to Murray's Mill, a restored historical site in Catawba County, we were treated to a bar-b-que dinner and live bluegrass music by the group Kudzu. That's when the tasting party began. Apple pie flavored shine. Peach flavored, cranberry, all yuppified moonshine in a cough medicine sized dose exchanged for a ticket from our mason jar.

None were to my taste or even to my sense of right vs wrong. The extended research I heard on the tour was thorough, well documented and went right along with my own study. Except that I also include the child's side of the moonshine trade, the impact when the father was in jail or when the revenuers were knocking at the door or when the child couldn't stay awake in class because he was up all night helping in the family business in the dark with only nature's light to work by.

As an unplanned bonus, there in the cloudless sky above the waterwheel turning in the creek beside our table was the biggest, clearest full moon shining down on us all.

The stories that moon could tell!

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Remembering September 11

2011-09-11T17:28:00.002-04:00

No Pilot Mountain connection today, for once. I have other things on my mind.

Today I only want to talk about one day, ten years ago, September 11, 2001 when I was teaching fourth grade. For a decade now, I've thought about that day and the children in my class. Although I've kept up with them through the years as they've grown into college sophomores, I have never talked about "that" day to get their impressions and feelings.

Until now.

I am facebook friends with one girl, Lindsey. She posted this morning:

I was in Gretchen Griffith's fourth grade class. We were told that we didn't have to do the homework we were assigned if we didn't want to. Even the next day, I didn't know how it really effected me or the world. I was sad because everyone else was. Looking back, I'm amazed at the teachers for being as calm and collected as they were. I'm not sure I could have done the same.

Here's my response:

Strange you remember the no homework fact, Lindsey. We also went out to play a little extra that afternoon, do you remember that, too? I didn't know what the future would be, but at least my class would have a time of true play before they found out that the world had changed. It was hard watching everyone play knowing this big life secret. I also remember that the next morning we discussed it as a class and then I could tell it was enough time spent talking and what everyone really needed was a little normalcy. So we went on about the business of being fourth grade.

Just like those fourth graders, when we go on about our freedoms, then we win.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Hurricanes, Tropical Storms and Such

2011-09-08T09:35:00.003-04:00

Rain, rain, rain and more rain. We've had enough rain for the past few days to last quite a while, thank you, very much.
I've watched videos on the news about roads in the Carolinas being washed away, more from Irene than from Lee. I can picture in my mind one such incident that happened to the Pilot Mountain community in the unnamed hurricane of 1940. Losing a vital connection to the rest of the world is a devastation to the community, no matter which natural disaster hits. It is not a recent phenomena either, although the invention of more available roadways into remote areas offers a hurricane additional opportunity for widespread destruction. The road through this valley is a good example.

The new US highway 64 through the valley had just been completed and opened to great ballyhoo two weeks before the 1940 hurricane struck. Up to this time, the road was a state road, route #181, that wound from one end of the county to the other connecting both mountain chains through the valley between them and connecting the towns of Morganton and Rutherfordton.

Here's how one man fondly remembered the old road that it replaced. Little wonder that the new version was a welcome relief.

The old road wandered all around creation, especially up there around my house. It went in front of my shop and on up past my garden and back to where highway #64 is at now. Climbed up the top of the next hill and circled back and went back down to Brindle Creek and crossed the creek and went up to the top of the hill and come back again. Goes as a matter of convenience from one property to the next. That’s how crooked it was. You don’t think nothing about the road until you get to looking at where it used to be. (Student, 1942-48)

The new road cut the distance between the towns from thirty-five to twenty-seven miles. A car (or horse and buggy) no longer had to ford the winding creeks sixteen different times because this new highway had bridges and culverts. Two weeks it was open and then it was gone, wiped out, death by water.

The engineers arrived again. They started from scratch and built an even better, even stronger highway that was part of a main artery between North Carolina and Arizona. Its importance to the ebb and flow of the nation diminished when Interstate 40 opened in the early sixties, but it remains as a vital lifeline to the locals. I live within walking distance of highway #64. My daughter in New Mexico works within walking distance of the same highway and lives within two miles. Some day I want to drive that ribbon of highway between our two homes and see for myself what the backroads reveal.

As long as the hurricanes leave them alone.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Hurricane Lee

2011-09-05T09:35:00.000-04:00

Today might be a holiday, but a hurricane named Lee has put a damper on it. Here in the foothills between the South Mountains to the east and the Blue Ridge to the west, we are experiencing the first bands of what is ahead, not that I'm complaining. We need a little rain, as long as the wind stays light. So I'm inside, hunkered down in front of the computer, pulling out a manuscript that I've ignored for two years while I've done this more pressing Pilot Mountain project. A change of topics is most welcome on this dreary day.

Hurricanes bring out the best in people and the worst in nature. To the western North Carolina mountains, hundreds of miles from the Atlantic coast, a hurricane is definitely nature at its worst. Case in point, the 1940 unnamed hurricane that blasted through the Pilot Mountain area with its own brand of havoc.

I caught tales in my net about this 1940's storm. Mostly I caught flood stories, how the barn was washed away, how the cows and horses couldn't fight the current and gave in to be swept down stream, how the promising crops were covered with thick layers of killer muds and how the farmers' yearly income washed away in one fatal day. After seventy years, the memory still haunts:

They was so much water til it looked like an ocean to me. The field looked like you could go swimming in it. All the stuff washed away, an old barn we had there, the stuff we had in it, the straw, hay. Crops. Everything was gone. It got it all. School construction crew member, 1941-42

Will Hurricanes Lee, Irene, Katrina and other storms in the sisterhood be so imprinted into this generation's minds that a storycatcher seventy years from now can garnish memories that are as vivid as what I see this morning?

No doubt.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Accomplishing the Impossible

2011-09-02T09:04:00.000-04:00

When I checked my emails this morning, I found a note from the AFS/USA president sent to all volunteers about placing the final 2011-12 students with host families. He began with this:

Recently, a volunteer passed along a quote to me from Eleanor Roosevelt, "You must do the things you think you cannot do.”

Do the things I think I cannot do.... Before my Pilot Mountain project, I would have thought "nice quote," in a bland sort of way. But two years into the project, I have upped my opinion of doing the impossible. Research into the home front war years did that for me. I read about the efforts to raise funds, to collect scrap metal and to do without essentials. I interviewed former students who lived through the ration book years, brought nickels to buy stamps for their war bond books and scrap metal from the farms to earn a sweat shirt.

The teachers were in charge of the war effort at Pilot Mountain School. They weighed the metal and kept meticulous records. They collected the nickels and kept the redemption books in their desks. When a child filled the book, the teachers were the ones who converted the book to a war bond. They worked extra hours to register citizens for rationing coupons. They were the ones who awarded the sweat shirts and taught about Victory Gardens. They did the impossible, the things they probably thought they could not do.

Eleanor Roosevelt, courtesy of the NY Times

In this newest century, we are called upon over and over to do the things we think we cannot do, whether it is to place foreign students in host families or to create jobs for the unemployed. We need to post Mrs. Roosevelt's quote on the doorframes of every household.

I have done what I didn't think I could do when I was in the midst, when doubts crept in. I finished a manuscript about a schoolhouse that existed during mid-twentieth century America. A major, major theme of its story is how the parents, teachers and students accomplished what the rest of the world didn't think they could do. Good for them.

We must do the things we never thought we could do. Thank you Eleanor Roosevelt for reminding us.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Too Many Moonshine Stories

2011-08-26T12:02:00.001-04:00

You know those jokes that start "You know you're a red neck when...." Well, I lived one of those jokes today only it was, "You know you've spent too much time researching your manuscript when...."

Okay, so there's no way you can research too much unless you start seeing things that aren't really there. Case in point: This morning I was doing the "grab everything you can in case hurricane Irene hits" grocery shopping, which is akin to the milk and bread snowstorm shopping panic, especially since I'm way up here in the western part of the state away from the hurricane's path. I got to the baking items aisle and waited patiently to pick up a five pound bag of sugar behind a lady who was blocking my way, reaching for the same sugar bag I wanted.

She loaded that bag, then another, then a third. All totaled she got ten five-pound bags of sugar. Now what would a person do with fifty pounds of sugar?

You're thinking jelly, jam, baking. Not me.

Not after I've been researching for the Pilot Mountain School project, catching moonshine stories about toting bags of sugar up the hills. All I could think of was making whiskey in the woods at the family still. I tried to restrain myself, I really did, but once a story catcher, always a story catcher.

Jelly.

Well, I asked.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

First Day of School

2011-08-25T07:51:00.000-04:00

Today's the first day of school for the 2011-2012 year here in the county where I live. It should be a pretty nice day. The weather sounds perfect with no rain predicted, at least not until the students will be safe at home from their bus rides and the afternoon thunder showers set in. (Hurrican Irene is still a blip on this morning's radar.) The teachers are waiting, and I'm sure the students are as ready as they will ever be. I'd bet most of them woke up early this morning, even those who dreaded the day. There's a certain air of expectation around the first day.

In 1942 Pilot Mountain School had its first, first day of school. I've tried to imagine what that day was like and how it compares with this morning. School opened a little later in the year back then because there were only eight calendar months of school, one hundred-sixty days, on the schedule. There was a war going on, with rationing. To save precious gasoline and rubber tires, the bus routes were as abbreviated as possible. Any child living within a mile and a half radius of the school could not ride the bus and those who could were required to walk to designated central pick-up spots.

Since the entire nation was on year-round, war time daylight savings, the school system adapted by scheduling the morning bell for after nine AM. Students had plenty of time to milk the cows, gather the eggs and finish whatever other home chores they were required to perform before they headed off to their first day of school.

Just like today many children came wearing new shoes, except that for the most part, this one new pair in the fall (usually brogan boots) was the only pair and had to last the entire year. Growing was frowned upon, I'm sure, wartime rationing, remember. A child wore the same pair of shoes until the soles came apart and then the mamas fashioned new soles out of cardboard, slid them down deep inside the brogans. Going barefoot was a lot more simple, and certainly permitted.

Waiting for the children at the door were four teachers, six grades, but only four teachers. That was it. No lunchroom ladies because there was no cafeteria with vegetable soup temptations announcing what was for lunch. The children either packed a pail or hurried home for a quick meal. The lunchroom had not been built yet, and neither had the bathrooms. The students (and the teachers as well) used the outdoor facilities. No custodian. No one to sweep the floors other than the teacher. No librarian and no library. No music teacher, PE teacher, nurse. Nothing but the four teachers, one of whom was designated principal.

The green sign out front didn't say Pilot Mountain School. Instead it said, in big block letters, "Constructed by the WPA." That's the Works Progress Administration, a Great Depression era government stimulus program through which this school was funded. The sign was still there because construction was not completed and on that first, first day of school back then, not only did the children arrive, so did the construction workers.

The sounds on that first day of school in 1942 were hammering and sawing as much as the voices of excited children settling down to a world of wonder in a brand new school. Settle down, they did. The noises from the construction became secondary. The pressures from war time America became secondary, too. After all, this was the first day of school where children came for sanctuary as much as for "learning."

Not all that different from today.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Teacher Workdays

2011-08-22T09:34:00.000-04:00

I'm waving at my teacher friends as they drive past my house on the way to work today. Hi, ho, hi ho, it's off to work they go. Work it is, even though it's a teacher work day with no students today or tomorrow...or Wednesday. There were optional work days last week when the teachers could come in, or not, and count the days as paid vacation days.

Things weren't always that way.

The early teachers I've written about for the last two years would never have dreamed of the teacher workday concept. What a luxury! Imagine getting paid for what they did anyway. In the 1940's, the first day of school was the first day for everyone, teachers and students, with no extra preparation days. Walk in the door with them, kind of thinking. Instead the teachers appeared a day or two before school opened, unpaid.

In the fifties, the state allotted two paid work days, one in the fall to prepare and the other in the spring after the last day of school to finish reports. Gradually the number increased and now the teachers have ten workdays, full of institutes and teacher meetings and grade level conferences and training and finally going into the classroom to put on the final touches for a promising new year.

Students in this county come Thursday and their teachers will be fully prepared in a ready-or-or-not kind of way. That's the day a group of us former teachers will drive past the school on the way to eat breakfast together. We will honk the horn in a symbolic gesture, but our teacher friends will be so busy, they'll never hear it.

It's sort of sad, though, for those of us who thrived on being in the classroom. We get over it, when we drive back home and see the classes standing in the heat having their first required fire drill.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

The Interview

2011-08-20T09:19:00.001-04:00

Last week I experienced the chance of an interviewer's life time, an interview with ninety-four year old Benjamin Horack. I met him through a friend who promised me he would delight and entertain as much as he would inform. She was right.

Benjamin Horack argued in front of the Supreme Court in a landmark case, Swann vs. Charlotte Mecklenburg Board of Education. Click here for more information about it. Mr. Horack might be over ninety years old, but he hasn't lost one bit of the fiesty spirit I can imagine he presented as he stood before nine supreme court justices. He told me about that day, about the time limit and the green, yellow, red stoplight thirty minute timer, about the questions he answered and his argument back.

He maintained that bussing children from their own neighborhoods was unnatural and would break down the fiber of community. Forty years later he still believes it even though the Supreme Court unanimously disagreed with him.

How would this apply to Pilot Mountain School, he asked? Community, I answered.

Bussing was not a part of the federal compliance plan in the county where this school was located. Freedom of choice within zones was. His perspective was big city. Mine was rural. He recognized community as the number one force in a child's school life. I did too, especially in what I heard about Pilot Mountain School.

This school just didn't teach the children. It raised the children. Two different things.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

The Help

2011-08-18T09:18:00.003-04:00

I went on a field trip with my critique group yesterday to see the movie, The Help. This is a film that must be viewed with a group because it stimulates discussions, and in my case, brings forth a few suppressed memories to talk about. Whether you lived it or are exposed to it for the first time, this thought provoking movie has value not only in the characters and the actions, but in the background subtleties as well. That's what I remember from those days, the colored only signs. The back doors. The separate but equal concept.

I've worked through "separate but equal" for months now in my Pilot Mountain School research. I've talked with former students at this all-white school that told me they never even saw a black person until they were in second or third grade. That's the kind of separate I present in this manuscript, two societies existing in the same space with no interaction. Hard to believe it was even possible, but it happened.

I read The Help two years ago when I first started the interviews for this project. What a fortunate and timely coincidence. It kept me conscious of the fact that when people open their lives to tell their stories for print, they are taking risks. Exposure is painful, and while I look at a story as just an ancedote to the larger picture, they look at it as representing life itself. As I ask questions, I must keep this in mind. I watch grown men tear up. I pass tissues to women who weep over a simple remembrance of a day at the school.

I must respect their stories and handle them with care.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Adapting to a Different Culture

2011-08-13T10:29:00.000-04:00

This week I was back in my "teacher" mode with a fantastic group of teenage exchange students who will spend this year in the US. They were fresh off the plane, although worn from their trip and from the farewell parties in their home countries. Ah, but teenagers bounce back. They were full of questions and we were full of answers that didn't match their questions. We keyed in on safety in a new environment. They wanted specifics, what will my life be like kind of questions. Is it really possible to prepare these students for the next few days, weeks and months? Our instructor guidebook thought so. We tried.

Being an exchange student isn't all glamour, believe me. I was one in Lima, Peru. Adjusting to a culture is work, hard work. It's also something that can't be explained. It must be lived, a fact these students I just met and worked with and listened to will learn soon enough.

As I've talked with the former students of Pilot Mountain School, I've caught a few stories about adjusting to a new completely different environment. Several people, as adults looking back, compared their experiences of moving into the community to that of being an exchange student.

Interview One: This was like coming to a different country, like going way back in time.

Interview Two: It was like a culture shock, I think that’s what they would call it now, even for children reared in the country. Not only the size of the school, but the people, they were just different. To seven and eight year olds, it was like going to a different world.

Interview Three: I remember the language was a lot different. The vocabulary was different, phrases that were said. I can’t remember any of them now because I’ve adapted and I use some of them myself, so they don’t sound strange now.

There, that comment from Interview Three, the one about the vocabulary not sounding strange anymore because he's adapted....That's what I wanted these modern day exchange students to realize. Some day soon they will wake up and realize nothing is strange anymore.

Then, mission accomplished.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

The Writing Community

2011-08-08T12:10:00.000-04:00

I thrive on being a member of a flourishing writing community here in western North Carolina. We critique each other with kindness and professionalism. We high five each other when a paragraph finally works. We hold our collective breaths when we wait for a reply to a submission. We dance for the good news and hug each other through the rejections.

The most rewarding of all, though, is attending an author event. I went to two last week, one at the Morganton library for young adult author Beth Revis (Across the Universe) and three other delightful newcomers to my radar. The other was at B&N for Mary Netreba (Rosemary for Remembrance) and four more equally delightful new-to-me authors. I bought their books and I've finished a couple of them already.

Nurturing. Supporting. Delighting in successes. That's what I'm talking about, not just in the writing community, but in the Pilot Mountain School community as well. For two years I've been on the fringes trying to understand this community and how it works, and all along, I was existing in a community with those very qualities. Now I know. Community...what a concept!

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Victory Gardens

2011-08-04T08:04:00.002-04:00

There's an abundance of fresh garden vegetables in my back yard right now, despite the hot dry dog days of summer and despite my not so high level of garden know-how. I'll pick a mess of green beans, wash them, snap them and throw them in the pressure cooker. Garden to table in less than an hour. Life is good. No food shortage here, or at the grocery store either.

But there was a food shortage during World War II and President Roosevelt encouraged the American people to plant gardens at home and not depend so much on the supply chain for their food. Sort of reminds me of the current first lady's drive to have present day Americans plant gardens of their own. Now it's a health food thing. Then it was survival.

A good portion of the war effort of the 1940's ended up on the shoulders of the teachers in this county, as in counties across the state and nation. Ration book registration. Teachers. Scrap metal drive. Teachers. War bonds. Teachers. Victory Garden Instruction. Teachers.

Except that the teachers here at this school were preaching to the choir, so to speak, when it came to Victory Gardens. No need. These families were country when country wasn't cool and when it was, they had the know-how of their own. So while the city teachers were telling their classes about going home and planting vegetables for the war effort, the Pilot Mountain teachers could go on about the business of teaching the ABC's...after they finished the business of taking up nickels for little Susie's war bond book or weighing the piece of scrap metal little Johnnie brought in.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Gardens

2011-08-01T08:03:00.000-04:00

The weather outside is frightful. Dry frightful. Hot frightful. We lost our cucumbers this past week, shriveled up and died even though we had watered them. I'll admit to one thing. A gardner, I'm not.

The Pilot Mountain community, on the other hand, is teeming with gardners, and cucumbers, too, I'm sure. It's a given. Come spring, they plant. They have the know-how. They learned it from their parents who learned it from their parents who.... You get the picture.

One lovely former teacher I interviewed didn't quite get the picture. Her first year teaching was at rural Pilot Mountain School and she was a city girl. The class came to the science lesson about plants. They planted seeds and the seeds sprouted as expected. One little boy said, "You know what you need? You need some fertilizer." Next day he appears with a small bag of fertilizer. She coated the plants (emphasize the word coated here) and the plants died, as expected by everyone but her. That was their science lesson for the week and that was her gardening lesson for life.

Lessons learned.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Bible School

2011-07-26T08:53:00.000-04:00

This week is Bible School week at my church. One thing about the south, forget the extreme heat this year, summer means Bible School and mothers bring their children. My children got the religion in the summer! I made sure they attended Bible School at every church in the community. It was fun for them, not just part of their religious training. It was a break for me, maybe that was the real incentive.

Bible School is so much fun, it makes me want to go back and be a kid again. This year at our church it's about cooking:

I don't know if the children who attended Pilot Mountain School went to Bible School in the summers. None of the interviews I've done have included that topic. Those children didn't need Bible School. They had the Bible at school, whether they wanted it or not. In the days before the Supreme Court ruling, religion started the school day. The teacher led prayer. The students read Bible verses. Sometimes the teacher read selections from inspirational publications like The Upper Room or The Daily Bread.

There were weekly chapel programs where local minister shared their faith with the children. At eighth grade graduation, the minister's sermon came first on the agenda. True, there were children from various Christian denominations sitting in the classroom. No one thought about that.

When the ruling came and the school discontinued Bible related instruction, the community accepted it. The now grown children told me about the first day of school the year the county complied with the ruling. Religion is a part of the home, the teachers said. We will follow the law, they said. And then they led the pledge of allegiance to the flag, including the phrase "under God" and started class. That was it.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Summer Produce

2011-07-23T07:35:00.000-04:00

I've been knee deep in tomatoes, okra, corn and peppers this week, full of blessings from an overabundance in the garden, mine and that of generous friends. For supper tonight, I'll pick a "mess" of beans, as we call it here in the south. Nothing like walking out the back door to gather my own food.

Gathering food for a cafeteria during war time in the '40's was not nearly as simple. There were food shortages in the marketplace, but since Pilot Mountain School was in a rural area, local produce was available. The families brought bushel baskets of turnips, beans, apples, blackberries, anything the cafeteria could use. In exchange, their children ate lunch.

In yet another step to this barter system, the county superintendent announced that the school system would provide glass jars for the farm families to preserve local produce for the schools, once again in exchange for their children's lunches.

The children had nutritious meals. The school had the supply. The system worked.

Would it work today?

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Building an Auditorium

2011-07-18T08:08:00.000-04:00

This is a good example of the saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words." Look closely, because the thousand words might be different from what you'd expect.

This is a class from the mid 1940's, probably around second or third graders, by the looks of the children. They are posing in front of the school. Scroll up to the current picture of the school and look to the middle entrance. That's where these children were. Where now there is a bricked wall leading up the steps, in the forties, it was metal. (More fun to swing on, I'm sure.)

Do you see what appears to be white barrels that the boys in the back are standing on? Guess again. Scroll up and look at the current picture. Those white "barrels" are there, too. They are the columns for the auditorium that laid in the early years on the ground, waiting "like giant bones scattered," according to one man I interviewed.

I heard them talk about those columns, about how they played on them, jumped over them, walked them like modern children walk the balance beam. I read the newspaper accounts about the bond issue that passed in 1947 that allotted money for building the auditorium, and I wondered. Why were the columns there for so long if it wasn't even built until the late forties?

Then I read the school board minutes. When the school was built in '41 and '42, the auditorium was a part of the original plan. Phase one was the first four rooms at the furtherest end in the picture above. The four classes moved into them in the fall of 1942 while construction continued on the second half. It was to be four more classrooms, a cafeteria, library, office, and auditorium. But, there, in the school board minutes, I found one simple comment.

Due to cost, (as usually happens in a building project) expenses ran over. The school board instructed the builders to forget the auditorium. Instead they were to remove the wall between two of the classrooms and turn that larger room into an auditorium. The school then would have six classrooms, not eight.

But they had columns, already purchased in anticipation of a real auditorium. What to do with them?

Nothing. Let the children crawl on them, play on them, pose for pictures on them. Leave them laying like giant bones as a reminder of what was taken from them or as a promise of what will someday be built.

That someday finally came and the results were beyond what the community expected. Still is. Look at it now at this auditorium link. So worth the wait.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Adding the Kindergarten

2011-07-14T07:03:00.000-04:00

The daughter of a friend of mine just finished a year in the "More at Four" program at our local school. Last Sunday at church I was in the nursery with her and wow, what a kid. I had not had any contact with her for over a year, so her change in maturity and school prepared-ness amazed me. Is she ever ready for school!

The children at Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse had no such program to prepare them academically. They came to school one day the spring before their first grade year with an older brother or sister or cousin and sat through lessons. That was it.

Until the federal government stepped in.

First there was Head Start, designed to, in President Lyndon Johnson's words, "rescue these children from the clutches of poverty which otherwise could grip them all their lives and will put them on an even footing with their classmates as they enter school."

That was a summer program, not much of a head start, but more than they had before.

The biggest impact came from the federal kindergarten program. North Carolina at that time had no kindergarten paid with state money, only a few city systems forked over the money for this unproven expense. In 1968 a kindergarten program started at Pilot Mountain, complete with a teacher, teacher assistant and a bathtub in the room. Today a bathtub in the room conveys a comfy aura of children relaxing with pillows and library books. Life was different then. The bathtub was for washing children. (And also for a temporary home for ducks at Easter.)

The kindergarten closed before the school did and for the most glorious of all reasons.

The school lost its federal funding.

The income level in the community rose too far above the poverty level. Major. Accomplishment.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Adding the Twelfth Grade

2011-07-09T07:53:00.000-04:00

Oh, my, it's been a month since I last blogged. Could I use summer as the excuse, please?

Vacationing is only part of the story, though. What has kept me busy and away from the blog during this month is the inch by inch, line by line sloooow process of fact checking my manuscript. My eyes can take only so much before they say "That's it. Enough, already."

I have run across a few details that I'll need to clarify. The main one deals with the decision by the North Carolina General Assembly to add the twelfth grade to the public schools. Up to 1938, when the law was passed, graduation was at the end of the eleventh grade. I've interviewed several people who guessed as to the reason it was added. The depression, they claimed, keeping the workforce in the schools for another year. Not for more training, mind you. Staying in school kept them out of circulation competing for jobs.

I haven't found any proof of that, although I have searched. What I did find was that by the time the twelfth year was implemented, the depression was long since over.

Adding an extra grade consisted of more than just telling the students they couldn't graduate. More teachers had to be hired (and paid, during a tough economic period?). And then there was the space issue, where to put the students. And the curriculum issue, what to teach that extra year. And purchasing text books to match.

When the process finally trickled down to the district including Pilot Mountain School, seven years had passed and the world was completely different from the day the law passed. World War II had put everything on hold. The school system could barely keep eleven grades staffed, much less a twelfth. After the war, many women left teaching to start families (remember, no pregnant teachers were allowed to be in a classroom) and the men returning from war found better paying jobs in the private sector. Think "teacher shortage."

So here's the process, how the twelfth grade was added in Burke County:

The eleventh graders graduated as usual in 1944, and the tenth graders moved up to the eleventh grade the next fall. At the end of that year, spring of 1945, there was no high school graduation because no one had finished the required twelfth grade. Oh, there were a few students who had accumulated enough credits, so there was a class of 1945, six or seven members, maybe.

At the other end of the spectrum, the first graders arrived, as usual. So now there were extra students that needed a space. The children from Pilot Mountain had to this date been sent to nearby Salem School beginning their seventh grade year. To free some space at that school, the seventh graders did not move on. Three years later, when Salem School was over capacity, the eighth graders also remained at the school.

And that's the story of how Pilot Mountain School came into eight grades. But it's not the story of the emotions behind the story.

One boy in the eleventh grade class was disgusted that he would have to remain in school for another year to earn the same diploma his older brother earned for eleven years of school. He dropped out in protest.

There's always emotions and consequences behind every decision.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Last Week of School

2011-06-09T08:23:00.000-04:00

Talk about traditions.

Every year the last week of school at Pilot Mountain presented its own unofficial traditions. Focus might have been on the official tradition, Eighth Grade Graduation, but for the rest of the school, the focus was on getting through that last week.

There were no teacher workdays in the early years, maybe one or two by the mid fifties. So all the downshifting, the book collection, report cards, cleaning desks, all those were accomplished by the children and the teachers together so that when the last bell rang, school was over for everyone.

Cleaning wasn't everything. There were also picnics when the entire school went outside on the ballfield or up the hill to the front lawn of the farmhouse behind the school. Several years the end of year picnic was at a fish pond in the middle of one of the teacher's cow pasture. Oh, the stories I caught about those picnics...stepping in cow pies and washing in the pond...splashing, falling in the water...falling in love, friends who became sweethearts that day and still are after fifty years of marriage.

There was one more tradition the last week of school. A little background: In the days before kindergarten, you'd think the first graders came "cold turkey" in the fall, just walking in the front door the first day of school. No. They came to school for a trial run. Big sisters, big brothers, cousins, neighbors, anyone who knew an upcoming first grader would bring him/her to school school one day that last week in an early version of mentoring, so to speak. The soon-to-be first grader would shadow the older child, sit in the desks, eat in the cafeteria, play on the playground...playing school inside and out.

That's how things worked at Pilot Mountain School, except for one more thing. The chant.

School's out, school's out,

Teacher wore the rules out.

No more pencils, no more books,

No more teacher's dirty looks.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Eighth Grade Graduation Ceremonies

2011-06-01T12:32:00.001-04:00

It's that time of year. Graduation.

I've received a few high school graduation announcements in the mail this week and I've cheered for those teens I've followed through the years. It's not been easy for any of them. They can testify to that. They've come through the fire and are ready to take on the world.

Graduation at Pilot Mountain School was almost as significant to the eighth graders then as it is to the seniors now. It was a rite of passage with a few adjustments. The students received a certificate of promotion instead of a diploma. There were no caps and gowns, but white dresses for the girls and white shirts and ties for the boys. Did I mention corsages for the girls? That, too, and red boutonniers for the boys.

I have the inside info about one year's corsages, probably in the mid 1950's. After the graduation service that evening, a mother who had helped pin the corsages whispered an apology to one of the girls. She had pinned the corsage upside down and that fact concerned her during the whole ceremony, tugged at her sense of etiquette. She had a reason for the error, though. By the time she had arrived to help, several other mothers had already pinned a few corsages on the girls, upside down. In her true southern graciousness, rather than point out the error, she went along with the others and pinned the corsages to match.

Eighth grade class of 1961

Thanks to the Morganton News Herald for this photo from their "Looking Back..." feature.

The eighth graders in this picture were not from the year of the upside down flowers. Nor were they from the year one of the boys sneaked back to the school during the night before graduation and carved his initials with his girl friend's in the doors. A few years later, they were married. More than forty years later, they are still married.

These students are from the years when eighth grade graduation was all about completion and promise and innocence. World War II was over, Korea, too. Viet Nam loomed ahead, but not here, not that day. That day, all was well with the world. Look at their faces. You can tell.

So many graduation stories...

Catch of the Day,

Gretchen

Cultural Orientation

2011-05-20T11:58:00.000-04:00

I've been a little busy lately and not had a chance to post here or to work on the Pilot Mountain Project. But actually I've done a lot of thinking about it because of what I'm doing with another passion in my life, AFS.

AFS is an international exchange student program that sends students from the US abroad to live with host families and accepts students from abroad to live with host families here. I have been preparing the students from the western half of North and South Carolina to go abroad in 2011. Tomorrow is our pre-departure orientation. We will talk a lot about students leaving their comfort zones and adjusting to a new culture.

Adjusting to a different culture happens within a nation, too. Take Pilot Mountain for instance. Three times the topic came up with former students I was interviewing. They all had moved into the community and had to adjust to a new way of life. All three said it was like coming to a foreign country. One was from a city environment and his adaptation was the most difficult of the three. He went from bicycles on sidewalks to wide open fields, from houses within a stone's throw to no neighbors within sight.

All three of them had trouble understanding the local accent, tarred for tired/laught for light/torlet for toilet. There were local traditions to adjust to also. May first wasn't a Maypole dance. It was the first day each year when children were allowed to come to school in bare feet.

Thing is, children adapt. There are universal experiences and emotions that override the differences. Children find comfort in the likenesses and learn to appreciate the differences, whether they are going across the state or across the ocean.

I wish a grand bon voyage to this year's students. Adjusting to a new culture is possible, just ask those Pilot Mountain children of so long ago.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Horse Riding Custodian

2011-05-14T10:19:00.002-04:00

Now that I've introduced you to Walter Norman and his horse in my last post, I'd like to tell you more about this wonderful man I never met. Uncle Walter, as the entire school population knew him, was a character in his own right. I feel like I know him well enough to pass along the stories. That what story catchers do.

Fact: He wore bib overalls every day, even on Sundays when he changed his every day shirt to a long sleeve white shirt for Sunday best.

Fact, with a little legend thrown in: One story about him had nothing to do with school, but told a lot of his sense of humor. Back in the day when citizens appeared in person at the tax office to declare their property, he diligently went to town to file his taxes. This happened to be the first year when dogs were taxed at two dollars a head and Uncle Walter hadn't been notified about this new tax. Now Uncle Walter loved coon hunting and had a pack of hunting dogs to brag about. The clerk asked him if he had any dogs and he proudly answered, "Yes, Ma'am, sixteen." The clerk responded, "That will be thirty-two dollars." Well, he paid it, although I can imagine the conversation he had before he did. Next year, when he appeared before the clerk and she asked if he had any dogs, he sadly answered, "No, they all died."

A man after my own heart!

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Horses and Pilot Mountain School

2011-05-11T10:42:00.007-04:00

This year's Kentucky Derby is history now. Out there somewhere is next year's winner grazing in the pasture, little aware of the acclaim that is to be or the work that is ahead to earn that acclaim and its wreath of roses.

Horses in the Pilot Mountain School community earned no such wreath. These were work horses that instead earned respect and acclaim through their achievements in the field rather than at the racetrack. I've caught a few horse stories this past year, mostly connected with long-time custodian, Walter Norman. He rode his horse to work every morning, tied it up to the hitching post behind the school. Some people I interview declare it was a horse. Others say, mule. I saw the picture. Long ears for a horse, I must note.

Did the children play with the horse, I asked?

No, these were farm children and horses were no novelty. To them it was the same as the teachers who drove cars and parked beside the school or the cafeteria worker who rode the school bus alongside the children. The horse waited, rain or shine, although in really bad weather, Mr. Norman was known to hitch a ride in a car.

I'd say this horse earned more than a wreath of roses. It earned a spot in the memory of children and that is worth every bit as much as roses.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Mother's Day in the 1950's

2011-05-08T10:21:00.004-04:00

To all the women in my life, Happy Mother's Day! My own mother is no longer living, although she lives through me and my children, so I send this Happy Mother's Day wish to those wonderful ladies in my life that have stepped up and mothered me.

Wasn't my mother a looker! I wish I could have met her the day that picture was taken. We could have had some experiences to write home about, I'm sure. From her I inherited the gene for adventure and curiosity. And what did I give her for Mother's Day when I should have given her the world?

A potholder a year.

I remember it now because of my interviews with Pilot Mountain children of the fifties. That must have been the trend back then, home-made potholders. A little hand held loom and a bag of stretchy loops miraculously appeared at school and we would weave the loops together using the most unholy combination of colors. When we cleaned out my mother's house, I discovered a stack of stained, tattered, well-used potholders in the top kitchen drawer. I was loved.

Pilot Mountain School was blessed with mother figures by the dozens who stepped up not only for their own children, but for the community children as well. Teachers went to homes and checked on their students when they were absent. The cafeteria ladies nurtured them through daily lunchline chatter as much as through their delicious food. Need a bath? Take them to the principal's house and wash their hair. Need clothes? Call a mother with a child in the grade ahead and ask for some hand-me-downs. Need a snack to eat? Pack an extra apple.

Come Mother's Day, the teachers called upon one particular woman in the community to help. This was a beloved lady who lived behind the school and walked to the mailbox same time every day consistently enough for the teachers to use her to set their clocks. On warm days, when the school windows were thrown wide open, she would stand outside and chat with the teachers while the children continued with their assignments.

But the week before Mother's Day, she came inside. She taught the children how to weave those precious potholders. Life was good!

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Psalm 121 and Pilot Mountain School

2011-05-06T10:12:00.000-04:00

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.

From whence cometh my help?

My help cometh from the Lord,

which made heaven and earth.

Psalm 121 has always been one of my favorites, probably since I am surrounded by hills and mountains. I've recited those verses many times over the years, usually in the King James version where I first memorized it.

This psalm has even more meaning to me now that I have have completed the research for Pilot Mountain School and learned about the missionary/teacher who impacted the children there. Lettie Hamlett taught the fourth/fifth grade combination class in the late fifties and talked frequently about her years on the mission field in China. I interviewed many of her former students, listening as they each tried in their own ways to explain the impact she made on their lives. When I finally received the packet of bio information from the mission board, I discovered there was more to this story.

Did she tell her students everything about her life as missionary? That she and her husband operated a floating library in a river boat? Probably that, yes. But the rest of the story... That the Japanese occupation soldiers considered this mission to be a threat? That on December 7, 1941 she was out of the mission compound on a library run and returned to a different world? That she and her husband were held captive for several months and then used as pawns in a prisoner of war exchange? That her husband's health suffered because of the harsh conditions and that he died shortly after their return to the US?

Morganton News Herald, September 11, 1942

That she bravely returned to the same mission alone after the war only to be considered suspect by the Communist soldiers? That she was once again held captive in the compound until word came that she was to be expelled from the country?

Here's where Psalm 121 comes into the narrative.

She had been helped through her final months of containment by the local community who, at their own peril, supplied her with food and wood for heat and herbs for medical purposes. She supplied them with words about her God and glimpses of a faith that they wanted to hear more about. So when they heard that she was to be deported, they wanted to give her a present for her to remember them by. She was allowed to carry nothing in her hands, but she could carry anything in her heart and mind.

They gave her Psalm 121.

It's true. Three different people, unknowing what the other was doing, whispered in her ear as they said their final farewells, "I give you the one hundred and twenty-first psalm."

She returned to the US, retired from the mission field, and at the age of seventy-two, came to Pilot Mountain School and a classroom that faced the ridge of the South Mountains. I wonder how often she recited that psalm, looking out the window, needing her spirit restored. From whence cometh her help? Her help cometh from the Lord. And the mountains stood as a reminder.

That's the rest of the story. And here's the rest of the psalm, in more modern translation:

He will not let your foot slip.

He who watches over you will not slumber;

Indeed, he who watches over Israel

Will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord watches over you.

The Lord is your shade at your right hand;

The sun will not harm you by day,

Nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep you from all harm.

He will watch over your life;

The Lord will watch over your coming and going

Both now and forevermore.

Catch of the Day,

Gretchen

The House that Built Me

2011-05-02T10:41:00.001-04:00

The music festival I attended this weekend is over and there's 360 days until next year's Merlefest, so you've got time to plan. Oops, 361 since next year is a leap year.

But this year's...Wow.

Sunday mornings I always like to attend the worship service at the creekside venue where Merlefest founder Doc Watson shares his faith along with his music. This year I arrived early enough to listen to the Merlefest chaplain speak.

The crowd was immense, spread out across a hillside looking down on the speaker, not unlike the situation where Jesus once spoke to a crowd sitting on the hillside. In his message the preacher said that he was from this area and Merlefest was his coming back to his roots, sort of like returning to "The House that Built Me," referring to the song sung by Miranda Lambert. Listen to it and you'll see what he was talking about.

What a great concept...the house that built me!

I've insisted for quite some time that I call Pilot Mountain School a schoolhouse. Validation! Thank you songwriters Tom Douglas and James Shamblin for putting this into words. I knew all along this was a house that built children, not just a school that pushed them through the grades. I looked online for the lyrics and I'm copying and pasting below so you can read through the chorus about returning to the house that built you.

Most of all, I connect to this song because I have seen the adults return to this remarkable school that built them. They talk about it being a sanctuary. They walk the halls where they once marched in line. They touch the walls and run their hands along the bannister. They talk about the spirit they carried away from it and the comfort they draw from returning to it. The lyrics might be about a house rather than a school, but in truth, it speaks about what forms you into you.

Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse, the house that formed a generation.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it

This brokenness inside me might start healing

Out here it's like I'm someone else

I thought that maybe I could find myself

If I could walk around, I swear I'll leave

Won't take nothing but a memory

From the house that built me

Read more: MIRANDA LAMBERT - THE HOUSE THAT BUILT ME LYRICS http://www.metrolyrics.com/the-house-that-built-me-lyrics-miranda-lambert.html#ixzz1LCWSMyoZ

Copied from MetroLyrics.com

Merlefest, Bluegrass Festival

2011-04-29T11:02:00.000-04:00

I'm taking a break from writing and rewriting and revising (whew!) and I'm attending a Bluegrass Festival near my home. Click here and see what Merlefest is all about, and then come on over and join us. It's not too late. Last night I sang along with Randy Travis, me and probably 20,000 others. Music was our common bond.

The Neighbors, from a photo on their website

In the afternoon, I attended one session by a local group, The Neighbors. They could be my neighbors, your neighbors. Music makes them universal neighbors.

Bluegrass music was a part of Pilot Mountain School, too, the children's heritage. One former student told me about the man who lived across from the school. Every day he would sit on his front porch after lunch and play the banjo. When the teacher opened the windows on those hot, stuffy days, the children heard the music. They couldn't work, supposedly. Finally the teacher adjusted her schedule. The class returned to the room immediately after lunch. As soon as the afternoon concert began, they went outside to play, but many of them chose instead to sit on the grassy bank and listen. This was a true lesson in music appreciation.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Easter Traditions in the South

2011-04-25T09:11:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I watched the sun rise with fellow worshipers at the edge of a cemetery. We listened to the birds waken from their night's rest and we sang songs of praise. There's nothing quite like welcoming good news at the break of day.

Thank you Mark Odom for the picture.

I felt a connection to worshipers across the globe who, like me, were looking for the light of the sun to break through the darkness when the preacher could announce, "The Lord is risen," and we could respond, "The Lord is risen indeed!" This year, mainly because of this Pilot Mountain project, I also felt a deep connection to Easter mornings past and the throngs of people who, generation after generation, also stood vigil.

Tradition is a comfort to me. With the chaos of newness and uncertainty, rituals bring me a reassurance that the world goes on.

Did the masses across the globe smell country ham cooking in their church fellowship hall while they stood outside? I did. Did they eat scrambled eggs and grits and red eye gravy and salty ham biscuits when the sunrise service ended? I did. Did they watch excited children in their Easter finery dart through dewy grass searching for Easter eggs? I did.

Tradition.

Easter egg hunts were a tradition at Pilot Mountain School, only these eggs weren't the plastic dollar store dozen stuffed with candy treats. They were real, hard boiled, dyed at home eggs and brought to school in baskets. These eggs the teachers counted before they hid them to make sure they wouldn't smell the forgotten egg two weeks later.

Plastic eggs, real eggs. It's the reassurance to the children that counts. The world goes on.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

South Mountains

2011-04-15T16:54:00.001-04:00

It was time for a little reward.

I knew my husband and I would be headed out to New Mexico to visit our daughter and son-in-law in Taos last week, so I was determined to finish the Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse rough draft before I set foot on the plane. Mission accomplished. I left all my cares behind and exchanged one set of mountains for the other, the South Mountains of North Carolina for Taos Mountains South. Be sure to click on the picture and see the close up. This is what my daughter gets to see every day!

The Taos Mountains South from the balcony of the Bed and Breakfast

Yes, that is snow between the pines.

Even when I was there, I couldn't get escape thinking about the South Mountains here in North Carolina. This week we went in one day from white snow caps of New Mexico back to the white dogwood blooms in the Carolinas. There is no comparison. Each is beyond beautiful.

Now look at North Carolina. Little wonder that the state flower is the dogwood.

No, that is not snow. It's a dogwood tree between the pines.

Spring on the street where I live

I have seen the best of two worlds in the southern Appalachians and the southern end of the Rockies. I have studied the culture of the southern Appalachians and ventured into the culture of the southern Rockies.

My challenge now is to make the Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse story appeal to readers from each culture. I've looked at my rough draft through Appalachian eyes, but maybe now it's time to look at it through New Mexican eyes, or New England eyes, or downtown Chicago eyes. What culture shock would I experience? What values would I find in common? What about the lessons learned?

Vacation reward time is over. Revision lies ahead and I'm so ready.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Spring Arrives at Pilot Mountain School

2011-04-02T12:58:00.000-04:00

The old "in like a lion, out like a lamb" adage is a little out of kilter this month. Outside the wind roars like the lion it pretends to be and it's already April.

Still, there is a glimmer of spring. Thank you Judy Brittain for this picture of spring breaking out at Pilot Mountain School.

This was taken in the back of the school, a sight not many people are privileged to view. In the distance are the South Mountains that the children saw every day, the soft, rolling ridge of what they called "humps, knobs and tops."

Each morning back in the 1940's, the classes would line up outside to march in. The door they entered is obscured by the tree, but it is still there on the left. The principal would greet the children and give a little pep talk about doing their best. Then she would sweep her arm toward those mountains and say, "Breathe that fresh mountain air." They would. Every day. And they still remember to breathe that fresh mountain air in appreciation.

Don't you wish you could be right there, right now, in this moment?

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

The Lighter Side of the Moon(shine)

2011-04-01T07:21:00.001-04:00

Since today is April first, to get into the spirit of foolishness and such, I thought I’d tell about some of the more humorous moonshine stories I’ve caught in my net. A rough life can have its comedic side, after all.

The children in the school were well aware of the revenuers and their never ending quest to shut down the illegal liquor business that was booming in the valley. They accepted it as a part of life, so what they witnessed was often taken in a spirit of "that's how it goes."

One day in the 1950’s, the calm and quiet of the classroom was interrupted by the sound of a huge explosion not all that far from the school. The students looked at each fully aware of what was going on. One student shrugged his shoulders and vocalized what everyone was thinking, “Well, there goes my father’s business.”

Another time the students had just arrived on the playground when the law went down the valley, flashing lights, siren. By the end of the recess, the law came up the valley with the guilty party in the back seat and a huge metal still hanging out of the trunk. Several students recognized him and waved at him as he went by. He waved back.

A first grade teacher told about the time the children were having the social studies lesson of community helpers and what fathers do for a living. One boy said, “My father makes whiskey for a living.” A surprised little girl sitting next to him said, “No, my father works for his father and they make liquor, not whiskey.”

Each fall on the first day of school the parents had to fill in a form with information about their families including contact numbers and other necessary emergency details. One question was about employment. Never did the response actually say “bootlegger.” Usually the word was “farmer” and that was the truth. They had to grow corn.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

The Dark Side of the Moon(shine)

2011-03-28T07:34:00.001-04:00

Children mimic what they see.

That could be wonderful. That could be tragic. It all depends on what they see.

Being the child of a moonshining bootlegger had little of a wonderful side to mimic. Sure, these children had wads of money in their pockets to buy their friends a coke at the store or a ticket to get into the movie. Their fathers worked hard for their money and provided well, as long as they stayed off the liquor themselves, or stayed out of federal prison.

One boy couldn’t wait to drop out of school. On his sixteenth birthday he came to school in the morning, cleaned out his desk, stacked his books and gave them to his eighth grade teacher. The teacher asked him what he was going to do after he dropped out. The student very honestly said, “Make liquor.” And he did. And one month later he was picked up by the law and sent off to prison.

A father caught his seventh grade son sampling the product and gave him a good beating and a reprimand, “Don’t you know we make this to sell, not to use.” That wasn’t a question. That was a statement.

A fifth grade teacher was having class one day, normal day, nothing out of kilter. A student asked to go to the restroom. She gave him permission. He walked to the back and took his jacket off the hook and left the room. He returned a few minutes later, hung his jacket up and sat down. A few minutes later, a different boy raised his hand, asked to go to the restroom. She gave him permission. He walked to the back and took the same jacket off the hook, left the room and returned a few minutes later, put the jacket back. When a third boy raised his hand and asked to go to the restroom and picked up the same jacket, she knew something was not right. She confiscated the jacket and found a glass vial of moonshine tucked in the pocket.

She contacted the principal who took all three boys home, beginning with the owner of said jacket. When they arrived at the house, the father was in a drunken stupor, head down on the kitchen table with a gallon jar of moonshine beside him.

Children mimic.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Recitation and Declamation

2011-03-25T07:58:00.001-04:00

I will not be not sitting in front of the computer today. Instead, I will be at the EBOB, as in Elementary Battle of the Books. I’m a judge for the fourth year in a row and I love it! I love watching children get excited over books. Team cheers. Team t-shirts. Clapping for each other. Huddling and discussing the books. Don’t tell me children aren’t reading. I know better. I’ve seen it.

There was no EBOB during the years Pilot Mountain School was open, but there was one competition many former students do remember. They were just as excited about it as the children of today are about the Battle of the Books. It was the yearly Recitation and Declamation contest.

This was a memorization activity for the older students, usually sixth, seventh and eighth graders, but sometimes fourth and fifth, too. The student would memorize a three or four page script and present it before an audience of squirming children and serious judges. Just like EBOB, these students were excited. They'd clap for each other and cheer each other along. Maybe they didn’t have matching t-shirts, but that was not a consideration. Not back then. They didn’t need them. They had spirit and that was enough.

Sometimes the speeches were patriotic. Usually the boys picked those.

Sometimes the speeches were religious. Sometimes humorous, in an attempt to mimic Minnie Pearl.

Or sad. That would awe the judges if the speaker could pull it off. Dog died. Mom sick. “Little Match Girl” kind of tragedies.

The winners went on to a county competition. Several Pilot Mountain students won on that level as well.

Give them the first few words, now, sixty years later, and they can take it up and recite, if not all, at least a phrase or two.

There's more to competition than meets the eye.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Moonshine

2011-03-20T16:07:00.000-04:00

From what I’ve heard on the news and read on Twitter, there must have been a great moon show last night. I missed it. I looked, saw a bit of moonshine and a few moon shadows even, but as for the moon, that, I couldn’t see. It was clouded over.

Moonshine. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with that word this past year and believe me, it wasn’t from moon gazing. It was more like microfiche gazing and reading newspaper accounts of the illegal moonshine trade that flourished around Pilot Mountain School. Moonshing, for those of you who aren't aware, is the distilling of corn liquor by the light of the moon.

I heard about moonshine from the children of moonshiners. I heard more from the teachers who knew they had children of moonshiners sitting in their classrooms. I even heard from a few who dabbled in this illegal enterprise themselves.

The stories I caught did not paint a pretty picture of home life for these children, no matter how modern media has romanticized the thrill of outmaneuvering the revenuers. Children had their own front row seat to witness the action.

“We didn’t know if the next knock on the door would be a client or be the law.”

“I remember a hundred cases of white lightning in half gallon jars, twelve jars to the case stacked in our bedroom. Well, there wasn’t hardly any room for the bed.”

“When I was five years old, daddy was making liquor up there, by himself before he started hiring people to do it for him. I couldn’t carry but five pounds, but I’d carry that five pounds of sugar to help.”

“We used to play revenuers instead of cops and robbers.”

Childhood memories.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Pray for Japan

2011-03-14T07:40:00.000-04:00

Earthquake

2011-03-11T15:04:00.000-05:00

I'm working in front of the TV today, something I rarely do. But I can't take my eyes off the news about the earthquake in Japan. Today I am Japanese. The world is Japanese. There is no such concept as isolation. Not today.

I volunteer as sending coordinator with an organization that sends exchange students abroad, AFS. Japan is one of our partners and we are hosting several AFS/Japan students now in the Carolinas. My heart goes out to these students who were so far away from home when tragedy struck last night. No doubt they spent hours today on the telephone or the internet. They are so young, so remote, so apart from where their hearts are. Today they learn about character, lessons learned half a world away.

None of our local students are in Japan. One just returned at the end of January. Two are slated to depart March 21. What kind of Japan will they find when they arrive?

Life turns on a dime.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Corporal Punishment, part 3

2011-03-09T07:58:00.000-05:00

I heard the following story last week about the first grade teacher during the 1940's, and I'm copying and pasting a former students exact words:

"She was so sweet and tenderhearted. It hurt her to even raise her voice toward us. If we did anything wrong, she would bring out the ruler, wasn’t a long yardstick, just a ruler. She would ask, 'Do you want me to do this to you, or do you want to do it to me?' The students would never hit her, but she would have taken it. That’s just the way she was. That in itself, you know… The students seen it and seen that she would have taken it from one of us, then we better not do it again. And then she would bend your hand back, and hit one time on the hand."

A teacher offering to take the punishment for a child? Sixty years later, that child still remembers. I would have, too.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Corporal Punishment, part 2

2011-03-06T07:21:00.002-05:00

If you get a spanking at school, you'll get one at home.

That's the warning the majority of parents gave their children. It was understood. That's how things worked with corporal punishment and the community during Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse days.

Listen to this conversation between a husband and wife as they remember school spankings:

Wife: They spanked us if we needed it. That’s what made us what we are. Our daddies and mamas spanked us. If I got one here, I got one at home.
Husband: I would have, too, if I had told.

Wife: I had a little cousin that told every time, so there wasn’t no way I could get out of it.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Corporal Punishment

2011-03-03T08:09:00.003-05:00

As I've interviewed the former students and teachers of Pilot Mountain School the topic turns inevitably to discipline techniques. Make that technique, singular, in the form of corporal punishment, spanking. The very thought horrifies the modern thinker, yet it was never given a second thought in the 1940's, 1950's and even into the enlightened sixties. It's just the way things were and looking back through the telescope of time, I must remind myself of that fact as I listen and nod in sympathy as each person relates a particular story, often with tear brimmed eyes. For many students the sting of corporal punishment lasted longer than the five minutes after the actual whack. Sixty years later it still stings.

Despite the sting, time after time, the students and parents defended the method. A little spank in the hall echoed throughout the school and stopped many a potential problem before it ever started. The children behaved because they knew the consequences.

Now they can laugh about it. There was the time an eighth grader put a spelling book in the seat of his pants. When the whack sounded odd, the teacher knew, the class knew, the guilty knew, too, smiling until he had to remove the book and take even more punishment.

There was the time one sassy boy was spanked in the principal's office, made a comment, was spanked again, made a comment, was spanked again. Six times it took him to connect the cause with the effect.

Then there was the fifteen year old seventh grade boy who took the last spanking he would ever endure at school. He would be sixteen in a few weeks, but he dropped out that day. Never returned. Who is laughing now?

Things were different then.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Overmountain Victory Trail

2011-02-28T08:12:00.001-05:00

I'm fine tuning my manuscript, chapter one especially, checking to make sure the historical information I'm presenting is worded correctly to match the library research with the stories I've caught in my net.

When I was atop Pilot Mountain last week, I imagined myself back in the days of chapter one. I stood next to a stone wall, supposedly erected in the early 1800's for a gold mining enterprise, but also used during the Civil War for defense against the invaders. My question, could it have been there earlier, when the overmountain men marched through the valley on their way to change the course of the Revolutionary War?

Standing there, I could almost hear the horn in the west signaling to the mountain men, "Alert! Muster now!" I tried to imagine sounds of hundreds of men marching in the valley below me on their way to fight Patrick Ferguson and his British troops. Snapping sticks. Crunching leaves, because it was late September when they passed through. Horses snorting. Voices? Maybe, but these men were more intent on finding the elusive Ferguson than on conversation. They found him at King's Mountain and the rest, as they say, is history.

For a most interesting look at this same trek, click HERE and listen to master storyteller Bill Carson tell about the overmountain men and their march through the valley. There are road signs now, labeling the two- lane road in front of Pilot Mountain School as part of the Overmountain Victory National Historical Trail. They've been there since 1980 when a group of men re-enacted those days from two hundred years ago, days when there were no signs directing the way on paved roads, no fast food lunch breaks, no motels. These historians marched from Virginia, from Tennessee, from western North Carolina, past the schoolhouse, on toward King's Mountain. They were not just pretending. They were honoring.

That's what storycatchers do, honor those who came before us. In my own way, I have my distinct version of re-enactment. I use words instead of costumes.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Climbing Pilot Mountain

2011-02-24T08:30:00.000-05:00

I did it!!!

I hiked Pilot Mountain and lived to write about it. So it was only 2063 feet tall and I didn't make it all the way to the top. So the outcropping of grantie rocks stopped me in my tracks. I can walk hills, I can't scale rocks.

But I still claim to have accomplished climbing Pilot Mountain. Did I go above and beyond the task of a storycatcher?

No, especially since I caught more than sore muscles on this trek. I caught stories.

Wonderful, gold mining stories.

Trouble is, these stories from the western side of Pilot Mountain are the same stories from the eastern side of Pilot Mountain. Each story is specific to the mountain, each almost identical about two different sides of the mountain.

Gold mining flume from the top of the mountain: east side, ten miles long going past the knoll where the schoolhouse would later be; west side, three miles long aiming toward the setting sun.

East side, old man sneaks to his hidden spot to dig for gold, purchases a car. West side, old man sneaks to his hidden spot to dig for gold, buys groceries. East side, teenagers hide to catch man in act of digging, intending to sneak back and find their own fortune. West side, same exact teenage legend. Both sides, unsuccessful teens that never found the secret.

I had to come back home and rewrite chapter one!

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Pilot Mountain School Opens for Visitors

2011-02-21T07:17:00.002-05:00

If you rebuild it, they will come.

They did...last Saturday, when Tom and Judy Brittain hosted an open house at the newly remodeled Pilot Mountain School facility. By "they" I'm referring not only to former students and teachers, but to many others who have driven past the school the last few years, observing the reconstruction efforts. "They" took the time to stop in and see the final product. "They" were thrilled. As was I.

I visited with now grown children who once marched in a line down these halls. I visited with retired teachers who started their careers in these classrooms. I taped a few stories that will add yet another level of richness to an already wealthy manuscript.

I've always been one to get the cart before the horse. Saturday I got the crowd before the book. I have completed the manuscript, rough though it be, and now I'm in the process of hosing off all the excess muck I dumped into its thirteen chapters. Soon I'll chisel away the last few chips, maybe add a few new comments from the interviews I'm doing this week, and this amazing story will emerge. I can't wait to share it with you.

There was one more group in the "they" list that came to Pilot Mountain School last Saturday. My SOUP Critique Group. We have supported each other for several years now through all our various projects. They have invested time and energy to make me a better writer. They have challenged me beyond what I ever imagined I could accomplish. They have rejoiced with me in my accomplishments and consoled me through my rejections. Best of all, they were with me on Saturday. Teresa, Sandra and Debbie!

Every author should be as fortunate as I am.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Open House at Pilot Mountain School

2011-02-16T08:45:00.006-05:00

I've caught its stories.

I've met its students and its teachers and written about them so much that I can feel their joys and their pains deep in my soul.

I've heard about the building at its worst.

I've seen the building at its best.

Now it's time for the big reveal, no, not of the memoir that I'm writing, not yet. That's still a work in progress. The reveal is of the building itself, the final product of five years of hard labor, sweat and jumping bureaucratic hurdles. It's the newly completed, entirely finished Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse that will be open for public viewing this Saturday, February 19 from ten in the morning until two in the afternoon. To read more of the story click here.

I will be there, flier in hand, drumming up interest in my project, finding answers to a few questions I still have about the school.

Y'all come.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Valentine's Day Parties

2011-02-14T07:14:00.001-05:00

Two parties a year.

That was the standard operation at Pilot Mountain School. The teachers selected Christmas and Valentine's Day for their parties, and then squeezed in an end of year picnic. With only two parties, they really went all out in a grand sort of way. Valentine's was the relaxing one, not the hurry up it's time for Christmas break stressing one.

The room mothers arrived on cue with the cupcakes and juice. Nothing more. That was enough. The children exchanged cards for the party entertainment.

Some classes had a centralized box of Valentines, one huge cardboard box covered in white construction paper and decorated with red crepe paper streamers. The week of the party, the children brought carefully addressed envelopes and slid them one at a time in the slot at the top. They traveled from class to class to deliver a few Valentines in every box.

Other classes had individual folders, white construction paper folded in half, red and pink hearts glued for decoration with the child's name across the front. In red, of course.

The "postman" opened the box and started delivering the Valentines. That was the slow, spend a lot of time, enjoy each Valentine as it arrived method. Woe to the person who forgot to put names on the envelopes.

The much quicker method was the individual folder, invented no doubt by a teacher who wanted to get it over with. Everyone opens Valentines at the same time.

Image courtesy VintageHolidayCrafts.com

No Dora the Explorer cards. No T-Rex cards. No princess or pirate cards, either. Maybe a Superman card or two. Mostly pictures on the cards were smiling children telling the reader how much they cared in silly "Be Mine" ways. Life was simple then.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Valentine's Day Card

2011-02-11T07:39:00.002-05:00

As the construction workers ripped apart this old school building, they found a few long forgotten items slid behind the bookshelves or tucked under cracks in the floor. A rusty pair of scissors. A few pencils.
A Valentine.

Image courtesy VintageHolidayCrafts.com

Found, one Valentine, a Will You Be Mine? Valentine similar to the one here. It took sixty years to be delivered. It sat there, silently waiting behind the nailed-to-the-wall, painted-over-the-cracks bookshelf. When it finally saw the light of day, it was barely faded. The name penciled across the back could still be seen.
It is now delivered. It no doubt brought more joy arriving late than it would have so long ago - well, a different kind of joy, at least. Then it would have been hastily read and stuffed in a folder with the other cards. Now it is relished, held up as a message from the past.

What a wonderful Valentine's gift.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

The Pilot

2011-02-08T09:07:00.000-05:00

Great name, Pilot. It conjures up images of a captain at the helm of a troubled ship, of a fearless aviator or even a Snoopy on his dog house roof. Usually, though, a mountain doesn't come to mind.

Unless you are in North Carolina, naming mountains.

There are eight mountains in the state with the name Pilot Mountain. I knew of two, but when I was cross checking my facts yesterday in the NC Gazetteer I found the list. Eight. Here's the Pilot Mountain this school is named for:

I suppose Pilot is to mountain like Main is to street and Washington is to county. Common but significant. Purposefully chosen.

The Pilot stands out. The Pilot is the guide. It is the steadfast always-there-to-find-the-way landmark.

When names were being tossed about hundreds of years ago, no one bothered to check if there were other Pilot Mountains. The name was a matter of convenience, a recognition of the mountain's purpose. That mountain was the pilot that gave direction to their wanderings.

So when it came time to name this school, Pilot Mountain fit. It conjured up what the community wanted for the children. What a perfect name for a school.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Polio and the Sugar Cube Campaign

2011-02-04T08:25:00.003-05:00

After the polio epidemic of the 1940's in the Pilot Mountain area, there was a second epidemic wave in the early fifties. Not as severe this time, it was still just as frightening as the first. This time, though, salvation was on the horizon.

A doctor by the name of Jonas Salk developed a vaccine that came on the market in 1955. The children at Pilot Mountain were assigned to go to a nearby school for their inoculations of the Salk Polio serum on Tuesday, April 25, 1955 at one o’clock. However the county health officials suspended the clinic due to questions and concerns about the vaccine's safety. It was rescheduled for May and postponed again until the fall when finally the children were immunized against this dreaded disease.

A second doctor, Albert Sabin, developed an oral vaccine that came on the market in 1962. Eight counties in western North Carolina planned a massive "Stop Polio" drive and set Sunday March 8, 1964 as the target date. Local schools, including Pilot Mountain School, were designated "Feeding Stations." The PTA, Parent Teacher Association, organized the drive at the school and helped to administer the vaccine. There, in the school library.
No sharp needles this time. No pain. Just a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down, only in this case it was a cube of sugar to make the serum go down. One liquid dose was dropped onto a sugar cube and handed to the client. Yum. What child would resist a sugar cube?

Eight weeks later, again on a Sunday, again at the school library, the process repeated for the second required dose. This sugar cube campaign succeeded in putting an end to polio in the valley.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Eradicate Polio

2011-02-01T07:18:00.000-05:00

I saw on the news that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has declared the elimination of polio as a top priority. Once and for all. Gone. Thank you!

Like most of the world, I live in a polio free country. I don't have to worry that my child will wake up this morning gasping for breath because the muscles that work the lungs won't work. Or worse, that my child won't wake up at all.

That was not the case for the parents of Pilot Mountain School in the mid 1940's during the first wave of a polio epidemic. Their children had no protection from this dreaded disease. During the summer of 1944, when fifteen cases of polio were reported in the county per week, local officials made a desperate attempt to stop the spread. Quarantine.

Children under the age of sixteen could not leave their property. No Sunday School. No movies on Saturday morning. No summer camp. No trips to the store for candy. No playing with friends. They did stand on one side of the creek and wave at their friends on the other side - when their mothers weren't watching. But for the most part, they obeyed. They were too scared not to.

Ever wonder what the town of Hamlin was like after the pied piper drew away all the children? That was this community, childless. Joyless.

School didn't open on time in the fall because the children were still confined to their homes. When new cases dropped to one or two, officials lifted the quarantine and life began again. Wonder what the teachers said to their classes the first day of school?

We can't forget the past because that's how we understand why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation initiative is so important. No town should be like Hamlin. Eradicate polio. Now.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Space Travel Lessons at School

2011-01-28T08:27:00.011-05:00

January 28, 1986 is one of those "where were you when?" days, the loss of innocence type days when we realized space travel did indeed involve risk and danger. We had been lulled into a false sense of bravado after watching the many successful launches and returns.

That day was cold, so cold in fact, school was canceled here in western North Carolina and for that I'm thankful. I had every intention of having my class sit in front of the television to watch the Challenger shuttle launch. After all, this was the much anticipated teacher in space launch and my students were excited, pumped up, ready to participate in the venture. I remember the shock, but I remember most of all seeing on television the faces and expressions of the children watching the disaster unfold.

Twenty-five years later, I wonder what those very children are telling their own children about that day. Do their eyes well up with tears? Do they emphasize the tragedy or do they take the opportunity to teach about courage and daring?

Pilot Mountain School closed in 1973, long before Christa McAuliffe applied to NASA. Travel into space had begun, though, and the children of the 1960's have space stories of their own to tell their children. They sat in front of the television with their classes, too, but not like today with the wide screen, remote control gadgets or even like the 1986 television on a cart (one per hall) and cable outlet plug in the wall.

The Pilot Mountain children watched in the auditorium on the television the principal brought from home that morning, five classes, one tv, on the stage, rabbit ears with aluminum foil wrapped around the ends for better reception. They watched the Gemini launches and they watched the Apollo splashdowns and worried with the entire world if the helicopters would arrive to rescue the astronauts before they sank to the bottom of the ocean.

The science fiction of their age is becoming the reality of this age. Few classes spend time in front of the computer screens watching the live space shuttle launches and returns. Space travel is routine, nothing worthy of precious class time. The connection is gone. What will these children tell their children in twenty-five years?

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Global Family Initiative

2011-01-25T09:19:00.000-05:00

Not only do I interview former teachers and students for this oral history project at Pilot Mountain, I also interview current high school students who are applying to go abroad as exchange students on the NSLI-Y program. Those letters represent National Security Language Initiative-Youth, a US government program designed to train young people (our future) in strategic languages not usually taught in American schools. I’ve met some fantastic students this way, self directed, goal oriented young people that will one day lead the world.

In connection with this, last spring I attended a Global Family Conference in Washington, DC. We made plans for international exchanges and how our students could adapt in a new culture. In break out sessions we participated in these cultures, not only in the food and dance, but in the nuances of daily living in each country. The more sessions I attended, the more I realized one thing. These people, in describing their homeland, were describing the southern culture that I had grown up in, the one that is fading away. I see it in the Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse era, too, and hear it in their voices as they describe life fifty, sixty years ago.

Never lock our doors.

Sit on the front porch and visit friends.

Talk indirectly.

Time is secondary to family.

Children respect elders without question.
Of all those on the list, I think the “talk indirectly” is the most difficult for our students to understand when they live with a host family. If there is a problem, they expect to be blunt and discuss it, that’s the modern way. They don’t expect to talk around the problem for an hour and then hear a parable or fable connected to the problem. But that’s what happens. And that’s what happens even yet in southern culture, if you go far enough back into the recesses of the mountains where neighbors still sit on the front porch and visit friends and where time is secondary to family and talk is indirect.

My concern is with the next generation from these cultures. Will their presentations change because their way of life has become global, influenced by the internet and mass media? Will all culutres melt away and lose their identity in one giant melting pot?

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Cursive Writing

2011-01-22T09:17:00.000-05:00

Yesterday on the radio I heard an interesting statement. Someone (third grade teacher, maybe?) suggested that cursive writing was an obsolete skill, and furthermore, that classroom time once devoted to perfect loops and undercurves would be better invested in keyboarding skills.

So I'm a little from the old school. My teacher training included a required class in handwriting, complete with three hours of academic credit. Drilled into my head during all those loops and connections and capital Z's: Teachers have to learn to write correctly if they expect to pass the knowledge (art form) to the newest generation. My professor was a stickler for correctness, as in when there are double t's, each t gets its own cross line. That kind of stickler. I won't even mention the weeks we spent on "how to write on the board without turning a sentence into a waterfall at the far right edge."

Needless to say, this revolutionary declaration set me to thinking. Are teachers spending time on an unnecessary skill? Is block printing good enough? I'm asking myself, me, the teacher who refused to accept papers written in print from my fourth grade students after the first six weeks. Me, the teacher who counted words as misspelled if the cursive turned them into a different spelling. Those m's and n's and r's, my how they look the same when written in haste by a fourth grade boy eager to finish his homework and run outside to play.

That's the point. Haste. Cursive is the answer to the pick-up-after-each-stroke block printing that is slow and inefficient. However, along with converting to cursive came the leaving-the-comfort-zone syndrome. Students groaned, moaned and sometimes rebelled, the Muggie Maggies of the world.

Now their day has come and maybe it's time. Sad, though.

Cursive writing was part of the curriculum through the upper grades at Pilot Mountain School. During the 1950's one teacher in particular enjoyed teaching cursive. Once a week, she would swap places with the seventh/eighth grade teacher and for an hour, teach his students the art of communicating through precise letter formation. She would be sad, I'd think, that her passion for this grandiose flow of pencil across paper is being challenged.

Or would she?

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Sledding at the Schoolyard

2011-01-19T08:55:00.001-05:00

Give a child a snowy hill and watch creativity come alive.

What could be more perfect than a snow day off school, a wide open hill, and plenty of friends!

The Pilot Mountain Schoolyard served as the neighborhood gathering place for snow fun. The land behind the school sloped just enough toward the ball field that a good push would start a sled barrelling downhill. The hill directly beside the school, even better. It was steep enough that a little push would give a thrilling, although shorter, ride.

Not every child had a sled. That's when the creativity happened. This was back in the 1950's and '60 when tubing was not a sport, but a side effect of innovation. It was when old car hoods and cardboard boxes doubled as instruments of recreation. Anything handy. Trash cans, gold pans.

Gold pans? These mountains offered more than sledding slopes. Underneath was gold, as in "There's gold in them thar hills." A favorite passtime was gold panning, but this was winter and the creeks were frozen over. A few dents in a pan wouldn't matter.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Civil Rights and the South

2011-01-17T10:22:00.000-05:00

I'm writing the chapter now about the 1960's at Pilot Mountain School. It is as full of challenges for me as a writer as it was for the teachers and parents who lived it. I lived it, too, in my high school and college years, surrounded by the southern viewpoint and unaware, or uncaring, of injustices.

Today I want to reflect. I've searched the newspaper accounts of the civil rights movement and desegregation, read about students being threatened and bullied and spat upon. I never witnessed it personally. The students of that era that I am interviewing didn't either.

We had been raised in a cocoon, a white cocoon, separated from other races. If we attended the same movies, we entered different doors, sat in different sections. If we were thirsty we drank from water fountains labeled "white" or "colored." If we wanted to swim in the same public swimming pool in town...well, that just didn't happen.

What were we thinking? I know what, and I cringe when I remember the comments I heard as we sat around the cafeteria tables in 1964. I apologize for not holding my hand up and saying "Stop."

Thank you Martin Luther King, Jr. for your relentless drive to bring change simply because it was right. And thank you Maya Angelou for speaking the words for me: It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Wednesday Snows

2011-01-12T08:02:00.004-05:00

February 1960.

No wait... Wednesdays, February 1960.

Snow. Not just flakes, major snowfalls.

No school Wednesday during the snow. No school Thursday or Friday following the snow, roads were too slick. School on Monday. School on Tuesday. Snow on Wednesday. No school Thursday...Repeat four weeks. Fun and games for the children.

March meant school six days a week to make up for days lost. Reality came knocking.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Snow Reality Stories

2011-01-07T07:59:00.000-05:00

Teachers grasp at every possible straw to prompt a student to write. Go on a field trip, write about it. Have a pet, write about it. Snow yesterday, write about it.

That's what one teacher in the mid 1950's had in mind when she taught a writing lesson using the week long snow break the children had just experienced. Her class discussed snow. They drew pictures of snowmen. They listed possible snow related words on the chalk board. Then she had them write a "What I did during the snow" story.

That night she read the stories. No snowmen here. These stories were about staying cold, walking to get wood from the woodpile, shoveling coal, water pipes breaking and candles on the tables. She expected delight. She received reality. Third grade reality.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Christmas Show and Tell

2011-01-03T07:51:00.007-05:00

One well established, can't-have-a-true-American-education-without-it tradition is what teachers call "Show and Tell." The child brings something to school, stands in front of the class, and tells all about it. All about it. Then come the questions from the class, usually not asked in an interested sort of way, but in a let's waste more time so we don't have to do the work sort of way.

The first day back after Christmas break always began with show and tell. Show us what Santa brought. Tell us about your holiday.

One girl brought her doll, the one she'd asked for and found under the tree on Christmas morning. She couldn't wait to tell all about it.

She sat near the back of the class. The teacher started at the front. Half the class shared and then the teacher put a stop, pulled the plug so to speak, said, "Tomorrow we'll let the rest of you share what you got for Christmas."

Next day, Mama wouldn't let the girl bring her doll to school, said, "Yesterday was show and tell."

The girl still remembers the sting. Sixty years old and it still hurts.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Christmas thoughts

2010-12-26T08:27:00.001-05:00

What if Christmas wasn't all it was advertised to be.

What if at school the teachers and the cafeteria ladies smiled all day and said "Merry Christmas" all day and hugged the children a special hug right before they handed them the treat bags and then...then the children went home to a less than merry Christmas. All the mirth and cheerfulness and joy was at school.

It happened. 1940's. 1950's. 1960's, and not just at Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse. And let's not fool ourselves, it happened in 2010.

Grown children remember the little things. They look back at Christmas past and realize Santa didn't visit everybody. They tell stories with tears brimming their eyes. And they work hard as adults to make sure it never happens to another child.

It takes a community to be a Santa.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Christmas Wishes

2010-12-24T10:42:00.001-05:00

To all the new faces and voices in my life that I have met through this Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse project, I send a most sincere wish for a joyous Christmas. Hearing your stories has brought a new dimension to my own story. I have learned more from you than I ever imagined possible when I first began the journey.

To my online Catch of the Day visitors that have wandered through the internet to read about this remarkable school, I thank you. Stay tuned next year. There's hundreds of catches ahead.

To all, may you find peace in the New Year.

Gretchen

The Best Gift to Give

2010-12-22T14:24:00.000-05:00

I'm participating today in a road trip blog carnival. The idea is to connect with other bloggers through answers to a writing/reading related question posted on the YA Highway. I've lurked long enough through the weeks I've known about this. No longer. I want to share my answer with you.

Today's question: What gift would you give a favorite character and why?

The past has absorbed me for a year now, both in my writing and in my reading and so my gift is for characters, real and fictional, who work hard to dig into the past, to report it no matter what the facts present.

I'm thinking of Sarah's Key. No the gift isn't for Sarah, although I imagine Sarah could use this gift. My gift is for Julia if I remember her name correctly, the reporter, storycatcher actually, who peeled away the layers and uncovered Sarah's story.

I give her peace.

What she discovered didn't give her peace. It unsettled her. It changed her life and it changed my life, too. From her I learned that the past has secrets that eat away at the soul of the storycatchers. I learned that some stories are best kept unspoken, close to the heart.

Storycatchers need a special kind of peace.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Christmas at Pilot Mountain School

2010-12-20T08:36:00.001-05:00

Christmas week and the children were nestled all snug in their desks while visions of vacations danced in their heads. That doesn't quite rhyme, but it does explain the mindset of Pilot Mountain children then. Just like the children of today, they couldn't wait for a few days off, after a school celebration, of course.

They would have decorated the classroom. A father probably stopped by one day in mid December with a tree from the farm. The children were ready and waiting with chains they had fashioned from red construction paper strips, stars they had made from aluminum foil and cardboard, and paper mache ornaments they had slopped and dripped and sculpted with newspaper pieces dipped in a flour and water and glue solution.

They sang Christmas carols. They sang about Santa. They acted out the nativity and blessed was the girl who played Mary. They read from the Bible. The teachers gave them pencils as Christmas presents, if they could afford it. The students gave their teachers small gifts, usually from the Avon lady, if they could afford it. They never exchanged gifts with each other. That thought probably never crossed their minds.

Every year the PTA (Parent Teacher Association) brokered a deal with the local grocer for oranges, apples and candy canes. Walnuts, too. The principal along with the parent volunteers snuck down to the store and picked up the crates, took them to the auditorium, and behind closed doors prepared what for some children would be the only Christmas present they would get beyond the pencil from the teacher. The treat bag.

Then, right before the last bell on the last day before vacation, the children marched to the auditorium to pick up their treasures.

Fifty years later, sixty years later, they remember the treat bags. They can't tell you what they got for Christmas that many years ago, but they do remember the treat bags.

It took the village to raise the child at Christmas.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Cold Winter Days

2010-12-14T10:17:00.000-05:00

Cold. Brrrr. Today we might get up to freezing and I'm talking "the sunny south." Brrrr.

One former second/third grade teacher told me about a cold day at Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse in the 1950's. School had been cancelled for over a week due to snow and ice and this was the first day back. She walked into her classroom early that morning before any children arrived and much to her horror discovered their goldfish bowl had frozen. Solid block of ice frozen. Goldfish suspended in the ice frozen.

Her heart stopped. Forget the fish. All she could think of was the children and the trauma this image would inflict on them. They would arrive any moment. She threw a cloth over the bowl, grabbed it up and rushed to her car. There the frozen fish waited all day, hidden away from view. She didn't bother to thaw it out. No bringing back from the dead experiment here. She threw it away, bowl and all, in her outdoor trash bin at home. The children never asked. They were too excited to tell their snow stories.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Molly-pop play time

2010-12-10T11:07:00.001-05:00

Molly-pops, what a fun word to say. Molly-pops. Sort of jumps off the lips. Molly-pops.

I'd heard that term from several former students, always the girls. The boys played marbles. The girls played Molly-pops. It's the bloom, what a bloom, passion flower beauty bloom, also known as May-pops and apricot vines. The whole school was surrounded by vines and vines of Molly-pops inviting, inticing the girls to "Come, play, dance with me." Can you see a ballerina in the bloom? These girls did. They pinched off the extra legs to form a body, shaped the purple passion into a tutu, and danced with their flower dolls.

Not so poetic, but still a lot of fun, were the seed pods, egg sized pods, full of air and little dark seeds. Just perfect for stomping. Just perfect for popping. Molly-pops.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Warm Clothes, Cold Days, 1950's

2010-12-07T08:41:00.000-05:00

Brrrr it's cold outside today. I bundled up, even for the quick dash to the mailbox. Long pants, no question about that.

But for girls at this grammar grade school in the 1950's the cold brought about a different challenge. They had to wear dresses, no arguments, that's just the way things were. To add insult to injury, they didn't just dash from the bus to the school. They had to wait outside in the cold until the bell rang.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then cold is the sister of resourcefulness and resourceful these girls were. They'd wear flannel pajama bottoms under their skirts and push them above their knees during class. They'd wear jeans under their dresses and slip them off when they went inside. The older girls would huddle behind the wellhouse. The younger ones would run and play and sweat and be plenty warm when they finally went inside.

They grew up strong and sturdy and rarely sick.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Mornings at the School

2010-12-03T08:17:00.000-05:00

One not so favorite fact of life for teachers is the meet-them, greet-them, get-them-in-the-school chore known as "bus duty." Rainy days, bring an umbrella. Windy days, bundle tighter. Frigid days, add extra layers. Yet, seven o'clock in the morning when the roosters are still announcing the day, watching those yellow buses pull into the drive brings a certain thrill of anticipation. And when the children, regardless of whose class they are in, give the hugs or the smiles...that's when bus duty turns into a reward.

Teaching in a small school means bus duty comes far too often. Get a week of duty over, and boom, here comes another week the next month.

Mornings at Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse from the students' point of view were pure joy. They hurried off the bus, plopped their books down, and headed to the playground. Even the students who walked to school couldn't wait to get there. They were often at the doors greeting the teachers as they arrived. This was the free play time and they didn't want to miss a moment of it. The teacher chaperoned. That was it. Chaperoned, stood back and watched and rarely interfered. The children organized ball games. They made their own rules for marbles. They took turns at the swings. They settled their disagreements themselves.

The older students welcomed the younger children to their games. They mentored them, taught them the rules and the possibilities. The younger students chose role models, learned how things work. They played hard. They ran and sweated, even on frosty mornings when their breath puffed in little clouds.

When the bell rang, they lined up outside and went to their classes. They were ready to settle. Their minds were awakened by the exercise. Their bodies had worked through the squirmies.

Mornings at Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse. Could it work today?

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Home Grown Food in the Lunchroom

2010-11-30T08:01:00.001-05:00

Back before there was such a thing as free lunch, there was such a thing as barter. Children from families who could not afford to pay for a school meal could bring food from the garden as payment. They could take a bushel of turnip greens to the cafeteria and get a food exchange note. One bushel would equal maybe five meals.

They would bring home-canned vegetables in glass containers. They would bring gallons of blackberries in pokes, paper bags. They would bring apples, pears, tomatoes and potatoes. Eggs, too.

Never meat, though. The cafeteria ladies could not accept meat and any milk that was brought was used in cooking. The milkman brought the drinking milk.

By the mid 1950’s this practice dwindled thanks to government surplus commodities and a centralized food service system in the county. The abundance from the farm community no longer counted. Fresh from the field no longer happened. The day of processed food had arrived.

Catch of the day,
Gretchen

Turkey Pie, again

2010-11-25T09:10:00.000-05:00

Chicken pie was the all time favorite entree in the cafeteria at Pilot Mountain School no matter who the cook, no matter what the decade. But one year the school received government surplus turkeys, an entire truckload of them. Piles and piles of frozen turkeys. So the ever so resourceful lunchroom ladies made turkey pie. And turkey salad. And vegetable soup with turkey. Not to mention plain turkey.

After weeks and weeks of turkey for lunch, the children were a little tired of it. Enough of this good cooking, they said. But still every other day, turkey for lunch. During one of my interviews with former students I laughed as this present day grown-up described the day she was to perform in the Recitation and Declamation competition. She was a little nervous, true, but not all that bad. Lunchtime came. Turkey pie, again. She couldn't stomach it and left every bit on her tray. As she scraped it all into the trash can, the ever present lunchroom lady smiled. "You're worried about the competition, aren't you?" she asked.

Not at all. This girl just couldn't eat one more bite of left over turkey. But, true to Pilot Mountain graces, she couldn't tell her that. She wouldn't hurt her feelings. So she nodded her head, went to the competition, and said her speech. She didn't win. But at least she didn't get sick.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

November 22, 1963 at Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse

2010-11-22T08:19:00.001-05:00

They might have been isolated from world events in their own little school universe, but the children at Pilot Mountain did hear about the assassination of President John F Kennedy before they got on the bus to go home that afternoon. Their teachers told them. There was no public address announcement to the entire school. The teachers spoke personally to their students.

The principal's wife was in the hospital with a new baby watching the news unfold on the tv. She called the school, but the principal wasn't in the office. He was busy teaching his seventh/eighth grade combination class. There was no full time principal in this school, never in all its thirty years of existence. The principal's classroom was across the hall from the office and a dependable eighth grade student would hurry over whenever the phone rang and take a message. On this day, though, I wonder if the wife gave a message to the student. Or did she demand to speak to her husband? I'll need to ask.

I do know that each person has his own very private memories of that moment in history. They remember disbelief. Shock. Blame, mostly blame. Who would do such a horrible deed? What if it were...unspeakable thoughts ran through their minds that day and that memory haunts them as much as the death of the president. What if it were a person from the south, angry about the direction this president was taking the nation in regards to civil rights? There, they said it aloud to me in several interviews. There, forty some years later, spoken fears of the first few hours after the tragedy.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Windows, part II

2010-11-18T09:12:00.002-05:00

Windows in the 1940's were for more than just looking through to see outside (and daydream about being out there). They were tools. For example, this school had no cafeteria. Often children went home for lunch if they lived close enough to hurry home, eat and hurry back. But the majority brought lunch with them, including a pint jar of milk. No refrigerator, no problem. Open the window, stick the jar on the outside ledge. By lunchtime in the coldest of winter, the milk had ice crystals for a special treat. By lunchtime on the warm days, the milk was a tad bit on the warm side, as if fresh from the cow.

Because there were five or six of those giant windows in each classroom, there was plenty of light and the two electric light bulbs dangling from the ceilings were rarely turned on. This presented a problem on bright sunny days since there were no shades. To solve this the teachers covered the inside of the windows with newspapers. Not the whole thing, because that would defeat the purpose of the windows. They would patchwork quit it. A pane here, a pane there.

I can imagine driving past the front of the school and taking a quick glance and then a second glance. Milk jars lined up all in a row. Blotches on the window panes. What a sight.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Full length windows

2010-11-14T14:36:00.001-05:00

Those windows you see in the photograph of Pilot Mountain School have been modernized. Look closer and you can see the outline of the original windows that went from about knee high to a teacher all the way to mere inches from the ceiling.

Wonderful tools, those old windows. They allowed cool breezes when air conditioning was an unheard of pleasure. They allowed light on even the cloudiest days. They also offered temptations to the stuck-in-class dreamers and a few escape routes for the rowdies. This photograph shows the front of the school with its not so safe drop, should someone attempt the unthinkable. In the back of the school, however, the windows are much closer to the ground and the drop not as perilous. Perfect for the ones who dared.

One boy, a second grader, a little imp according to his teacher, routinely made a dash to the woods to relieve himself. Heaven help the teacher who had her back turned when the urge struck him. Off he went through the window.

Another now grown, fully mature adult giggled into the recorder when she told about how she and her best friend hurried to eat lunch and then ran to the one and only unbroken swing to play. First come, first served. She jumped out the window while her friend went through the door, the hall, the outside entrance and around to the playground. More than once, she added.

And then there were the older boys, the ones who took great joy in the new baseball field with its homeplate stuck back in yon corner. The dare this time wasn't in the jumping out, it was in the breaking in. Breaking actually. Who would be the first to break a window pane? I know the answer. His cousin still takes joy in telling about his punishment.

There's more to windows than meets the eyes.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Veteran's Day

2010-11-11T07:53:00.003-05:00

Today I'm honoring a soldier who did not have the privilege to celebrate Veteran's Day as he should have. I never met him, but I've heard his name through several interviews at Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse, Ralph Smith. I was anticipating reading about him as I scrolled through the microfiche newspapers of the sixties, but when his face came on the screen alongside the article, I wasn't anticipating my sadness. Ralph Smith, the first soldier in Burke County killed in Viet Nam. Ralph Smith, on a search and destroy patrol. Ralph Smith survived by his parents, a wife and two daughters. Ralph Smith, killed on November 6, 1965, five days from Veteran's Day. Ralph Smith, educated at Pilot Mountain School. Ralph Smith, doing his part for his country.

Thank you, Ralph Smith.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Daylight Savings in WWII

2010-11-07T14:39:00.001-05:00

Daylight savings ended early this morning and I earned back the hour I lost last spring. It’s almost like I banked that hour to revel in today. I’m going to spend it well. Reading.

I’m on Eastern Standard Time, not Eastern Daylight Time anymore. But if I had been around on that September day in 1942 on the very first first day of school at Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse, my clock would have been on something entirely different. EWT. Eastern War Time. From February 9, 1942 to September 30, 1945 the entire continental US was on daylight savings year round to conserve energy for the war effort. One person I interviewed said they were on a two hour difference, double daylight savings, but I’ve not seen proof of that. Even one hour made a difference in this rural, milk-the-cow-before-school society. It worked fine in spring, summer, and fall. Come winter, though, with the long dark nights, it was a different story.

To remedy this, school days started at ten in the morning and released after four in the evenings, safer for children catching the bus or walking on the side of the road in the mornings. After school, they hurried off the bus to get their chores finished before dark, so they weren’t playing around at the bus stop.

They worked it out for the good of the country. No questions, no rebellion. They just did it.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

2010-11-06T08:56:00.000-04:00

Womanless weddings of the 1950's at Pilot Mountain School were not designed toward a particular agenda. They were productions, elaborate affairs complete with "bridesmaids." All men. The "bride" (usually the biggest man in the community) wore a white dress and full veil. The "groom" (usually the smallest man in the community) wore his Sunday best.

It cost a quarter to watch. Yes. This was a school fund raiser. Better than selling candy or wrapping paper.

I mention it because this week my critique group went over my chapter seven with me. All was well (yeehaw!) except one thing. "What in the world," my raised-in-Southern-California critiquer asked, "is a womanless wedding?"

Funny how a few words in a paragraph bring out so much emotion and misunderstanding. She figured out the procedure. She figured out the participants. She couldn't figure out the culture behind it.

I don't know if I can explain it other than it was just a part of the innocence of the fifties. When we superimpose our current value system on a past system, things might not make sense. That's the beauty of this project. I don't have to explain or justify or defend. I just have to show a culture with all its fragments.

And then there were the Tom Thumb weddings. Surely you've heard of those.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Birthdays and a hectograph

2010-11-02T17:40:00.000-04:00

Taking off my catcher’s hat for a moment and putting on the mom hat. Yesterday was my birthday and my daughter flew in from New Mexico to surprise me. Shock me, actually. What a fun day and it’s still going, until her return flight Thursday.

Birthday celebrations were much calmer in the Pilot Mountain School days. Only one person out of the hundred or so I’ve interviewed has even mentioned birthdays. On her eighth birthday, her third grade teacher gave every other student in the room a paper with an outline of a cake. Each child colored and decorated the cake and wrote birthday wishes. At the end of the day the teacher stapled the birthday cakes together in a booklet and gave her to keep. Keep, as in over sixty years keep.

Thirty children in the class. Thirty birthdays. Do the math. That’s a lot of birthday cake pictures and papers. But wait, there’s more to this story.

Producing a picture of a birthday cake wasn’t as easy as today with laser printers at the touch of a finger. The teachers didn’t have a mimeograph machine either, the old put it on a barrel and roll it around over the paper. Think further back.

Think hectograph, gelatin duplicator. Think shallow pan of goo. So the teacher draws the birthday cake onto the master copy with a pen of a special ink with aniline dyes. (Thank you wikipedia for the details and the picture.) She places it over the goo pan, presses it down until the ink soaks into the goo in the pattern she has drawn. She removes the master and places a sheet of paper on the goo, presses it, removes it and starts over on the next sheet. Thirty times. Math test? Same process. Social studies work sheets? Same process.

Precious time taken up to make copies of birthday cakes for each child. What a gift.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Halloween in the 1950's

2010-10-31T15:06:00.001-04:00

Halloween was much more simple for the children of the 1950's than it is today, at least in Pilot Mountain school territory. They'd throw on a make shift costume and grab a sack and head out the door.

One person I interviewed told about going trick or treating to the school late one Halloween evening. She was with a few of her friends and they debated which door to knock on. That's not so strange, considering the principal lived in the school building.

There were no security lights at this school, not in that day and age. No need. There was no reason for classroom lights to be lit, either, so the building was completely dark, a gigantic angular monster lurking on top of the hill. Silent, too, I'm sure, since few cars traveled the roads then.

What was familiar in the day, transformed to beyond frightening that night. Those girls didn't even make it to the front steps. They high tailed it home!

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

2010-10-28T17:26:00.000-04:00

I'm not here today. I'm here being interviewed by Linda Anderson about the Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse project. Click on over.

Linda is blogging for the Christian writers group, write2ignite. Their goal is to provide children's writers with resources and encouragement as they use their talents to bring a Christian perspective to children's literature.

The teachers at Pilot Mountain School would have truly appreciated their efforts.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

A Sport Called Marbles

2010-10-26T05:54:00.001-04:00

Ever played a game of pig’s eye marbles? Oh, yes, there was such a game. I heard it from an expert. The usual ten foot circle-in-the-sand wasn’t the only marble game in town, not at all.

When there was a one-on-one challenge, these Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse children preferred the “pig’s eye” version of the game. It sounded simple when I first heard the rules, but then I realized there was more to this version of marbles than met the eye.

Whoever threw out the challenge, drew the pig’s eye.

Size didn’t matter.

Shape didn’t matter.

This was a game of strategy.

Each player put five marbles in the pig’s eye. Then they both stood about ten feet away and rolled another marble toward the eye. The player whose marble stopped closer to the eye without going in won the honors of shooting first, but the first shot had to be from that same spot.

The object was to knock a marble out of the eye with a shooter, a larger marble. When a player accomplished that, he could put the marble he captured into his drawstring bag. For keeps. And it was still his turn.

The catch was he had to shoot from the spot where the last marble stopped rolling when it came out of the eye. Power and thumb muscle didn’t always triumph when that marble went rolling merrily too far along its way.

Just curious, how many other ways can a child play marbles?

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

2010-10-23T09:15:00.002-04:00

She played the role of Scout in the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird, Mary Badham, and she spoke to a Southern Cultures Class at a high school near me. I went to her evening presentation last night more out of curiosity than anticipation. After all, what could a child star from the sixties possibly have to share? Five minutes in and I knew the answer.

Her experiences growing up in segregated Alabama to some extent paralleled those of the children at Pilot Mountain Schoolhouse, although her family had servants, “colored” women from across town. In the Pilot Mountain School district, children’s chores accomplished the same thing at no cost. Here the children worked alongside their parents, scrubbing the floors, planting the corn. There the mothers taught the girls how to wear white gloves to the department store while their maids scrubbed the floors.

But it was still the south. There were still the rules and laws and accepted ways of doing things. Daily life was separated into two parallel existences that rarely intersected. Separate water fountains. Separate sections in the movie theater. Separate schools. Separate but equal, supposedly.

Mary Badham talked about change and how it sometimes takes a crowbar to get the system moving. I’m researching the sixties now and seeing how the crowbars impacted Pilot Mountain School. How can I write a memoir of a school in the south and not include this? Oh, yes, it will be included.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Marbles Play Time

2010-10-19T09:24:00.001-04:00

The game of choice for the 1940’s children at Pilot Mountain School was marbles. Since there was no such thing as Physical Education as we know it today, the children were free to entertain themselves during recess and before school. Entertain they did.
The young boys brought their toy guns to play cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians. The older boys brought balls and bats. The girls had jump ropes. But most everyone, young and old, even a few girls, had a little bag of marbles in their pockets.

First step, draw a circle. No, wait, first smooth the grit and lumps from an area, then draw the circle. On official tournament days, the circle was defined by a string with a nail at both ends and a geometry lesson of their own making. But most often it was a hurried circle that fit everyone’s liking.

Those who were playing that round placed an equal number of marbles in the center. The first person, usually the one who drew the circle, “broke” the pile with a strong thumb flick of his shooter. He kept any marble that he knocked out, for keeps. If no marbles went out, the next person took a turn.

The shooters were larger, often left over steel ball bearings from their fathers’ machines. The playing marbles were from the dime store, seven marbles for a nickel. Agates, Cat Eyes.

They made their own calls and abided by them. They refereed themselves and settled their own disputes. Adults had nothing to do with this game. Except twice.

Once the teachers decided playing for keeps was gambling. They imposed the adult rule of playing for fun. That didn’t last long. Playing for keeps came back and stayed. For keeps.

The other time adults had anything to do with the game was when the mothers complained. Seems that their sons were coming home with their pant knees worn bare, but nothing a little patch couldn’t solve.

There’s not much marble action these days. The ideal spots for marbles, good old fashioned dirt fields, were long ago grassed in by adults or paved over by youth organizers.

What were they thinking?

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

2010-10-15T21:21:00.001-04:00

Wooden ink pens by used2Btrees are interesting even without the back story. They're not primitive sticks, not at all, but works of art crafted by artisans who view a chunk of wood like Michelangelo would a block of marble.

Here's one from a red oak tree:

A great advantage to being a storycatcher is meeting and interacting with the people I interview, going beyond the story into the tears and pain. But I also get to go into the joys and accomplishments. Last spring I met Henry and his son, David. Both of them attended Pilot Mountain School, Henry in the opening years, David in the final years. They were two ends of the spectrum, two completely different stories to catch, but they had one thing in common, a gift to create with wood and an eye to see the magical in the ordinary. Musical instruments, cabinets, tables. And ink pens.

Here's his display case. Zoom in and look at the pens. You'll be glad you did.

It just so happens that a two hundred year old oak tree at my church had been struck by lightning that very week. Death was imminent. Sad.

Light bulb moment here. Or was it destiny?

"Could you make pens from the tree?" I asked.

And so, the woodworker, David, came to the tree the day it was cut and selected pieces. He preferred the junctions, where the energy of the wood made different colors and paths and patterns. He made a prototype and showed it to several members of our congregation. Yes, just right.

We've passed one hundred and twenty-five pens and each one has been a unique creation. David's branched out, no pun intended, into designs and various hardwares that are beyond what any of us imagined. I wish the pictures I took could show you the beauty of the grain in the wood pens. This 200 year old white oak tree had secrets hidden inside that in its death are just now coming to light. Because of this artist. Because of the Pilot Mountain project.

Wow.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Music Class

2010-10-11T18:17:00.001-04:00

No. We didn’t have music.

No. There was no music teacher.

Those were the usual answers I would hear during many of the interviews when I asked about the Pilot Mountain School music program. I’ve learned, though, to peel away the layers and go beyond the answers and I was on target this time, for sure. There was more to the music program than the lack of a specialized teacher. What I found was a community rich in traditional music brought across the Atlantic generations ago. Music was such a part of the lives of these children that they didn’t even recognize it as “music.” It was life.

Irish folk tunes. Blue Grass. Gospel. Hymns. Ballads. They sang at church. They sang at family gatherings. They sang at school. They brought their guitars and banjos to class and they taught each other just by sharing and watching and experimenting.

Music as life.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

Library Books

2010-10-04T11:50:00.001-04:00

What is more basic to a school than library books? No money? No books. Not true, because when talking about the most precious element of a school, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Teachers and school systems can get very resourceful.

Pilot Mountain School in the 1940’s had little money to establish a library. The few books that were available stayed in the classroom of the teacher who brought them from home. The school system contracted with the county public library system for a bookmobile to make bimonthly stops at the outlying county schools such as Pilot Mountain. The original bookmobile, an old clunker of a converted delivery truck, sat disabled on the side of the road all too often. Next came a government surplus vehicle that had seen its fair share of battles during World War II. This library on wheels arrived at Pilot Mountain School every other week, on schedule, for the children to exchange their books for new ones.
Speaking of World War II, there were several army bases in North Carolina that were no longer needed after the war. There were libraries on each base. In fact, during the war, there had been a home front/war effort drive to collect gently used books to supply these base libraries. Now those same books were government surplus and available to schools. Pilot Mountain received several shipments of books. A good thing, isn’t always a good thing.

Imagine the delight! Books. Finally. Boxes and boxes of books. But also, there was no librarian to check through the books for appropriate language and content. These books were for mature readers. These children had never seen such words in print. They didn’t know things like that could happen. Sixty some years later, those former students still remember those books and chuckle.

Catch of the day,
Gretchen

2010-09-28T16:02:00.000-04:00

Feed sack dresses and flour sack shirts were everyday wear at this school in the 1940's, even into the early 1950's. Talented mothers could turn an empty ten, twenty or fifty pound bag of food into shirts for the boys and dresses with matching underpants for the girls.

Dry goods came in cloth sacks, not the sturdy paper packaging of today. Chicken feed. Flour. Salt, too. When the sack was the smaller size, there wouldn't always be enough material to complete a project. If the housewife waited for the next delivery, the pattern on the cloth was often different, yet she usually didn't have enough money to purchase the larger size. Talented as they were, these seamstress-mothers still needed enough matching material, so they went looking. They bargained with other housewives to swap materials. One grandmother had a little business on the side. She purchased solid materials and kept on hand to add collars and trim for a dress for her neighbor's daughter or a shirt for the son.

The most popular man in the county was often the mercantile delivery man. He sometimes carried sample swatches of the sack material as he went around the community delivering the orders and taking orders for the next week.

I know that because I talked with his son who tagged along with him making deliveries those seventy years ago.

And I know it because I talked with the now-grown children who watched their mothers bargain with him and then wash out the chicken feed and scrub away the flour labels. After all these years, the memory of these dresses brings a pride to some, a humbleness to others.

The stories I catch often come accompanied with tears, but only once did I see a glistening of a tear over feed sacks. It was from a lady who as a second grader had proudly worn her new dress and matching bloomers to school one day, another school, not Pilot Mountain. On the playground her dress flew above her waist and everyone (including the teacher) saw that her bloomers matched her dress and laughed (including the teacher) at her for wearing feed sacks. Her family later moved into the Pilot Mountain School district and first thing she noticed: that's what everyone else wore. She had found a place in the world where she could be welcome and comfortable in her own skin, even if that skin was covered by feed sacks. Every child needs a Pilot Mountain.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

2010-09-20T14:51:00.000-04:00

If you think dresses from the 1950's were only for fun and fancy, think again. I found an example of how practical they really were in my storycatching at this schoolhouse. It's a long roundabout story, so stay with me here.

As I've mentioned in a previous blog, the bathrooms were outside, behind the school in a most inconvenient spot. After three or four years of children hurrying outside on rainy days, frigid mornings and bug infested sweltering afternoons, construction finally ended on the indoor bathrooms. The girls were delighted. Boys less so since their new indoor facility never had any heat, took away from their freedom to run up the hill, and diminished their chances of collecting wooly worms to throw at the girls.

But for the girls, this was as close to heaven as they had ever been. Well, except for one thing. In the old privy, there was privacy. One hole, one girl. In this new fangled "rest" room, the toilets were line up, side by side, no partitions, nothing private.

Enter the newest dress fad: the full skirt, how convenient. The girls soon connected the dots. They would bathroom in pairs, one girl standing in front, facing away for modesty, of course. She'd fan out her skirt, as if she were giving the onlookers a giant curtsey. Fashion design for the practical.

And the designers in New York thought they were giving the world an elegance.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

2010-09-16T11:28:00.001-04:00

One story I've caught over and over from former students and teachers at Pilot Mountain School is what I'll call the "black olive episode." These apple-blackberry-corn-and-potato children from the rural South Mountains had never heard of black olives, much less tasted one. Government surplus, they'd heard of that, but black olives, no.

Sometime back in the 1950's, the weekly government surplus delivery began to include gallon cans of black olives. The first black olive days, the lunchroom ladies dutifully placed three olives on each plate. I don't have to imagine the response, because sixty years later, every person who told the story could describe in detail the expressions on the children's faces. It didn't take long for the olives to serve a secondary function, akin to table football or finger soccer. One teacher said she spent more time with discipline over the black olives than any thing else in her entire career.

A creative principal held a contest to see who could eat more olives than he could. That worked for a day or two until he couldn't eat another single one, but it did manage to get some brave students interested in at least tasting them. For the most part, wise students figured out how to get around the olives and still be a member of the daily "clean plate club."

They stuffed them in their empty milk cartons when the teacher wasn't looking.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen

2010-09-13T14:13:00.000-04:00

Jump board. Jump plank. Call it whatever, but it's a game children of the 1940's played at school. Picture this, a seesaw with a child standing on one end, another child climbing a fence, tree, anything high enough to jump off and land on the opposite end and send victim sailing through the air. Clowns in a circus made it famous. Children with no other playground equipment made it fun.

No one ever broke a leg, not that anyone has reported to me. One girl said she fell into the open pit the school was in the process of digging for a new outhouse location. She skinned her leg, the teacher didn't blink. So she cleaned herself up and went back for more.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen