Five Days and Counting

FIVE!!

Five days to the launch of

Lessons Learned:

the Story of Pilot Mountain School

Since today's countdown number is five, I searched through the text to find any references to the number five. It was like striking gold. Five here, five there, over and over, five.

The first reference to five is the number of teachers in the system in 1905 who had college degrees. Five. Out of the sixty-seven schools, only five teachers were certified.

On a lighter note, one person I interviewed talked about her cousin's goal to stand at home plate and hit as many baseballs over the new cafeteria behind the school. One fine Sunday afternoon, he succeeded in breaking five windows in the process. And he replaced every one of them with his own money.

Another five, the fee to join the electric co-op that came through the year before the school was built. Monthly power bill would be one dollar fifty cents.

Five gallon buckets were mentioned several times by the two school construction workers I interviewed. They remembered using them to carry mud for the bricklayers to lay the bricks.

The local school committee size was increased from three members to five after a disagreement over lunchroom policies, settled in part by the free lunch program started in the late fifties.

And my favorite, taken as a quote from the News-Herald announcement of a fund raiser at the school:

“Serving will begin at five and continue as long as hungry residents show up to get a feast of chicken pie.”

In five days, beginning not at five, but at ten in the morning, I will be reading the dedication from my book and then it will be available for purchase.

Join me, at the school auditorium. I can't wait.

Catch of the day,

Gretchen