Eight Years at the Gray Creek One-Room School
When I started school in September 1934 at the age of six, I was fortunate to have Miss Evelyn Stoddart as my teacher. Miss Stoddart had previously taught at Chezacut, an isolated place in the Chilcotin west of Williams Lake, so Gray Creek with its daily Greyhound mail service was an improvement. That said, most of our teachers didn’t stay more than two years. Out of their monthly $60 salary they often paid $30 or more to room and board with a local family. Many felt confined and boxed in—town was a long stern-wheeler ride away. None of our teachers ever had a car, or even a bicycle, and walked everywhere as virtually everyone else did, including my own family. There were only three cars in the community, along with a jalopy or two which sometimes could be started. We had daily Greyhound service to Nelson and Creston, but anyone wanting to go to town had to stay overnight, so few made the trip. Still, anything not available locally could be ordered from Eaton’s or Simpson’s mail order catalogue, or from the Wood Vallance Hardware catalogue through my dad’s general store.
Miss Stoddart assigned the four of us in Grade 1—Beth Oliver, Violet Adams, Frederick Simpson, and I—to desks on the east side of the room. Those in Grades 7 and 8 had the west side, the best side, next to the windows on Kootenay Lake. There they could watch the SS Nasookin, the sternwheeler car ferry coming around Cape Horn and across the bay to the Gray Creek landing next to our store. As we moved through the grades, we moved ever closer to those desirable lakeside windows.
The large windows allowed sufficient natural light, so lamps were never needed.2 x 4s to allow entire rows to be moved to one side of the hall when it was being used for meetings, dances or church services. The woodstove in the middle of the room had a very long horizontal stovepipe which allowed the stove to be moved out of the way for dances and whist parties. Three steel rods and turnbuckles reinforced the walls at rafter height, which John Oliver, an older boy, liked to swing from. He later recalled, “The walls were ballooning out—I liked to see the walls bounce.”
