JB:  OK, can you tell me what years you attended Cooper School?

GC:  I started in 1943 and ended in 1951.

JB:  And you started in first grade?

GC:  First grade, yes.

JB:  Do you remember anything about your first day of school?

GC:  Not much about my first day of school.

JB:  Can you tell me how your family came to this area?

GC:  We lived on the hill above Delridge.  We moved into a house up there, and then my parents bought a house on Yancy Street.  And I believe that was in the first year I attended there.  And prior to that we lived in Queen Anne, so I did kindergarten at Queen Anne, so we just moved.  My step-dad worked in floor coverings and had a job in West Seattle, so that’s why we bought the house. 

JB:  What was the neighborhood like around the school?

GC:  I thought it was quite nice around the school.  The school side of the street had very few homes until you got further down Delridge, but it was mostly woods, right from this brick wall along there for quite a ways, but across the street were some nice homes and nice families that we got to know.

JB:  And how did you get to school?  Talk about your route to school.

GC:  Well, from Yancy Street, we were not allowed to go through the Gulch.  So we were given the choice of going on, was that 26th ?, right next to the steel mill [Andover? 26th would be a north-south street two blocks west of Delridge], over to Delridge and up, or up toward Genessee Street, and we took it straight up to the park.  Because we were not allowed to go down to the Gulch – there was supposed to be a Gulch Gang that was down there. 

JB:  What area was the Gulch?

GC:  It was the bottom of Yancey Street and it was from the steel mill over. It may have been one block this side of Delridge that wasn’t [the Gulch].  But from the steel mill up to Genessee was all overgrown and no homes and lots of nettles and water and muck and just not a good place for kids.

JB:  Is that where the creek was?

GC:  Uh huh.

JB:  So you didn’t ever go over the Creek on the way to school?

GC:  Well…...  We weren’t allowed, but we did.  There was a shortcut we could take right across from Skalabrin’s there was a half road down and a bridge across the creek and steps up and that was a real shortcut.  And we were known, as we got older, to take that shortcut quite a few times. 

JB:  Skalabrin’s was…

GC:  The grocery store on the corner of Dakota and…what is that street?  28th.

JB:  And you mentioned that there was a bad area on Delridge that you couldn’t go past too.  A big red barn?

GC:  That was in the Gulch.  The big red barn was in the center of the Gulch by the…I think the creek ran all the way through there, but it was very…a lot of discarded things.  We never did go… We had a lot of stories about what was in there but we never did know what was in there.

JB:  You were warned away?

GC:  We were warned away.

JB:  What were the stories?

GC:  One of them that was kind of strange was that there were foxes in there.  And then the Gulch Gang, were the stories.  That they…it was before drugs were at all prevalent, but it was my first hearing …that there might be drug use there.

JB:  Who was the Gulch Gang?

GC:  You know, I can say some of the names…[laughs, tape turns off].  The other night they said “I saw Harold Tuffs, and he’s this and that”; well, he was the most scary.  It was called the Tuffs family.  There was Jean and Lloyd and Malcolm Tuffs.  And Jean was my age and the nicest one of them.  And they may not have been that bad, especially as you look at it now.  And across the street there were four or five older, out of Cooper, so they were probably in high school, at that time, that frequented it.  I don’t know the names, I would have known at one time.

JB:  Can you remember in your years in the school, were there any issues, bigger events that people were concerned about for the school or the neighborhood, while you were a student?

GC:  In my recollection there was nothing critical that I can remember.  The biggest thing that I remember was that we had Mrs. Thelma Dewitty coming, and there was a question whether there would be… I don’t know if they questioned the parents as to whether that would be OK or not, but the question came up at our house.  I didn’t have Mrs. Dewitty; I’m not sure if my brother had Mrs. Dewitty or not, but I do know that she was greatly loved and everyone liked having her there, so that’s the biggest thing that I can remember.

JB:  Do you remember the first time you saw her there?

GC:  I do remember thinking that I had some pre-ideas about what she would look like, and she was very soft and gentle so it was interesting to me. I thought, “What would be so scary about that?”  So… she was quiet, very soft spoken, unlike some of the teachers.

JB:  Talk about the teachers a bit.  What teachers do you remember?

GC:  I remember so many.  I’m not positive that my family… my mother was divorced and remarried and… I don’t know why Cooper was so important to me, but I remember many of my teachers.  I remember especially Mr. [Lester] Roblee.  Because, I probably never spoke to him, but the figure of the man and the… there was a safety feeling about Mr. Roblee that I loved.  Whether he put his arms around me or not, he was that kind of a man that was with kids on the playground.  We had indoor playgrounds, indoor cement rooms that when it rained we would get to play in there, and he was always there.  And in later years when I talked to him he said he didn’t remember me but he had some of the tough kids at that time, and some of the other kids that he was dealing with, so he said “I don’t really remember you,”  but there was a presence about the man that I have never really forgotten. 

JB:  What kind of activities were available at the school?  Any sports, or clubs?

GC:  There was… you always wanted to be in safety patrol if you possibly could because then you got to go to Playland I think…. I didn’t do that but I did work in the office.  It was “Cooper School, pupil speaking,” which was very difficult to say because we were… we laughed over the years because we were afraid we’d say “Cooper School, pooper speaking!”  The office lady was Mrs. [Margaret] Hartog.  There were several other ladies in there but I don’t remember them but I do remember her. And it was a privilege to work in the office – you had to work your way up to that. I don’t think that happened until we were in fifth or sixth grade, to answer the phone and run errands and go with the messages.  But outside activities, I remember very, very few.  My classmate’s mother was the Bluebird leader, so we had Bluebirds and Campfires at Mrs. Ditty’s house so that was an after school activity.  And we had, Delridge Playfield had “Ossie” the big [?], they came and you had to throw a ball through a …

JB:  A carnival?

GC:  Yeah. And yo-yos were big, there were yo-yo people who came and carved yo-yos and did demonstrations at the Delridge playground.  And I was in a play, I have a picture of it, it was put on at Delridge Playfield.  I was Sleeping Beauty and I have a picture of us sitting there and we did plays.  We went to Delridge Playfield from the morning when we arose and we had to be home at dark, for a long, long time.  And they were great activities there and great leaders, group leader.  Always softball, all kinds of sports and stuff.  We’d spend the days there and we’d bring lunch.  Swim in the pool, the little cement pool, for the longest time the bare knees with the cement. 

JB:  The wading pool?

GC:  Oh yeah.  On your hands and knees, going through there.  As a matter of fact they have one over here at Highland Park and Carl is so disappointed because he says, “They never put water in our pool,” and they still do at Delridge, which is great.

JB:  This is during the summer that you spent the whole day?

GC:  Yes, uh huh.  ‘Til dark.

JB:  Could girls be on the safety patrol when you went to school?

GC:  Yes, they could.  Always. As long as I remember.  But I’m not sure why I wasn’t there because it was really always something I wanted to be, but maybe it required good grades or something.  But I can’t think of anything.  We had talent shows, at Cooper.  I sang “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” in a talent show on the stage there.  I remember the lunchroom very well.

JB: Talk about that.

GC:  Chocolate covered graham crackers.  Just lots of good… what has brought it back to me now is my grandchildren are in school. And they are not allowed to go to school before school, and they are not allowed to stay after school unless there is a planned program.  Well, we were there; we were at that playground.  The school was never closed – I mean, you were maybe not inside, but you were shooting baskets outside, and playing on the playground.  And that was part of my growing up that I felt was good and lots of good friendships and camaraderie.  Because the kids all live close and in the neighborhood and there was no school bus.  And usually teachers, Mrs. Dorothy Hoff (I wrote it down), Mrs Rouse was my second grade teacher, who sat and read stories.  [In 1944 there is no Mrs. Rouse listed; there is a Virginia Hulse, kindergarten.  Second grade is Strate or Loreen.]  It was also, another thing was we got grapefruit juice and graham crackers, every day. 

JB:  As a snack?

GC:  Yes, it was because some of the families were poor, I think.

JB:  But everyone got them?

GC:  Everyone got them.  But I hated grapefruit juice and graham crackers to begin with.  But then I became addicted to them, and still to this day it’s a nice combination for me.  I think that was a government thing, I think they brought it in.  I can remember being on the committee to open the cans and pour the juice and stuff. 

JB:  Did you bring your lunch or did you buy it?

GC:  Brought it.  Most of the time.  It was a privilege if we got to buy it.

JB: Can you describe the other children in the school?

GC:  It was… I consider most of them in our bracket in that here were no wealthy children, at least if there were I didn’t know about it.  All on a pretty level plain as far as clothes they wore and… there never seemed until we got to high school and junior high competition.  Oh, we had sewing class.  We had M[iss] [Grace] Seydell as our sewing teacher and we all made dresses that we wore to the spring something-or-other. 

JB:  And it’s in your graduation photo?

GC:  And it’s in our graduation photo.  And the families to me seemed, maybe because there were not a lot of vacations, there were not a lot of jealousies of other kids you were in school with because they were all sort of on the same plain.  All summer long you were there playing at the school and stuff.  A good variety.  We had some really nice Italian families and we had uh, the Davidsons, Clifford Davidson and _____ Stewart in my brother’s class. They lived very close to the school and a lot of times we would stop and play at their house in the night.  Anyway, just a lot of good kids.  We had, M[iss] [Cora] Gerkins was our “adjustment teacher” it was called at the time.

JB:  What was that?

GC:  That was, there were kids who were having trouble like here at Highland Park…

JB:  Oh, like special ed?

GC:  Special Ed.  Only they called it the adjustment class then.  And M[iss] Gerkins was a wonderfully stern black haired lady with a bun.  Had some kind of an accident in her life, or was born so she had one arm that was stiff like this.  And appeared very very stern but was not.  I ended up moving close to her when we moved down to Fauntleroy, and got to visit with her for a long time after.  Wonderful, warm teacher.

JB: Did the children change during the war?  Did the war worker housing change who went to Cooper at all?

GC:  If it did, I did not notice it.  We had one black family, Audrey and Ozzie Williams, and they were wonderful.  There was no problem whatsoever that I felt having black students in the school.  Of course he was extremely athletic and really good and actually went to high school and did well, and Audrey did the same.  She was the Girls’Club President.

JB:  Do you know if they are still around?

GC:  I have not heard a thing. [tape cuts out]

JB:  You were in first or second grade during the war.  Other students have mentioned the Japanese American students being sent to the internment camps. Do you remember that?

GC:  No. And as far as the war, I remember that we had a bucket of sand and a helmet at the door if there was ever an air raid, and I remember going to Riverside, the top of Riverside above where the tavern used to be as you’d go down in there, the day the war was over, and listen to the whistles and bells and people screaming and yelling.  There is a kind of a hill that you are up on there and you could hear from everywhere the bells.  That’s my only memory of the war.  And I do remember people’s flags with the stars on it hanging in their windows so you knew they had someone in the service.  But I was relatively untouched about being afraid or anything about the war. 

JB:  Bells and whistles coming from across the harbor?

GC:  They came from somewhere on Harbor Island, and from the Bethlehem Steel Mill, and people tooting horns.  It was everywhere. 

JB:  Taking the sand bucket scene into the 1950s, do you have any memories of the Cold War affecting your experiences of the 1950s?

GC:  I don’t.  I remember earthquake drills and fire drills and that’s the only thing I remember through school.  And I have a feeling one of my reasons for caring so much about Cooper is that it was a very safe place for me. It felt good every day, which changed when I went to junior high.  You belonged, there was a warmth. Even M[iss] [Florine] Bassett, who was the crabbiest old teacher in the school, was gentle and soft and …y’know, she expected things from you and actually ended up getting things from you too.  There was never… I can’t place any turmoil in the school, from my entire time there. 

JB:  Were the earthquake drills after or before the 1949 earthquake?

GC:  There were some fairly simple ones before, where we just marched out.  Then after, it was under the desks, and “duck and cover” and all that business. 

JB:  Describe your experience in the earthquake.

GC:  I was at the top of Yancey Street in the grocery store, Squires Grocery Store, that my mother worked at when the earthquake hit.  And the cans and everything started hitting everybody and running out.  So I ran to a telephone pole and grabbed onto it.  And someone brought me back from that, saying that the lines had come down and it wasn’t really safe.  It was very scary. That scared me for a long time.  

JB:  Were there any school hangouts?  You have talked pretty much about the playfield and being at school before and after.  Any other places kids would go?

GC:  Only across the street to the field and we did a lot….  I don’t know if the trees are still out in front of Delridge, Cooper now, but there were a lot of maple trees, and we used to walk shuffling leaves, back and forth and back and forth, there.  There were no hangouts that I know of. We went straight from school to Delridge playground or home.

JB:  Do you remember the Youngstown Community Club, or was that still open?

GC:  I do not remember that.

JB:  What were your memories of recess?

GC:  Recess was extremely fun.  And for the most part you wanted (that was always my favorite subject) you wanted to go outside, but because of the weather we had the wonderful big brown balls and we played inside.  I think there was one room that was enclosed, and there was one that was covered and open and you could play in and stuff.  And there was always “soak ‘em” and volleyball and…I don’t know how they got organized but there was always good playing.

JB:  What was the first thing you said?

GC:  Soakum.  I think now they call it [?], you throw the ball at someone and they are either in or out.

JB: Oh, Dodgeball.

GC:  Dodgeball. That was called Soakum then.  And jump roping also was another thing.  We did a lot of jump roping.  And there was an activity that went from Cooper to Woodland Park.  And there were some competitions that you could jump and cross and do all those jump roping things.

JB:  So would Cooper send a team?

GC:  I think you had to try out and be good enough. I do also remember that…boy, I had forgotten all about this.  There also were balance beam.   You earned medals, bronze and silver medals by doing balance beam, jump roping, something else.  You had to do a whole series of sporting things to get these medals.

JB:  Sounds like a badge in Girl Scouts

GC:  Yes.  A little, yeah.  You had to go to the end of the balance beam, and dip and turn and go back and stuff.  I had forgotten about that. 

JB:  Did you have separate playgrounds for the boys and girls when you were there?

GC:  I don’t think so.  No.

JB:  If you got into trouble, what happened?

GC:  All I remember is that you had to go to the office.  I don’t know what happened from there. 

JB:  You never got into trouble?

GC:  I didn’t, no!

JB:  Can you tell me something you remember about celebrating holidays?

GC:  It seemed like we celebrated every holiday.  No matter what your background was.  One thing we did there that everyone remembers is the May Day. We had the pole, the May Day pole, that was a very big Spring thing. 

JB:  Did you do it across the street or in …

GC:  No, we did it at the school.  And you know I don’t’ remember a lot about… I know that we wore white.  We sang Christmas carols; it was OK to sing Christmas carols, and we wore white things with red bows.  We were in the choir and we did a lot of singing.  There were a lot of assemblies.  M[iss] [Nina] Bonnell was the music teacher, Mrs. Hoff and M[iss] Bonnell. And, but I do remember the Valentine’s Day was pretty sad because you didn’t get one from everyone like you do today.  So that rings a bell for me!  But I don’t remember Halloween or any of those things being that spectacular or not.  The same with Christmas. Christmas mainly was the Christmas program went on.  And they did a nativity set.  And everyone participated.

[GC’s mother] asks a question:  Did you have a moment of silence at eleven o’clock on November the 11th?

GC:  No

JB:  What was that for?

GC’s mother:  Armistice Day.  I thought that at one time or other, that went on.

GC:  Another thing we did was every day we raised the flag, and we said the Pledge of Allegiance.  And I loved it. 

JB:  Where did you raise the flag?

GC:  On the school ground right outside the …. There was a big flagpole.  And I think we all just stood outside.

JB:  Before school?

GC:  Before school.

JB:  Did you have a favorite room at school?

GC:  Well I felt M[iss] Bassett’s class…I don’t know if she was the librarian or not, but I think that was the library.  And I loved the smell of the room and the books were all there.  But she also taught I think, writing or something so it wasn’t that you were always in the library but the library was in her room.  That was one of my favorite rooms.  And I liked the sewing, Home Economics room, M[iss] Sydell, and we did a lot of cooking and we did….we were not kind to M[iss] Sydell in the eighth grade.  We were not kind.  She was a little lady and she was trying her best, but I think we were getting to be eighth grade girls and we were not very kind. 

JB: Did you like the dress you made?

GC:   I loved the dress I made!  We used dotted Swiss and she made sure everybody’s got done on time and she was a really good teacher, so…but it’s one of those, when you start making fun and… not something I’m proud of. 

JB: Did you have to bring…pay for the fabric or did you bring your own?

GC:   You had to pay for your fabric and the pattern.  And the sewing machines were in the room.  I think we started with an apron and then went to a dress.  Those were my favorite rooms.  I liked music; I liked the lunchroom because that was also the theater.  The big huge velvet curtains were there on the stage.  So you could remember things that had gone on there.  There was always something snooping in and peaking through and making jokes and stuff. 

JB:   Did you have a school song then?

GC:   I don’t think so. We started in the eighth grade.  We had Mrs. Astrid Dooley was our teacher.  And we started a club called the Deltones.  And Mrs. Dooley was our advisor and we had to go to Frederick and Nelson’s to get a charter.  And, but by the time we really got into it, we were graduated.  So it was not much, I think we even had Deltone pins.

[phone rings]

JB:  You talked about the Deltones.  Did that name come from Delridge?

GC:   I do not remember.  I had totally forgotten about that when you asked about clubs because I guess that was preparing us for junior high or something.

JB: You had to have a charter?

GC:   I recall that we had to have a charter and we had to go to Frederick and Nelson’s, in their teenage room which they had at the time.  Some of my other friends were more into it than me, maybe they…but I think I went there though.  But I don’t remember a lot about it.  We didn’t have very many meetings.  It was something we started in the eighth grade and by the time we got rolling doing anything it was time to go to junior high and we all split up. To different junior highs.   

JB: You went to different junior highs.  So that was the end of your elementary school friendships?

GC:   That was it.  Not really.  A lot of them were still friends. But I went to James Madison, and they went to Denny.  I think those were the only two at the time. Carl went to Denny. 

JB: Do you remember what happened when people got hurt at school, who took care of you?

GC:   There was a wonderful nurse.  Mrs. Ahrens was our nurse.  And she was absolutely the most wonderful lady.  She took care of everything. I never got hurt very much.  But I know it was always fun to go to the office and see Mrs. Ahrens.  I can picture her to this day.

JB: Was she in that little room?

GC:   The little room right off the gym.  And we had Mr. [Jack] Ganfield when I first came there as the gym teacher then he left and we had Mr. [Richard] Thurston.  And we did square dancing.  We did, PE was very good, too, in a social way.  Like on Tuesdays or Thursdays or something we did square dancing.  You know, I think there were some, toward 8th grade we might have had a couple of socials, where they had some movies at the school.  It wasn’t at the playfield, it was at the school.  And you could buy popcorn and see a movie, Tuesday nights or something.

JB: Let’s talk a little more about the neighborhood. You mentioned working at a store in the neighborhood.

GC:   After Skalabrin’s sold to the Copelands, then I worked in the grocery store for Mr. Copeland and his sister.  His name was Sid Copeland.  I didn’t get paid; it was a learning experience.  I was being, I didn’t spend many hour there but when I was there I was being taught to use the cash register and I think I may have even got some groceries.  But it wasn’t a pay.  

JB: How old were you then?

GC:   Probably 12?

JB: Did you like doing that?

GC:   I loved it.  But see Skalabrin’s, that store was our store.  We had a charge account there and so we would go and charge.  And my parents smoked and you had to have a note, even though they knew my parents and they knew me, that said that they needed a package of cigarettes.  It was all…and lots of penny candy and bubble. Clear’s Double Bubble during the war became very scarce. So you had to find out on what day the Clear’s Double Bubble would be coming to Skalabrin’s or, I can’t think of the other store that was up by the school.  So we’d get word that it was coming in.  It was still a penny, but….  that was a really big thing. It had comics in it and stuff.  Across the street from that store lived Willy, who was the janitor at Cooper School.  I don’t remember his last name, his first name was Willy.  And the headman’s name was Oscar, a white haired man. And even the janitors were wonderful people at that school.  I think one of them either died while he was working there or retired before I got out of there but they had been there for many years and lived in the neighborhood and were the janitors at the school.

JB: I know one of the Barnecuts was a janitor there, but that was very early, the nineteen-teens.  Do you remember any other stores, or did you just go to one store or did you sometimes go to the Safeway or anything?

GC:  Well one thing, my parents were poor and we didn’t have a car until quite a long time, and then when we did my dad used it for work.  Our groceries were purchased there or my mother would take the bus to West Seattle once in a while, not very often and get things.  There was a Safeway store down there on Spokane St. but we never went.  She even sometimes took a taxi cab to the grocery store.

JB:  You talked about bootlegging in the neighborhood? Could you describe when that was, and what that was.

GC:  Well, I only remember that because the stores closed usually on Friday night, Saturday and Sunday stores were closed.  And coming from a family of people who liked to drink there were times when we would drive to the owners of the taverns and buy liquor out of their car, that they would take from, probably from the tavern I don’t know. 

JB: So it was legal to be selling liquor in the stores, but they just weren’t open.  

GC:  But they closed like Friday night or something.  Especially for a long time it was Sunday, there were no liquor sales on Sunday.  After a while you could get it on Saturday, but… that was a big thing in our family. They knew, we even went clear down to Spokane Street at times, but anyway.  There was a little bit of it in Delridge.

JB:  You mentioned feeling very safe at the school. Did you feel safe in the neighborhood too?

GC:  I felt safe in the neighborhood, until… I felt safe in the neighborhood. There was one drug incident where a boy, can’t think of his name, and this was a long time ago, overdosed on drugs and he was having some sort of fit over on that next street over at the end of Delridge playfield, right there at the end of the park, and it was very traumatic to me because I had never seen … I saw it and the way he was acting and the craziness and the police were there.  But I think that was close to the time that I never went back to spend any time.  Once we were in junior high, we were out of there; it was a bus clear up to West Seattle and back and hardly ever down to Delridge after that time.

JB:  How long did your family or you stay in the neighborhood?

GC:  I left in June of 1957 when I married my husband.  And we moved to West Seattle.

JB:  So you were on Fauntleroy then?

GC:  No, we were first up in the Admiral District in a little house, then we were down on 49th SW, then we moved to Fauntleroy. When I went to Cooper School my parents were divorced; my mother married my stepdad and then he was my stepdad at Cooper when we bought the house for I think we were talking the other night about eleven years.  Then they divorced and my mother remarried to my third father. And my mother worked only at the store while I was in school; that was the only time she worked while we were growing up.  But all of my dads were hard workers who provided.  Good providers and big drinkers (laughs).

JB:  Did any of them work at the steel mill?

GC:  No.  Retired navy, in the navy yard in Bremerton.  One was a floor layer who worked for Decker Brothers in West Seattle. 

JB:  You did live near the steel mill, though.  What was that like?

GC:  Living near the steel mill was great.  It was noisy, and there was hot, red hot steel you could see going through there out my bedroom window and then at the end of whatever season they had the railroad cars would come by and the conveyor belts would drop hunks of steel into these railroad cars until they were full.  So a lot of the time for it seemed like weeks you would keep hearing, “clang, clang, clang” with their finished product going out.  And we lived by the steel mill lunch hour bell whistle.  But there was not a lot of traffic on Yancey, which you would think; I guess that’s because Delridge was more the entrance. And not one person that I went to school with’s father worked at the steel mill.  Not one.  That’s kind of strange, isn’t it.  I just remember where they all worked and they didn’t work at the steel mill. 

JB:  How was the air around the steel mill?

GC:  It absolutely seemed fine to me. Never a complaint.  I do remember seeing the hot steel going through and the red sparks and everything, but I don’t think it ever really affected the air quality.  And they had, because it was Bethlehem Steel they had a star, the Bethlehem star was up there every year. 

JB: Do you remember seeing striking workers at the mill?

GC:  I do not.  And you know, they had big cyclone fences, so… we never were inside the mill.  I think we did go on a tour from Cooper, I think we went on a tour of the steel mill.  I’m pretty sure we did.  That’s another thing we did, we did lots of.. .we went to Carnation Milk Company… so that was some of the activities we did.  I hardly even recall the workers there, or where they parked their cars.  So it must have been down towards the meat market and the drugstore.

JB:  What about the flour mill, did you get to tour that?

GC:  Yes, Fisher Flour mill, yes. 

JB:  You mentioned that the flour mill would sometime have bags of grain?

GC:  When Stone Burr came in.  Fisher Flour mill was the one on Harbor Avenue that we went on a tour of.  But when Stone Burr came in at the bottom of the hill [present location west of Longfellow Creek?], it seemed like certain days of the week we would get bread, not free but a good price on bread and bags of buckwheat, things that probably didn’t sell very well at the time. Because it was pretty innovative, there wasn’t that much wheat and things in bread.  Bread was Wonder Bread and whatever.  Stone Burr was one of the first that I recall that got really into whole grain.  I don’t think they were broken bags, I said that, but I think they were, like the label didn’t fit.  There were trays that my mother could look at and see that the stuff you could get for half price or something.  But that was built while I was in the neighborhood, and that didn’t change the neighborhood either as far as…. No one I knew worked at Stone Burr

JB:  And you don’t have much memory of Longfellow Creek? 

GC:  Only that we weren’t supposed to be over there.  There was a rope swing that went over there.  There were some things down there.

JB:  When you did the shortcut to school, was there a bridge?

GC:  Across a bridge, there was a wooden bridge there.  And steps up by some people’s house. 

JB:  Whom did you walk to school with? 

GC:  My brothers. And Lois and Patty Squires, and Ed Parker who lived in the apartment house on the hill above.  And many times we picked up my friend Gail who lived over towards Delridge.  Lots.  It was not just to go off to school, we walked to school with friends and came home with friends.  I recall reaching the point when I did not want to walk with my brothers,  especially my little brother. 

JB:  Do you remember the Boysen’s store? Was that open when you were here?

GC:  Boysen’s.  It was known more by his first name.  I want to say Zack or Sachs, we called or something.  I think my brother can remember that.  But yes, Boysen’s, that’s the store. What street is that on?

JB:  It is on Avalon.  But close to Spokane, on the corner of Spokane.

GC:  That’s a different one that I was thinking of.  Boysen’s.

JB:  It was brick, had apartments above.  Did you feel like there was any difference between kids who lived on the hill and kids who lived in the flatlands?

GC:  I don’t think there was.  I never felt any…I didn’t even know the feeling of envy, so much, in grade school, until you got to junior high where you start seeing the difference in clothes and everything. Everyone seemed, you know their dad might not be working but you know, everything seemed to be more on a par, there wasn’t that some had more than others and did better than others.  And they all had, the Rennebaums [sp?]lived right above the school and her mother taught piano and that was another place that we would go and meet and play after school.

JB:  Well, thank you very much…. I forgot to ask about the Salvation Army and being a Sunbeam.

GC:  Well the Salvation Army was the church right off of Delridge up from the butcher shop and it offered a very wonderful group called the Sunbeams.  It was probably like Girl Scouts or Campfires would be now, only it was more religious.  But we sang:  “Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam.” We did a lot of wonderful things at the Salvation Army.  So that was a good thing.

JB:  There is a picture of kids holding their hands out; you said it’s playing “Streets and Valleys,” where you turn and somebody calls out?

GC:  “Streets” or “Valleys” and then you turn, and if you get caught going in then you are out.  That’s how they eliminated the players.

JB:  Is it like Simon Says?

GC:  Uh huh.  Well, you are going up here (mimics walking between rows of other children), and someone yells “Valleys and they turn (blocking the way) and if you are caught, you’re out.

JB: So streets is being in line and valleys is turning to block the path.

END OF INTERVIEW