Local Elder’s Council shares what life was
 like growing up in Stevens County

BY SOPHIA ALDOUS
S-E Staff Reporter

    Two women and two men, ranging in age from 81 to 85, sat side by side in chairs lin¬ing the wall at the Keller Heritage Museum last Thurs¬day night.
    The small group that had convened at the behest of the Stevens County Historical So¬ciety spent the evening remi¬niscing about being young and attending school in Ste¬vens County.
    The members of what was referred to as the Elder’s Council consisted of Rita Burnett, Maxine Huguenin-Parott, Joe Hudspeth and Warren Franz. The quartet told a small audience their stories of childhood and how school was different for them during a time when there were more farms than houses, horse races during recess, and being disobedient in class could get you strapped.
    “We lived about two miles from the school house,” re¬called Rita Burnett, who went to White Lake Elementary School after her family moved to the Colville area in 1923. “In good weather, my brothers and I rode horses to school. My older brother rode a horse by himself and I rode on the back of the other horse with my other brother. If I acci¬dentally slid off, then I’d have to walk the rest of the way.”

Horse races at recess

    Burnett described her schoolyard as having two out¬door privies, and a swinging rope hanging from a tree, and a barn for students to put their horses.
    Children would bring their own lunches and the teacher would cook a pot of soup on the woodstove during the winter. When children weren’t learning basic educational skills like reading, writing and arithmetic, Burnett said they would play softball during re¬cess, or the older boys would have horse races.
    “I remember the teacher caught them having a rather wild race around the school-house and she told them if they were that ambitious, they could go clean out the barns,” said Burnett, giggling.
    Eventually, riding the family horses to school finally gave way to a school bus, which consisted of a truck with can¬vas stretched over a frame in the back with benches for children to sit on.
    “Of course, there were no seatbelts,” Burnett said.
    As for Maxine Huguenin-Par¬rott, she was born and raised just over two miles out¬side of Colville and attended elementary school in a small building close to where Astor Elementary School is now lo¬cated. When she turned 12, she transferred to the Kit-Nar¬cisse school off of Tiger High¬way.
    “The girls had to wear dresses and the boys had to wear nice slacks, or their best pair of jeans,” Huguenin-Par¬rott said. “For 25 cents a week you could have hot lunch, which was a pot of soup that the teacher brought to school. If you couldn’t pay, then you could exchange work for it by staying inside during recess and cleaning up the class room.”

‘We courted for three years…’

    Huguenin-Parrot then went on to Colville High School, but dropped out her sophomore year to get married. However, it was not an act done rashly.
    “We courted for three years before he proposed,” recalled Huguenin-Parrott. “He was the son of our neighbors, who lived a couple miles from us. I was 17, which in those days wasn’t considered too young to get married, but it was dif¬ferent then.”
    For Joe Hudspeth of Fruit¬land, his school definitely fit the definition of rural. His family moved to Fruitland in 1929 where Joe began at¬tending school in a one-room schoolhouse. During the win¬ter, while waiting for the bus, he and the other children would set bundles of tumble-weeds and other brush on fire to stay warm.
    “We’d stand so close that when we got on the bus, none of the other kids wanted to sit next to us because we stank like burnt weeds,” Hudspeth said. “The teacher caught the bus with us, so she stank pretty good too.”
    Hudspeth’s parents pro¬vided room and board for the school teacher, something he said was not uncommon in those times, though at the time, Hudspeth wasn’t too ex¬cited about the idea.
    “She was watching you all day when you were at school, then she was right there to drill you about homework when you got home,” Hud¬speth said. “That didn’t work out too well.”
    During the Great Depres¬sion, Hudspeth said there were a few kids from one fam¬ily that continually brought bean sandwiches to school, while he ate peanut butter and honey everyday.  Occa¬sionally, he would trade with them for something new.
    Meanwhile, Warren Franz was attending school at Mey¬ers Falls Grade School where students rode to classes in a Model T Ford. During the winter, the children would put their feet on the exhaust pipe that ran down the back of the truck to keep their feet warm.
    “There were two rooms with 40 kids and each teacher had four grades,” said Franz.

Those were the days

    According to Franz, he was a bit of a troublemaker, but only because “the rest of em’ were doing it, so I had to do it too.”
    Two such occasions of peer pressure occurred when Franz and a group of boys were caught peaking through a loose board into the girls’ outhouse and for shoving a female student into a snow bank.  As punishment for the latter, Franz received a strapping from the principal.
    “I was the kid who would cry if you looked at me sideways, but I didn’t cry when he hit me with that strap,” Franz remembered. “Boy, it stung pretty good though.”
    Corporal punishment was something all four members of the council remembered as being perfectly acceptable both at school and at home. After arriving home from school, the foursome said the first thing each child would do was chores, followed by dinner, cleaning up after the meal, then homework.
    “Kids nowadays are able to get away with more,” mused Huguenin-Parrott.
    “They have more privileges and less responsibilities,” agreed Burnett. “Back then you would not talk back to your parents if they told you to do something. You didn’t tell them ‘no’ or ‘I don’t want to’. You pulled your weight without complaint.”
    Hudspeth recalled there were times when his teacher would hit his knuckles with a ruler or pull his ears for being disobedient or not paying at¬tention, and his parent would think nothing of it.
    “I’m not saying that you should strike a child whenever they need to be disciplined; perhaps that went on too much in my day,” Hudspeth said. “But maybe it doesn’t happen enough now. I’m not saying that kids these days are bad, but you can tell that manners aren’t as important as they once were.”
    The council members agreed that though times have changed, the memories were something that would last them forever.
    “Those really were the days,” recalled Franz. “True, they could be tough, but it made you enjoy them all the more.”
    DVDs of the Elder’s Council are available at the museum for $25 or go to www.theheritagenetwork.com.

    Rita Burnett, Maxine Huguenin-Parrott, Joe Hudspeth and Warren Franz.