inose days. But not mean,

inose days. But not mean, Edna emphasized. Boys tickled and poked pencils at the girls and were rewarded with squeels and shrieks. And when they felt extra mischievous, say at Halloween, their favorite target was the old bell atop Forest Grove School. “Miss Ida used to ring it with a rope. You could hear it for miles and miles.” Mrs. Mills said.

“I’ve been on that school house and rung that bell at two o’clock at night more than one time,” Acrey added, smiling.

Sometimes, there was more than the old bell up there. James Mills, Edna’s husband, remembered being part of an especially daring gang of pranksters who hoisted a local farmer’s buggy onto the school house roof one Halloween.

But the rowdy pranks were relegated to outside the classroom. "When we went to school, we went there to learn and we had to do it—and that was it,” Edna said. “We started right out the first day of first grade with a reading book. It wasn't ‘Dick and Jane.’ It was called a Primer Book. We had a copy book to practise penmanship, an English book, arithmetic book, history book and geography book. Then in filth grade, we got a hygiene book that carried us through seventh grade. And we had a dictionary. Every boy and girl had to have a dictionary.”

All the work wasn’t at the desks, either, in the days of the little one-room school houses. The boys cut wood for the stoves that heated the two classrooms, chopping down pine trees in a lot across the road from Forest Grove. They were relieved of that chore only by Charles*\ Green’s donation of slab wood from his Amissville sawmill, Edna recalled. “We used to have to get water from Russell Smith’s spring, climbing over the fence or crawling under it with our ' bucket. And the fights! Everyone wanted to get that water. Miss Ida used to have to assign somebody in order to stop all the fightin’.”

Once the water was hauled back to the school house, it was emptied into a big cooler, a blue and white i