Several residents had gone to one-room schools. There were also two former teachers in attendance. Anne M. Squire began teaching at S.S. No. 2 Malden in 1939, the day after World War II broke out.
I also met Velda Mason who attended a one-room schoolhouse in Popes Harbour, Nova Scotia in 1932, and later attended Business College in Halifax. She remembers have all grades from primary to grade 11 with one teacher in the one-room schoolhouse!
Olive Hansen (Cleveland) said it was difficult finding teachers for Western Shore School in Nova Scotia. Students went home for lunch and the high school (grades 7-10) was upstairs. She told me she got the strap for being saucy. One of her teachers used to hit her students on the head with the bell if they were talking while coming into the school after the lunch break.
Ralph W. Smith went to the town school in Stettler, Alberta. The elementary and high school were all in one building with three floors. When the School Board couldn’t find people to make outhouses for the rural one-room schools, they hired a carpenter to build them at the back of the School Board’s office building. Ralph drove a 1938 Ford truck. In the 1940s, he was hired to pull the outhouses on a sleigh attached to the truck and deliver them to the rural schools, sometimes 50 miles away. The roofs of the outhouses were red shingles so that other cars could see him coming.