After visiting Hay Lakes - where, surprisingly, we met people who still remembered my parents - even after 70 years - my cousin Elizabeth drove my son and me to another community further up the road, to "Kingman."
When I was starting grade one (see class photo above) Kingman was opening a new high school for students bussed in from the country.
My mother was hired as their home economics teacher. Since she didn't drive, she and I lived in Kingman, in a tiny 2 room teacherage (think CABIN with no running water!) from Mondays to Fridays. We'd go home to Hay Lakes for the weekend. (Where we didn't have running water either!) Such was life in rural Alberta at the time.
Above is a picture taken outside our tiny home on my birthday. And below is a picture of my mother and some students in her home economics classroom.
The teacherage and the school are no longer there, but part of the former school building is now used as a tea house and museum.
There are interesting displays about life as it used to be...
I've been hunting through old school photos to send to them - for their school collection.
After our year in Kingman, my father sold his garage and we all moved 100 miles south to Red Deer - a modern city - and to a new house with a basement furnace, electricity ... and running water!!
But strangely, as a child, having to use a hand pump to fill buckets of water to heat on a wood stove for cooking and bathing - and having to go out into the cold to use an "outhouse" in winter really didn't bother me! I don't know why.
(This last photo is the front view of the Kingman School Museum. The first photo, on top, is a side view.)
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