Old Washington Grammar School


The "New" Elementary School

By Martin Keith Marsh

 

I entered first grade at the old Washington Grammar School on 505 Maine Street, Nevada City, in 1935. I had just turned 6, so I don't have a profound recollection of the event. However, I do know that my first grade teacher was Miss Gertrude Goyne, a veteran teacher at Nevada City Elementary School. My Dad often reminded us kids that Miss Goyne had taught him when he was going to Washington School. Eventually, she taught all four of us Marsh kids. (Mynola, Jean, Luther Jr., Keith, and Germaine). Miss Goyne taught for 57 years, and was a First Grade teacher in Nevada City for 52 years. Miss Goyne has, to this day, a reputation for firmness.

Mrs. Ruth Tamblyn Hooper, who was my teacher in both 3rd and 4th grades, told me (Feb. 6, 1995) that she was assigned the task of taking her little brother, Bob, to school on his first day in Miss Goyne's class. There was a long line of mothers, with children in hand, in front of the teacher's desk awaiting introductions. Ruth was well down the line with Bob when Miss Goyne looked up, stopped what she was doing and called out something like, "Hasn't the little boy in the back forgotten something?" Ruth had been a student of Miss Goyne herself, and was very embarrassed that the negligent lad who had his hat on indoors was little brother, Bob! Everyone who had been taught by Miss Goyne came to respect her as an outstanding teacher and a loving person.

Washington Grammar School was an imposing structure, at least from the perspective of a 6-year old. But the building was dilapidated, having been built in 1868, sixty-seven years before my arrival on the scene. First graders aren't expected to notice such things, and I was no exception. A Morning Union newspaper editorial (October 1, 1935) of the time described Grass Valley and Nevada City schools as "inadequate as to space, unsanitary, and fire-trappish in operative use." Enrollment was reported to be 420 students, up from the 271 just four years earlier.

Elsie Schreiber Sharpe was a member of the last eighth grade class to graduate from Washington School. (Years later she taught 2nd grade at the "new" Nevada City Elementary School, became principal, and after retirement, served on the Nevada School Board). She has many recollections about the layout of the school in its final years. Boy's and girl's lavatories were located on the ground level in the back section of the building. Girls had to go outside the building to gain access, though the boys could enter their facility from the inside. Ground floor, front, housed a manual training room with work benches for the boys, a sewing room for the girls, and furnace and custodial space. (Sewing and woodworking training were required for the upper four grades in 1915, but by 1936 the rooms received more limited use.)

On the second floor were the office and grades 1 through 4. Stairs and floors throughout the building were oil soaked from the custodial practice of putting down oil-saturated sawdust to facilitate sweeping. Elsie recalls that two steep sets of stairs led up to the third floor, where grades 5 through 8 were located. Bells signaling the start and end of the school day, recesses, fire drills, etc. were located in 4th and 8th grade classrooms. The two bells were operated like door bells and functioned independently for the two floors, since upper and lower grades ran on different schedules. Dependable 4th and 8th grade pupils were selected by the classroom teacher to ring the bells. According to Elsie, it was a "big deal" when you were the one that got to watch the clock and push the button when it was time for recess.

A music room was also located in the front section of the building, on the third floor. In Elsie's words, "There was a stage and a place where you could seat quite a few people." For emergency exit from the upper floors there was a big wooden outside fire escape that came down near Miss Goyne's first grade classroom out onto the playground on the school street side. Nevada City firemen considered the building to be a dangerous firetrap, and were especially alarmed when they heard the fire bells signaling a fire called in from the Cottage Street alarm box opposite the school.

Nevertheless, I was proud to be attending Washington School, the same one that both my Dad and Grandfather had gone to, and which in its early years had served Nevada City as a high school as well from 1877 to 1912. At the time of my matriculation, first grade was on the second floor of the three-story building. The big kids got the third floor classrooms. Miss Goyne sat at an elevated desk that helped her oversee the class. The platform on which her desk was situated had a handy corner that proved to be the nemesis of misbehaving kids. Offenders were summoned to the front of the class to sit there for a period known only to the teacher; the punishment was more embarrassing depending upon the disposition of the one being disciplined. The 1st Grade Class of 1935-36.

Behind the building there was a long, open but roofed over structure...the lunch shed...that extended out across the playground all the way to the fence line of the Searls residence. The lunch shed divided the school yard into two parts. On both sides of the divider were benches where kids ate their lunches, visited, and horsed around. If you were high enough in the kid pecking-order you might have had the privilege of eating your lunch seated above the trash box at the far playground end of the shed. Hard to believe in today's reality is the fact that the girls were required to play on one side of the divider, boys on the other. Humiliating for first-grade boys was the fact that we were required to play on the girl's side!

We neophyte scholars were scarcely settled into this strange, new structured environment of academia when it was announced that we would be participating in a lantern parade through the streets of downtown Nevada City. The purpose of the parade was to demonstrate faculty and pupil support for building a new elementary school, and it took place on Friday night, October 4, a week before the school bond election. Can you imagine today's school administrators authorizing a lantern parade to support a school bond drive, what with our over-zealous concern about liability suits? Would it even be legal today?

I have a hazy memory of marching in the parade...at least the forming up process on York Street, which opens onto Broad Street just opposite to what is now the City Hall. My Da was hovering around somewhere close by amidst all the excited chattering, and he handed me some kind of lantern just before the parade commenced. My cousin, Dale Berger, close friend and classmate through all 12 years of our schooling in Nevada City, remembers getting dressed up as a "Chinaman" for the occasion, along with our mutual friend and classmate, Andrew "Andy" Chan. Andy's mother provided the costumes and put the two boys up to wearing them in the parade. (The Chan's operated the grocery store that was located just up the street from the present location of the City Hall; they lived in rooms over the store.)

According to the Morning Union, the parade was a huge success, with the high schoolers joining in to promote the passage of a construction bond for additions to the Nevada City High School. "Nearly all of them (the students) carried the old time tin can lanterns, carbide lamps, or flashlights, and in the elementary division one section wore miners 'hard-boiled hats' with a banner stating they wore them to school 'to protect our heads from falling plaster.''

Also parading that evening were two women in a car with a sign indicating that they had been members of the 1st first-grade to pass through the "new" Washington School in 1868. Although we didn't know it at the time, our first-grade class was to be the last first grade to finish out the school year at the old Washington School! Realize, of course, that others can claim that their class was the last 1st grade class to attend Washington Grammar School, the last class to graduate from Washington Grammar School, etc.

Whether or not the lantern parade influenced the electorate, the school bonds passed, and construction started on the new school in 1936. The building was financed through the WPA. It cost $117,000, an early "matching funds" project partially paid for by the federal government ($45,000) with a local bond issue ($72,000) covering the remainder. The new structure, which exists today with minor changes, was designed in the shape of the letter "L" so that construction could proceed as classes continued in the old building. It was built around the front and east side of Washington Grammar School. Construction continued through the fall term of 1936.

One cold, stormy morning, right after we returned from the Christmas-New Year vacation, Miss Savory Ford, our second grade teacher, had us take our pencil boxes and other personal belongings out of our desks and line up in the traditional column of twos for the march to our new classroom in the new elementary school. The Nevada City Nugget reported that the move to the new school took place on January 4, 1937. Unfortunately about 50 students missed the event due to "heavy snow and bad weather."

By the time the authorities got around to dedicating the new school my class had progressed to the 3rd grade. Not that I cared that much about it at the time. Nevertheless, I have a related memory pertaining to the event. It seems that Mrs. Marian Libby, the music teacher at both elementary and high school, was putting together one of her musical extravaganzas for the occasion. A group of 3rd Graders was to participate, singing "Ten Pretty Girls at a Village School," a popular ballad of the 1930's.

There were to be ten of our 3rd grade girls (including one saucy little redhead) singing their lines while one boy danced around...sort of flirting with the girls as he sang. Woe was me when I found out that Mrs. Libby wanted me to audition for the boy's part! I was certainly embarrassed about all this, and didn't want my pals to know. And I guess it showed. Bobby Cozzalio had to try out too. Bobby was better looking, had a better voice, and...most important, didn't have the hang-up about girls that I and most of our buddies had at that age. At any rate, Bobby got the part and I lived happily ever after...except in retrospect, as I matured with age. (Incidentally, many years later Bobby Cozzalio joined the U. S. Marines during our Junior year of High School. He was killed in action in the Korean War shortly after his unit landed to take part in the battle of the Pusan Perimeter.)

 

Back