SCHOOL DAYS

I never went to kindergarten, I started right in at first grade. I was living on Stevens Street so I went to Harbor School. My father did not want me to go to an "inner city" school. Can you imagine back then there would be an inner city school. A vaguely remember first grade I liked school very much. Sometime between the first and the fourth grade the music teacher told my mother that I could not sing. I simply could not make nice music with my voice. I was a good little student.

When we moved to Chester Street I went to Mt. Pleasant. The principal was an old classmate and friend of my mother which made a little difference in the attention I got. I was frequently called "the little Holt girl". In elementary school they would weigh and measure us and I would always get a blue card that would say I was underweight. Then my mother would have to take me to the doctor who would report that she can not grow two ways at once and right now she is growing tall. The principal lived in Hudson and came to school by horse and buggy. The horse would be tied up in the school yard all day. At that time the school yard was quite rural. On the last day of sixth grade I got to ring the bell for the last time and then they tore the school down and built a new one on the same site.

The next years are mixed up in my mind. I think I was sick quite a lot during those years so I missed a lot of school but I was bright enough so I didn't have to stay back. I had a teacher named Ola Dunlap who was a cousin of my father.

I liked high school, yet again there were teachers that knew my parents. I was a good student but nothing unusual. My favorite class was German. It was a very easy language for me to understand. I also enjoyed physics. I would take an advanced class after school. Partly for the physics and partly for the male teacher who taught it. In my senior year, the members of the senior class all wore purple and white capes for assemblies. I can remember going to football games at the stadium. I think my high school was on Spring Street but a lot of things have slipped my mind so I am not sure. I was a writer for the Tattler Magazine and I also helped write the class will. I can remember some sort of guidance counselor.

Most of the time I was in school, I went home for dinner. School got out at noon and we went back at two. I think towards the end of my education they started providing lunch at school for children who had no other means of getting food. I always walked to school except when I was in high school my father would sometimes let me drive the old Ford car. I would pick up some friends to ride with me. I would pick up the judges daughter and some other friends.

KEEPING COOL IN THE SUMMER

Field's Grove was a swimming spot in Nashua when I was growing up and when my children were young. It was occasionally condemned for swimming but I would go there when it wasn't condemned. My folks would bring us up to Silver Lake which would be a real treat on a hot, hot evening once in awhile. At other times we would go up to Baboosic Lake which was a favorite place. It was a real summer resort type of place where people had cottages and there was a dance hall at one end of the lake. It was quite popular back in those days. For a number of summers we rented a cottage on Baboosic Lake. My parents never went swimming but we kids did.

When it was really hot we would wear whatever we had that was the coolest and we had fans in the house. The fans would be scattered around where we would be. We had an icebox and loved to have the ice man come. We kids would run behind the ice truck and pick up the pieces that would fall off and suck on them. We wouldn't have ice cream at home but would go out in the evening to get some. I think we might have gone up Concord Street somewhere.

I don't think shorts as such had been invented so we wore bloomers which we could pull up above our knees if we got real daring. The bloomers were made out of a wool serge so they were not real cool. We wore midi blouses which looked like sailor's blouses with a wide collar. We wore sneakers on our feet with socks. It really wasn't a very cool outfit.

On several summers I was a camp counselor at Camp Sargeant. It was a day camp with a portion of it overnight. It was real exciting to be a counselor for a tent full of teenage girls. The sleeping arrangement was that the counselor had her bed in the middle of the floor and the girls slept in cots built around the edges. We did a lot of hiking and walking. The counselors had to come up with their own activities. We swam a lot, mornings and afternoons. The girls took lessons and learned the different strokes and how to dive. I remember one year they had horses. I had taken horseback riding before. We had to go into Nashua to pick up the horses and then ride them back at the end of the day. I took my girls to climb Mt. Monadnock. We slept at the foot of the mountain one night and then climbed the mountain in the morning.

Some years we would go to the beach for a week or two. Mostly when my father was leading the National Guard band he would have summer encampment somewhere around Rye so we would go along and have a cottage and see my Dad once in awhile.