"An Education was Worth the Temporary Discomfort"

OHSWEKEN - A re-union was held recently to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Hagersville Secondary School. Back in the late 1940s and early 1950s when I attended it was called Hagersville High School.

A picture of the first school built in 1891 shows a tall, two storey building with a steep roof surmounted by a belfry. The first floor was elevated and two sets of steps led up to two doors at opposite ends of the building. It is probable that one door was for males and the other for "the fair sex," as we used to call them.

This made the building look tall. No wonder it was called a "high school."

When I attended, the school had spread out considerably, but the boys still had a separate entrance from the girls. We also had separate lunch rooms where we ate our lunches out of brown bags. Cafeterias were still unknown at our school.

Of course, we didn't feel deprived. Education wasn't supposed to be comfortable. It was better to be sitting in a classroom than to be at home on the farm pitching manure or chopping wood. That's the way we looked at it.

You may not get many of the older generation to admit it, but you could say that a lot of us got an education because we were too lazy not to get one. An education meant a better paying job that was easier on your back.

I still think it was worth the temporary discomfort I had to go through.

When I started to go to high school, I used to ride the seven miles or so on a bicycle. Sometimes my companion was Ken Campbell, whose father was a minister at the tiny Bethany Baptist Mission.

This small mission was started by the Miller sisters at Sixty-Nine Corners on the reserve. Ken Campbell later became noted, or notorious, as a spokesman against abortion in Toronto.

A couple of years ago, I met the now Rev. Ken Campbell in Ohsweken. He reminded me about the time we were riding home from Hagersville on a hot June day.

As we approached the Boston Creek bridge, on the New Credit Reserve, we decided to stop and cool off in the creek. There was about 3 1/2 feet of water under the bridge. We didn't have bathing trunks to wear so we just laid our clothes out on the grass and went skinny dipping.

Earlier, I mentioned the lunch rooms. In the boys' lunch room were a couple of long tables. These tables were sometimes used for other things besides eating. Grade 9 was called first form.

First form students used to undergo initiation rites in the lunch room. All the "first formers" were lined up and had to crawl the length of the table on their hands and knees while their posteriors were vigorously spanked with gym shoes.

This quaint tradition was mentioned by Lloyd King of New Credit who entered first form way back in 1928. It ended in 1946, the year I started. Apparently the year before, some of the bigger "first formers" had objected to the indignity of being initiated so vigorously. A big fist fight erupted which greatly annoyed Elgin A. Awde, the school principal.

In 2946, this worthy gentleman strode out of his office on the day the initiation was to take place and called it off before hostilities could begin.

I have never regretted that this part of my education was neglected.

Our Town is an Expositor feature which provides a forum for news and views from some of the smaller centres in the region. George Beaver is a freelance writer who lives on the Six Nations reserve.