CHAPTER 4

Washington

We spent our last Christmas in Canada with Uncle Robert Clarke's family. They brought us back nearer to Spy Hill to Uncle Fred's for our last night and he took us to the night train for the West Coast. We spent New Years with Uncle Herb's family (they had moved from the island to Vancouver) and went again by train, arriving in Puyallup on January 3, 1923. We spent a few days with Dad's Uncle Henry Green and then rented a small house at 110 8th Street, just a block west of the high school.

Isabel, now Mrs. Chas. Holstin, whom I remembered from our first visit, went with me to enroll at the school. We found it difficult to apply my credits from Canada in the middle of my sophomore year of high school. In Canada, we were involved in every subject every year so that at the end of high school we were examined on every course we had taken. Now I found that you finished each course in one year; algebra 1st year, geometry 2nd year, English I 1st year, Literature 2nd year, etc. I had some of each course but not enough to qualify for almost any one course. I was allowed three credits for freshman year and had to take freshman algebra the last half of this sophomore year; then Geometry as a junior and that made it necessary to take five or more subjects each year in order to graduate in four years.

I shall be forever grateful to a girl who was boarding next door who had come into the school the year before. She was a senior and having come in as a stranger, she understood my problem of learning my way around a new big school. From a two-room school where I knew everyone to a school with enrollment of eight hundred was very disturbing. This girl took me to my first class, met me there, and guided me to the next all through the day until I learned the numbering system and could find my own way I didn't realize how frightened I had been until much later. I have often dreamed of standing with books and an enrollment card in my hands and completely blank as to where I should go.

During this year I went with Isabel to the Presbyterian Church, there was no R.L.D.S. Church in Puyallup at that time.

That summer, a home was purchased at 1111 West Pioneer. A shop was built on the front of the lot next door to a grocery store and my father set up a shoe repair business which did very well. Later he moved the business down town and continued repairing shoes until he retired at the age of seventy-nine, all this time making all his own shoes, forming them over lasts he whittled out from wood.

Isabel and Charlie Holstin were very thoughtful to invite me to their home and take me on outings with them. One trip was with their church group to Vashon Island in Puget Sound. We also went often to Point Defiance Park on the Sound and to the movies.

Our first Christmas there, will be remembered as the time we were quarantined for a month with small pox. I had so light a case we did not realize what it was but when Mother and Daddy came down with it, we reported it to the doctor and the sign was put up. They both had a very bad time I was thankful for the grocery store next door for they kept us in supplies. On Christmas eve, which started as a very dreary time but was soon made into a festive occasion, I answered a knock on the front door and found a little trimmed Christmas tree, presents and magazines. Aunt Eliza, Isabel, and Charlie came out of the shadows to wish us a Merry Christmas. This was our first Christmas tree we had in our home. While we were on the prairies of Canada, trees were shipped in and expensive. Only a large evergreen was shared by schools and churches for community Christmas programs.

This was the first semester of my junior year and I was carrying a full load of subjects. That spring, I was out again for three weeks with the mumps. With the help of kind teachers, I was able to make up back work.