Elber School

It was a small log building like all the other buildings that existed at that time in the early settler community of Reesor. At first it only consisted of one small room, but a few years later a woodshed lean-to was added on to it and the outside log walls had clapboard siding, applied to them. The uniqueness about this school was that it had a large colonial window to the south taking up almost all of the wall space. I remember gazing out of that great window with an unbearable longing for the freedom of the great outdoors. In the meantime, I would be procrastinating from doing my study assignments, then having to stay in to finish them, while all the other lucky kids were being dismissed. Our teacher, Mr. Thiessen, out of necessity was a strict, and austere man. He had to be, to keep order and control of his thirty or more charges, while at the same time trying to teach the curriculum of all of the eight various public school grades. There were some of us, who did not make his job easy for him.

Sadly to say, I humbly have to admit that I may have been one of them. You see, to meet some of the most essential needs of any school, we had two outhouses on the school property; a two holer for the girls and a one holer for the boys. The boys’ latrine had an extension to it – a wooden trough for a urinal with a crude privacy wall around it. As we all know, outhouses were, and still are the butt of many jokes and pranks. In fact, the old outhouse itself was a kind of a big joke.

One day, I must have been in grade three or four, as I was to attend to a very pressing personal need, I noticed some thing unusual as I walked past the outhouse door to the urinal. The inside hook had fallen out of the door, thus keeping the door from fulfilling its proper function; failing to give the occupier of the facility total privacy. Of course, that did not apply to everybody. The big guys could squat on the comfort seat, lean forward. reach out and stick a finger through a convenient knothole and hold the door shut.

What I happened to notice was the tip of a finger on the outside, sticking through the knothole of the door from the inside. I reasoned that the owner of that fingertip had to be one of the big boys, either Peter Bergen or Abe Mathies. I could hardly believe how lucky I was, having the great advantage over the big guy, whoever it was, on the other side of the door. I had literally caught him with his pants down. I could not resist the temptation of a great moment of opportunity. I picked up a short stick then quietly tiptoed to the door, and you guessed it, while he was inside I gave that finger a whack! Whoa! The language I heard! It almost shocked me as much as it must have shocked the poor soul on the other side. That was not one of the big guys. I had gotten a much bigger fish. That was the teacher, Mr. Thiessen himself! I hightailed it out of there, away from the door that now partially stood open. I was scared! Although I felt I had made a clean getaway, I was not totally sure.

At one-o-clock the bell rang. The noon recess was over, we all went in and took our seats. I watched the teacher. I could tell he was tense. We always knew when he was upset since beads of sweat would form on his upper lip. A couple of times he seemed to cast a suspicious look at me. Would he suddenly explode and unleash his pent up wrath on me? It was obvious that he had a very sore index linger on his right hand. When he went to the blackboard and picked up the chalk, he did it with his other fingers, allowing the red painfully throbbing index finger to stick out, away from the rest of the hand. For me it was a long and scary afternoon. When it finally was over, I felt relieved that somehow I had gotten away after having committed a kind of capital crime. It was a long time after when I finally confessed my evil deed to my most trusted friends.