Saskatchewan needs child labour laws (and teachers need bells around their necks!)

Way back when we lived in that close-knit and self-contained community of CFS Alsask, my favourite place of all was the library. I had a library card almost from the minute the moving van pulled away and I devoured entire series of books; Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames were real people to me. Lorna Doone was one of the most tragic figures I'd ever "met".

The library was in the northwest leg of the H-hut that was John A Silver School (aka DND School Alsask). I visited at least once a week. By 1971, the library had outgrown the space; a portable was brought in and set up at the south end of the school to make room to expand. But how to get all those thousands of books from one end of the building to the other and into another building? Why not create our own version of a bucket brigade? Scathingly brilliant. The kids in Grades VII and VIII were enlisted to move the books. Who needs to have lessons and follow a curriculum when you can put all those kids to work? There were only about 16 of us, but that was enough. We passed piles of books down the hall into the waiting hands of the next kid all the way to the portable, where the librarian arranged them on the shelves.

That year we had two teachers: Mr George Proud, who was also the principal, and Mr Bill Winter who was in his first year of teaching and also taught part-time in the Grave V-VI class. Mr Winter was responsible for supervising much of the Great Library Relocation. One afternoon near the end of the project I was at the new end; we were moving the reference books... tons of encyclopediae... I can't remember whose idea it was, mine or Peggy Stewart's, but there we were, looking in the dictionary to see if they had an entry for the F-bomb. We were so intent on our quest that we didn't notice that Mr Winter had come up behind us and was looking over our shoulders. Thank heaven he didn't have the usual extension of his right arm (the yardstick) in hand or Peggy and I would both have been sporting some impressive welts! (Yes, corporal punishment was allowed in DND schools in 1971. I was intimately acquainted with Mr Winter's yardstick and so was Peggy.) We only realized he was there when he said, "Too bad you can't put that kind of enthusiasm into your English homework. Back to work!" Whew... we got off lucky that time.

I wonder where Peggy is now...