Wednesday, March 08, 2006
A Tale of Two Flagpoles 1959 – 1969 (part 1)
It was the worst of times; it was the best of times. In 1959 Kennedy was running for President and talk was of Camelot, in 1969 Nixon was president, JFK, MLK and RFK had all been assassinated, there were race riots in the cities and protests everywhere about Vietnam. The sixties began in an era of innocence with hope we really could make the world a better place. They ended with a sense that we couldn’t achieve world peace, man was just as flawed as ever and pursuing innocence was not to be desired.
I started first grade in the school year 1959-1960. We lived on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation at the St. Elizabeth’s Mission for Indian Boys and Girls. There were about 100 boys and girls that lived at the mission during the school year and attended school in nearby Wakpala, SD. When I started school I rode the mission bus to Wakpala with the mission kids. Wakpala means Oak Creek in Lakota and was located on Oak Creek which is a tributary of the Missouri. Wakpala had about 300 residents. Most of them attended either the Episcopal Church at St. Elizabeth’s or the Catholic Church in town. There was also a small Baptist congregation led by Pastor Rogness who also served as the local postmaster. I have a couple of school related recollections before I actually started first grade. There was no kindergarten in Wakpala, but I remember my mother taking me to a Home Economics class when I was 4 or 5. They were studying human development and were looking for live specimens. I cried the whole time I was there as I wasn’t ready to be separated from my mother yet. I also remember my dad going to O.K. Ehler’s, the school principal’s to watch the 1958 Rose Bowl as his alma mater, Cal was playing that year.
Our first grade teacher was awfully naïve. I remember a fellow student asking permission to visit the bathroom and using a vernacular term to describe his needs. The teacher asked him if that was an Indian word. I didn’t know a lot in the first grade, nor did we use that term in our household, but I had heard the word and knew it wasn’t Lakota, but
English. My parents invited her to dinner at our house one night. I think they thought it would be a good idea to get to know my teacher, what with their oldest child beginning his education. The school lay at the end of the main street leading into Wakpala. It was a K-12 facility. There were about two blocks to the main street between the railroad tracks and the school. Oak Creek ran behind the school. The town pump where everyone got their drinking water including our family was a block south of the school. On the north side of the street was the Post Office and Crazy Jim’s. Crazy Jim’s sold pop and candy and was set up like a bar. Maybe at one time they sold alcohol, but I believe the Standing Rock was a dry reservation and alcohol sales were prohibited. On the south side of the street was a community center directly across from the school and just north of the pump house. Farther down on the south side of the street was Larsen’s Meat Market and John Busch’s general store and gas station. We used to buy gas and a few items at John Busch’s, but bought most of our groceries in Mobridge about 33 miles away across the Missouri river. The younger elementary children were dismissed earlier and had to wait for the older children to be dismissed before the bus would take us back to the mission. This gave us a chance to visit the stores of Wakpala. My allowance was five cents a week in the first grade. That was split 3 ways, two cents to spend, two cents to save and one cent for the offering on Sunday. I didn’t have a lot to spend on candy, but sometimes other kids would take pity on me and share a little something. When it snowed, I learned how to “hook” cars and ski behind them as they traveled down the main street. Crazy Jim, who was a Russian immigrant, saw me doing this one day and told me he was going to tell my parents when they came to town. I can’t remember if he ever did, but I never heard about it from them. I remember an older kid who was in high school from up the river a piece saying hi to me one day. We knew his family somehow. Later that year he was killed in a car accident and his funeral was held in the school gym. I have thought later how many funerals like that were held in small town community centers due to deaths in Vietnam. I also remember being one of only two children that had to pay for school lunch. My father wrote out a check for the whole school year in the amount of $81 which seemed to me to be an enormous sum of money. The only other child who paid for her lunch was the Sherwood girl. We had a community Halloween Party at the community hall that year. She won the costume prize as a bright orange pumpkin. I remember some kids asking if she were related, probably because we were both white. Her parents owned a bar and gas station at Sherwood’s corner on U.S. Highway 12 west of Wakpala, between McLaughlin and Mobridge. Alcohol sales were legal there, as they were in both McLaughlin and Mobridge. Mobridge incidentally was one of the few places between Bismark, ND and Pierre, SD where there was a bridge across the Missouri River. The parts were shipped up the Missouri on a steamship and marked Mo. Bridge, thus the future name of the town. Being in the Central time zone they were an hour ahead of us in the Western zone. When we went to town you had to plan to get there an hour earlier to get to banks and stores before they closed. I had always heard about Indian time and thought that was what it meant. When we went to the white town, they were an hour earlier. We also had some native friends that told my dad he had to lock his car when we went to town because white people lived there. We had a fire in our school that first year and missed two or three weeks of school in addition to the Christmas break. The gym and the kitchen had to be rebuilt. My incident with the flagpole came about one day during lunch hour when we were playing in the courtyard in front of the school. We were playing around the flagpole and there was a rope that was used to lower and raise the flag. I thought it would be fun to swing around on that. It would so happen that a teacher came by just then and escorted me to the principal’s office. I was mortified that I would have to face O.K. Ehlers. I remember waiting a few minutes for him to show up, but don’t remember any repercussions from the visit. I had perfect attendance that year. We had an awards ceremony a few days before the end of school and I received my award. The next day I was sick and missed school. I was worried I would have go give back my award. It was also the day we were going to have a store in our classroom. Each child brought something from home to be sold in the store. I was going to buy a pair of stirrups a kid had brought. I didn’t have to give the award back, but didn’t get stirrups either. I remember the following year in November 1960 listening to the presidential election returns around the family radio. We had a picture of both Nixon and Kennedy that came in the mail. You could display both pictures or turn one side in and the back said President of the United States. My folks had the picture turned to cover Nixon and display Kennedy. I remember a visitor asking if we really supported a Catholic for president. I remember feeling a great sense of hope for our country with Kennedy as the next president.
It was the worst of times; it was the best of times. In 1959 Kennedy was running for President and talk was of Camelot, in 1969 Nixon was president, JFK, MLK and RFK had all been assassinated, there were race riots in the cities and protests everywhere about Vietnam. The sixties began in an era of innocence with hope we really could make the world a better place. They ended with a sense that we couldn’t achieve world peace, man was just as flawed as ever and pursuing innocence was not to be desired.
I started first grade in the school year 1959-1960. We lived on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation at the St. Elizabeth’s Mission for Indian Boys and Girls. There were about 100 boys and girls that lived at the mission during the school year and attended school in nearby Wakpala, SD. When I started school I rode the mission bus to Wakpala with the mission kids. Wakpala means Oak Creek in Lakota and was located on Oak Creek which is a tributary of the Missouri. Wakpala had about 300 residents. Most of them attended either the Episcopal Church at St. Elizabeth’s or the Catholic Church in town. There was also a small Baptist congregation led by Pastor Rogness who also served as the local postmaster. I have a couple of school related recollections before I actually started first grade. There was no kindergarten in Wakpala, but I remember my mother taking me to a Home Economics class when I was 4 or 5. They were studying human development and were looking for live specimens. I cried the whole time I was there as I wasn’t ready to be separated from my mother yet. I also remember my dad going to O.K. Ehler’s, the school principal’s to watch the 1958 Rose Bowl as his alma mater, Cal was playing that year.
Our first grade teacher was awfully naïve. I remember a fellow student asking permission to visit the bathroom and using a vernacular term to describe his needs. The teacher asked him if that was an Indian word. I didn’t know a lot in the first grade, nor did we use that term in our household, but I had heard the word and knew it wasn’t Lakota, but
English. My parents invited her to dinner at our house one night. I think they thought it would be a good idea to get to know my teacher, what with their oldest child beginning his education. The school lay at the end of the main street leading into Wakpala. It was a K-12 facility. There were about two blocks to the main street between the railroad tracks and the school. Oak Creek ran behind the school. The town pump where everyone got their drinking water including our family was a block south of the school. On the north side of the street was the Post Office and Crazy Jim’s. Crazy Jim’s sold pop and candy and was set up like a bar. Maybe at one time they sold alcohol, but I believe the Standing Rock was a dry reservation and alcohol sales were prohibited. On the south side of the street was a community center directly across from the school and just north of the pump house. Farther down on the south side of the street was Larsen’s Meat Market and John Busch’s general store and gas station. We used to buy gas and a few items at John Busch’s, but bought most of our groceries in Mobridge about 33 miles away across the Missouri river. The younger elementary children were dismissed earlier and had to wait for the older children to be dismissed before the bus would take us back to the mission. This gave us a chance to visit the stores of Wakpala. My allowance was five cents a week in the first grade. That was split 3 ways, two cents to spend, two cents to save and one cent for the offering on Sunday. I didn’t have a lot to spend on candy, but sometimes other kids would take pity on me and share a little something. When it snowed, I learned how to “hook” cars and ski behind them as they traveled down the main street. Crazy Jim, who was a Russian immigrant, saw me doing this one day and told me he was going to tell my parents when they came to town. I can’t remember if he ever did, but I never heard about it from them. I remember an older kid who was in high school from up the river a piece saying hi to me one day. We knew his family somehow. Later that year he was killed in a car accident and his funeral was held in the school gym. I have thought later how many funerals like that were held in small town community centers due to deaths in Vietnam. I also remember being one of only two children that had to pay for school lunch. My father wrote out a check for the whole school year in the amount of $81 which seemed to me to be an enormous sum of money. The only other child who paid for her lunch was the Sherwood girl. We had a community Halloween Party at the community hall that year. She won the costume prize as a bright orange pumpkin. I remember some kids asking if she were related, probably because we were both white. Her parents owned a bar and gas station at Sherwood’s corner on U.S. Highway 12 west of Wakpala, between McLaughlin and Mobridge. Alcohol sales were legal there, as they were in both McLaughlin and Mobridge. Mobridge incidentally was one of the few places between Bismark, ND and Pierre, SD where there was a bridge across the Missouri River. The parts were shipped up the Missouri on a steamship and marked Mo. Bridge, thus the future name of the town. Being in the Central time zone they were an hour ahead of us in the Western zone. When we went to town you had to plan to get there an hour earlier to get to banks and stores before they closed. I had always heard about Indian time and thought that was what it meant. When we went to the white town, they were an hour earlier. We also had some native friends that told my dad he had to lock his car when we went to town because white people lived there. We had a fire in our school that first year and missed two or three weeks of school in addition to the Christmas break. The gym and the kitchen had to be rebuilt. My incident with the flagpole came about one day during lunch hour when we were playing in the courtyard in front of the school. We were playing around the flagpole and there was a rope that was used to lower and raise the flag. I thought it would be fun to swing around on that. It would so happen that a teacher came by just then and escorted me to the principal’s office. I was mortified that I would have to face O.K. Ehlers. I remember waiting a few minutes for him to show up, but don’t remember any repercussions from the visit. I had perfect attendance that year. We had an awards ceremony a few days before the end of school and I received my award. The next day I was sick and missed school. I was worried I would have go give back my award. It was also the day we were going to have a store in our classroom. Each child brought something from home to be sold in the store. I was going to buy a pair of stirrups a kid had brought. I didn’t have to give the award back, but didn’t get stirrups either. I remember the following year in November 1960 listening to the presidential election returns around the family radio. We had a picture of both Nixon and Kennedy that came in the mail. You could display both pictures or turn one side in and the back said President of the United States. My folks had the picture turned to cover Nixon and display Kennedy. I remember a visitor asking if we really supported a Catholic for president. I remember feeling a great sense of hope for our country with Kennedy as the next president.
