SECOND YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL

SECOND YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL
What I am about to say may sound crazy to you! The highlight of my second year in high school was geometry! Having always liked arithmetic, and having gotten along well in algebra, I was looking forward to geometry, despite the fact that the fabled Miss Dutch would be my teacher. However, I had gotten along very well with Miss Dutch in algebra. My only concern was that geometry might be too difficult to master.
As so often happens, my fears turned out to be foolish. Geometry was not like other mathematics courses--it was a course in thinking! I was really delighted with it, learning how to prove one theorem, and then use that proven fact to help formulate other theorems and prove them. I literally ate it up! Also I learned a lot about the relationships of angles and tangents, and the sides of various figures--triangles and rectangles, and how to calculate the area of all sorts of circles, rectangles, etc. This was knowledge that would be helpful soon.
I had other new teachers that year, also, and learned something from each of them. We had a new basketball coach, and though I still couldn't (or didn't) "go out" for basketball, I was very enthusiastic about our team. We had a new English teacher, Miss Mary McGee, a lady maybe fifty years old, who was a fine teacher. And then there was a new science teacher, Mr. Shaw, who was my biology teacher that year. He and his wife lived in an apartment in the school dormitory. He had shelves and shelves of books, and encouraged me to borrow books from him, to supplement my reading from the school library. I think of all my teachers in high school, Mr. Shaw probably did the most to encourage me to learn everything I could, in whatever area my interests might run. We were good friends!
In those days there were no objections to having Christian ideas expressed in school. As Christmas approached, Miss McGee was in charge of developing the high school Christmas program. I remember that she had Wyatt Grant, Ernest Copenhaver, and me practice as a trio to sing "We Three Kings of Orient Are" in the program. Also, for some reason I don't remember, I helped her arrange a nativity scene on the stage. We had some cut-out animals, but didn't have either an ox or a donkey. One day when she and I were talking about the setting, I suggested that we should surely have an ox. Unfortunately, she misunderstood me, and thought I had said "ass," pronouncing the word carefully with a very broad "a"--like "ahse." I was too embarrassed to try to correct the misunderstanding, so agreed with her, and we found someone to cut out a donkey in cardboard. Thus we had an "ahse," but no ox, in our nativity scene!
Apart from my high school studies, the choir at the Methodist Church was also important to me. I think it was in this second winter there that I had opportunity to sing a solo! In those days the church had only a little thin red hymnal, with perhaps one hundred fifty different songs, old familiar favorites. We young folks knew those books backward and forward. I'm quite sure, though of course I can't prove it, my song was number 139, "Oh Soul Without a Savior." My voice was just changing, and I tried to sing it as a bass. It was not what you would call an outstanding success, I know. I didn't attempt another solo in church until years later! Once was more than enough!
I was still working during the winter months at trapping weasels. That winter I made two unusual catches. The first was a magpie, which must have seen the snowshoe rabbit meat I had used as bait, and become caught in the weasel trap. It was caught by one leg, and was very much alive as I approached the trap. The poor bird screamed at me, and it seemed to me that it was really calling "help!" Instead of killing it (as I usually did to magpies whenever I had a chance), I let it go!
The second catch, also not a weasel, I would gladly have let go if I could! I had set a trap very carefully in an old hollow cottonwood log, with some strong and supposedly attractive scent placed back in the log beyond the trap. I had already caught one weasel there, and thought that morning as I checked the trap, that maybe I would have another good weasel. Sure enough--something was in the trap! I couldn't see the trap, but the chain was pulled tight back into the hollow log.
Very casually, expecting to find a frozen weasel, I pulled on the chain, and then gave a harder pull when the trap didn't come out easily. On that second try, I found what I had captured--a fine, very much alive skunk! Naturally, he used the only defense he knew--sprayed his scent much too quickly for me to avoid his aim, and then crawled back into the log! Well, that was another learning experience. I went back to the house to ask Dad what to do. He had gained some experience with skunks when he was a boy in Wisconsin, and said he would help. We took a pole about twelve feet long, fastened a hook of wire on the end of it, and went back down to where the trapped skunk was. With the pole Dad pulled the trap far enough out of the hole to expose the skunk, so I could shoot it without getting sprayed any more. Of course, my clothes had to be taken off before I could come in the house, and I had one very odorous skunk to skin. It appeared to me to be a fine skin, when I finally got it off the carcass, and on a stretcher, though it was a bit smelly.
When the skin was finally dry enough to ship to a fur company, I had the problem of how to mail it. With my sister Jean helping, I got the skin wrapped up and placed in a cardboard tube, and covered with wrapping paper. On my way to school one morning I stopped by the postoffice to mail the package. Unfortunately, the postmaster said the smell was a bit too much, and refused to accept the package! Having no place to leave it, I took it to school with me, thinking I would take it home and wrap it up better for another try.
Would you believe it--someone in school objected to the presence of that package in the cloakroom! It ended, if I remember rightly, in my putting the package down in the furnace room at the school for the day. (The janitor sympathized with me to that extent.) Well, I took the thing home, rewrapped the package, got it accepted for mailing, and awaited the check. Finally the fur company, Beckman Brothers, in Great Falls, rejected the skin. Not only was it too smelly, they said, but it was past its prime, and worthless! So I got nothing for all my troubles! That was the last time I skinned a skunk!
The school year went by quickly, with the usual marble playing in the spring, when the weather warmed up. Again I was busy taking care of the cattle, helping get the garden started, and doing the usual farm chores. Almost before I knew it, summer had come, and I was out of school again. My brother, Robert, was now taking a home correspondence course in higher accounting, from LaSalle Extension University. He worked hard at it, in every spare minute he could find. My sister, Jean, was doing well in school, and would be a senior in the fall. She, too, was apparently going to be valedictorian of her class. I helped in the early part of the summer with our large garden, haying, and spent a lot of time swimming in the river.
A surprise was coming for me--geometry paid off!