The woodstove was in the middle of the schoolroom, and the stovepipe ran up and then across the room. One day when he started the fire, the smoke started billowing out. At that point, the students were arriving for school.

When they saw the smoke, they saw the smoke and kept their coats on and went back outside while my dad put out the fire and aired out the smoke. Someone helped him take apart the stovepipe and they heard scratching and scrabbling across, up and out the chimney. As they took the lengths of pipe apart, they found a squirrel’s nest, which had been blocking the smoke. They cleaned it up, put the pipe back together, started another fire, and started school a little bit late.

When my dad was in 1st, 2nd or 3rd grade, his dad used to cut trees on the land near the schoolhouse. On the way home, he and his brother Russell had to stop at the work area and haul logs out by hand (It was too swampy for horses to work). They had to work until they had the wood hauled out. My dad knows that he was four feet tall, because a cord of wood is 4’x 4’x 8’, and he measured the logs with the top of his head to see if they had been cut to the right length.

One day a man came to the schoolhouse door and said he’d gotten his car stuck on the dirt road. He asked if some of the boys could go with him to push the car. The teacher let my dad and his brothers Russell and Arthur leave school. Walk about a third of a mile with this stranger, and push his car out of the mud. The man gave them $3.00! Then they went back to school – muddy for the rest of the day. And of course they had to give the money to their mother and father when they got home.

Eighth grade graduation was the only time that students from his school got together with students from other Harwinton Schools. The ceremony was held at the Congregational Church. One graduate form each school gave a “talk”. My dad talked about the Leatherman the year he graduated in 1935.