I looked forward to weekends. Then Dad drove our little ‘24 Chev – Old Sparky – down the long, winding dirt road from Torrey to be with us. He was principal at the great big Torrey School. There he and two other teachers taught a total of perhaps 90 students. I was proud that my daddy supervised and taught in such a school. I'd brag about him to the other kids at our lonely little school in Fruita. "Why, at Torrey, they've got three school rooms an' a meetin' hall for playin' ball upstairs, an' ya didn't need a hand bell to call the kids in from recess, nosiree. There was a belfry way up high on top of the Torrey school, an' a rope an' the bell was so big it'd pull a boy who was ringin' it right off the floor. I know, because my brother went there to the first grade." But how I loved the little old school at Fruita, maybe because Mama was the teacher, and I loved Mama. As far as I was concerned Mama founded that school. She was that school. And that was so with the other boys and girls, too. They all loved her. They'd bring her apples, pretty flowers, and, sometimes, a chipmunk.

But, of course, she did not found the school. The school was started in about 1895, the year before my mother was born, when Fruita was called Junction and Grandma and Grandpa Mulford lived there. And there had been many teachers before Mama took over, and many teachers after she quit teaching at the end of her second year in 1927. That little school continued to turn out good, knowledgeable students up to 1941.