Every oldtimer can tell you of trekking to school either through deep snow or across the burning sands, depending on the locality and his audience. Now, I have an entirely different story about a schoolhouse that crossed the burning sands to reach the school children.

When I went to school here in Jal, the high school classes were held in a little three- room frame building that sat just about where the administration building is now located. It was later referred to as the Home-Ec building; but I believe that the name was a goal and not a reality, because the closest thing to Home Economics in that building was an odd- shaped room that might have been a kitchen at one time or another. When I attended there were three classrooms--one large room divided by a colonade, one small classroom, and the principal's office.

The grade school and junior high were situated in a large frame building resting pretty close to where the swimming pool is now. That structure had about six rooms, as I recall. It could have been eight, because it had a removable partition between two of the rooms that enabled them to open the rooms up for a small auditorium.

The outdoor facilities consisted of two johns with multilevel seating, a basketball court with multilevel baskets, and a bare spot down the hill for football that didn't have a level spot on it. You will hear golfers refer to the fact that 'local knowledge' or knowing the perculiarities of a golf course can be a great help when you play. Well, when you played basketball or football in Jal 'local knowledge' was almost essential. Actually, Jal was about average for the area in that day and time--we didn't have much, but our neighbors weren't getting along too hot either.

To get back to the business at hand about our 'traveling schoolhouse.' The large schoolhouse (the eight-roomer) was originally built out at Cooper. Then, as activity shifted, it was moved from Cooper to a point East of highway 18, and North of the Andrews highway. After a short while it was moved again down to where I found it when I came to town. That doesn't sound like much of a chore nowadays; but when you consider the first move was accomplished with horses, that eight-room building was literally drug six miles across some less than hospitable landscape.

That was a hardy bunch of characters that smoothed out a place for us to live and raise our families.