When I started to school in 1936, we went to a little one room school for eight grades. It sat upon the top of a tall sand hill located in Grant Co, OK. My dad, Orville Caywood, went to school at the very same location for more than eight years, but the school he attended was then called Florence. When the Florence school burned down, a new school was built. It was renamed Mt. View Dist # 61 for it's hill top location. Mt. View had one large room that I would estimate it to be close to 24 X 40 feet or perhaps larger. It also had two very small rooms that we called cloak rooms where we hung our coats.

My first teacher was Miss Edith Miller from the Jet area. She always arrived early and had a warm fire going in the big coal stove before the students arrived. She was one of the kindest ladies I have ever known, She took care of all of us as if we were her own children. The next teacher after Miss. Edith was Mr. Glen Yarnell. He also arrived at school early and had the fire going too, but we missed the tenderness of Miss Edith that taught us before him. The last teacher before the school dissolved in 1941, was a young Miss Edyth Leeper Childs. Our school was her first to teach.

The Riley children and we Caywood’s walked together. They met at our house and we joined them most of the time. They had to walk almost three miles and we walked almost two miles with little protection from the cold most of the way. We were chilled to the bone by the time we got to school. Many times we huddled in the open foyer of the school house to keep warm during those cold days and snow storms. I well remember several children crying when they got so cold. They squatted down on the foyer floor while the "big" kids covered them with their coats and bodies to help keep them warm.

I would never want to relive those days again. I used to get angry with some of our children for not being outside when the bus arrived and told them so many times of how far I had to walk to school that they had my story memorized.