James Laird - Lark Ellen Boys Attend Emerson Jr. High School - Page 1

Emerson Jr. High was a new school and many buildings were still under construction. The mechanical drawing class was in a bungalow moved from another school and was a required class for all seventh grade boys. I enjoyed the class and what I learned there came in handy many years later when I had to make drawings of houses and buildings I constructed in Australia. To have blue prints made while living on Bribie island took a trip fifty miles away on the main land to have them made. Using what I learned from the mechanical drawing class I bought the blue print paper and using my own tracing and the sliding glass from the laundry window along with the laundry sink made my own prints in a few minutes. We had new buildings for wood, electric, metal and print shops.

Next I took electric shop making a soldering iron, small motor, a telegraph key and a CW radio transmitter. The first project in wood shop was a careta (a cart used in old Mexico pulled by oxen). The next was a model sailboat which was much more complicated and took several weeks to complete. The last was a canoe paddle which I thought came out very beautiful.

The gym was a large two-story building with a basketball court in the center of the upper floor. On the boys end of the second floor was a room with all kinds of special equipment. This was the place I had gym the first two years at the school. I was diagnosed as having a crooked spine, and as near as I could tell it leaned to the left because they had me swinging from bars high up on the wall with my left hand on a bar above the right hand and I had to swing from side to side for the first part of the period.