James Laird - Lark Ellen Boys Attend the Sawtelle Grammar School - Page 2

The most fun was making paper airplanes which were thrown toward the wall on a windy or a hot day when the rising air currents were strong. The planes would catch an updraft and soar toward the top of the building. No one ever made it over the top but the one that went the highest for the day was the winner. We used several different shapes depending on the wind strength. My highest flyer was made by folding the front of a piece of paper with tight folds about half way up the sheet then folding the rest in half across the fold. Each half was then folded back down like steps with the horizontal parts acting as wings and the vertical parts as stabilizers. The folded front gave it the weight and balance to hang on to the air currents and was often the winner for the day.

We had a large playground covered in decomposed granite with assorted play equipment no longer found on play grounds. We also had high jumping, and broad jumping pits. Several schools would join us for track and field events while I attended there. They were a lot of fun and my first introduction to high jumping, something I never did well in ever. The running broad jump became my cup of tea and I did well in it all my school years. The fifty and sixty yard dash were also good ones for me winning my grade in them each year.

There was a garden area on the west side of the building and our teacher talked the gardener into letting us build a model of Japan by digging a moat around the shape of the main islands and stacking the dirt in the middle for Mt. Fuji as we were studying about Japan at the time (before WWII). We filled the moat with water and planted some plants for trees and put plaster of Paris on Mt. Fuji for snow.