Anne Bouquin:
CLASS OF 1975
Lincoln Elementary SchoolClass of 1975
Bradford, PA
Bradford High SchoolClass of 1982
Bradford, PA
Anne's Story
After high school, I worked my way through UPB and graduated in 1986 with a BS in Public Administration. That was a hard year to find a job in Bradford and I wound up being a couselor for domestic violence victims at the YWCA for 2 years until I got an accounting job at State Line Supply. I'm still there, the only woman, after 20+ years because, really, there hasn't been anywhere better to go around here.
After our 20th wedding anniversary in October 2007, my husband and I welcomed our only child, Jennifer, into the world in December. She was a complete and total surprise as we had been married so long with no expectations for having children. Jim will be 70 when she graduates from high school and you can do the math to figure my age!
That long honeymoon allowed me time to do all the things I wanted to do. My mom and I went to Scotland and Ireland in 2001 and were there during 9/11 - we left JFK 4 days before and came home to a vastly different home country than when we left it. I took a couple of canoe trips on the Allegany River, once to Pittsburgh, with the Allegany River Scholars from UPB. I had some horseback riding lessons and learned to play the string bass in a band for about a year in 2006.
Let's move on to some Lincoln Elementary School memories...
I'm thinking about the hours the girls spent jumping rope on the playground and the rhymes we used to do as we skipped and the hand play we did with each other. Mrs. Doyle had us for music and choir and Mrs. Beck did art in our classrooms. She used to say "Hands in the air!" to make us stop and listen to her in the middle of our projects. Miss Bickel was so good with the band and patiently showed us how to play our instruments again and again - what a saint she was to keep starting over with new students and letting her better ones go on to Fretz.
The principal, Miss Tozer, was also quite a great lady. Apparently the teachers had a specific break time for lunch and we all had to sit in the cafeteria until the break was over. Miss Tozer would teach us songs and led our sing-a-longs to keep us from horsing around after we were done eating. One was "Oh, I stuck my head in a little skunk's hole, and the little skunk said 'Well upon my soul, take it out! Take it out! Remove it!'"... Another was about someone swimming and doing the backstroke, the front stroke...and at the end we held our noses and put up an arm as if we were sinking in the water. Who can give me the words to that one? She used to say they were Pennsylvania Dutch songs and she may have learned them as a child herself. At Christmas the younger kids all learned the "Santa smells" version of Jingle Bells from the older kids, much to her consternation. She would ask us to do it the right way but there were always the ones who couldn't resist the temptation. I think I learned all of the pop Christmas songs in that cafeteria. Also, remember the mural on the wall there done by a class in the 1950's. It had things from Bradford in it - Zippo, Case, oil wells,and it also had nursery themes like Hansel and Gretel and the Three Bears. I think it may still be there. I'll look in the window sometime.
When my class started Kindergarten in Derrick City in 1969, we had to learn a new alphabet called ITA. It was phonics but it had all different letters and spellings for even the most common words. The t in "the" was even flipped over the other way and joined to the h. What a mess that was! My parents had already taught me the regular alphabet and then when we started school we had this completely different one. To this day I still have trouble spelling and it's all the fault of that ITA business! I think it was abandoned when my class was in second grade and by third we were pretty much able to read the real way.
I was so fortunate to have Miss Llewlyn for 5th grade. All through the lower grades we were all afraid of her because she would walk into the hall at the hint of any noise and glower at us - she stopped us in our tracks! When I had her for a teacher she treated us like little adults and spoke to us that way. She expected good behavio...Expand for more
r and got it, she read us books regularly, and talked about our subjects with great insight and background knowledge that made her class so interesting. She even talked about Creationism and Darwinism - in 5th grade! She had an office phone in the classroom that she had to answer when Mrs. Bish, the secretary, was out. She also organized the bus business at the end of the day and assigned jobs to the students in her class so that the bell rang the right number of times for whatever bus was loading next. I remember that she read us an adult biography about Amelia Earhart and in my mind I identified Miss Llewlyn with the same personality as Amelia for the openness of her mind and the passion she had for her job as teacher. She could be gruff and moody but overall she was impressive.
I also thought Ruth Danielson was a great teacher in 3rd grade. I came to her class at the bottom reading level (ITA trouble) and by the time I left her class I was reading at the top level. She was easy to please and once she had praised something you just wanted it to keep coming and she never let us down on that. She knew how to inspire her students to do better and for that I have her to thank for the progress I made that year.
For those us us who had Mrs. Wolcott or Mrs. Rupert in 2nd grade, oh my! I had Mrs. Rupert and I'm glad I can look back on that year and think she represented an old-time teacher out of step with the times. If someone put their head down on their desk, she plunged a yardstick down the back of their shirt to make the point that they had to sit up. Thumb suckers (there were still some at 7-8 years old) were given pacifiers to put in their mouth so they would be made fun of later by the other kids. The same for tattle-tails - squirel tails were pinned on their pants for the day. We also had to make our own flash cards for math and a few times I was kept after school to go over those darn flash cards again with her. The only thing I could do to please her was write stories on that large lined paper we had. There was a space at the top of the paper to draw a picture to go with the story and she used to keep her favorite ones from years past in her piano bench and show us one once in a while for inspiration. We had to take turns cleaning the room and I found a place inside her piano that was especially dirty that I would dip my rag into so she would think I had been cleaning really hard. When there was nothing else to do she played marches on the piano to walk us around the room between the rows of desks. We were so happy to move up into third grade!
The PTA had a carnival late in the spring at the school and they would set up a flea market and bake sale in the gym with things for us to buy. There were games we could pay to play but the one I remember vividly was a large piece of plywood with a clown painted on it and a cut out place for a teacher to put their face through the clown to let the students throw big wet sponges at them. A towel had to be wrapped around their necks and the women teachers wore shower caps when they had their turn in the clown. Miss Tozer was always the first to present her face for a sponge bath and when the teachers were done there were some willing boys who would put their face up for a sponge. Besides games, there were some competitions for fastest runner at different lengths and a potato sack or three legged man race. At another time our classes also took turns having a picnic lunch in the side yard beside the cafeteria about once a year.
The school is now the offices of Foster Township and I get to go into it now to vote or pay taxes. Walking down the halls of red and white checkered tiles brings back memories of being that young again. The classroom doors are still the same and the gym is unchanged except that the rows of wooden seats are not there and it looks a lot bigger without them racked up against the wall. The playground had to be demolished when some meddleing citizen decided that the township was storing their winter road sand and salt too close to wetlands and it all had to be moved to the playground and ball field.
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