When school was out

Cold winter nights and weekends brought about the need for some sort of entertainment to make the hours pass. Lester was a good table-tennis player, so we played some of that on the dining room table. He and I also enjoyed building balsa wood and glue model airplanes. Other times we played board games, such as Monopoly.

In the spring when the snow had melted there would be "sloughs" of melt water in many small depressions in the landscape. An exciting activity was to put together a few 2" x 12" boards as a raft and pole it around in the water. We were real Tom Sawyer types.

When school was out, I boarded a Greyhound bus for the 1,700-mile trip to Hermiston, Oregon, where my dad had a job in the ammunition dump at Umatilla. That fall, my family returned to the Drake area of North Dakota to take over part of Grandpa's farm. I spent eighth grade in another one-room school, then began high school in Drake in September of 1942. Lester started at Fessenden High School the same year.

Lester and I would get together very seldom. Farming in the forties didn't leave much time, or energy, to do a lot of traveling. Also, we weren't in the same high school athletic conference so we didn't meet on the athletic field, except for a couple of times when we played out-of-conference. We competed in basketball twice, once at his school and once at mine. The games were very close (although Fessenden was a much bigger school than Drake). As I remember, we lost both games to Lester's team. But sometimes my memory is bad, so I probably won one?

Lester's basketball team made it to the state tournament when we were seniors. That was a big deal for the farm communities to get to play the big cities. They even broadcast it on the radio. I remember in one game the announcer yelled, "And Seibold shoots from the center of the floor - IT'S GOOD!" Well, you can imagine how proud I was. They lost the game anyway, but what an experience.