Remembering the first day at Valley View

By Mike Weland

Until midway through the eighth grade, both Helen Seaman and Irene Merrifield knew they were small town girls. Though neither was tame by any stretch of the imagination, Helen was slightly the more sophisticated, going, as she did, to the few room South Side School in Bonners Ferry.

Unlike most Boundary County Schools of the day, South Side School had heat — whether it was a furnace or a boiler, Helen can’t quite remember, but you didn’t have to stoke it with wood, and for Boundary County in the year of our Lord 1950, that was downright cosmopolitan.

For Irene Merrifield, who attended classes in the much more rustic Paradise Valley School, which was a one room school house with an old wood stove, memories of her school days before the start of the second semester of eighth grade had a more bucolic, “Little House on the Prairie” feel — memories of her dad, Earl, driving the “school bus,” which was no bus at all, but the 1950 equivalent of today’s Chevy Suburban, him hauling wood and going to the schoolhouse early to get the fire going so “his” kids found a warm haven at the end of their trek.

Of mornings so snowy and cold he’d forego the jitney and instead hitch the team of horses to a sleigh and pile blankets to keep

Rosanna Cartwright brought her mom, Irene Rice, to Bonners Ferry from her home in Genesee on Friday, where they met Helen Hill to reminisce of when their disparate worlds met in the long, pristine halls of a brand new Valley View Elementary, so vastly different from anything either had known before that neither ever really bothered the attempt to determine who the sophisticate, which he ingenue.

“It was beautiful,” both remember as one these 74 years hence. “Really uptown.”

And not just the building.

“Clara Hewitt,” Irene said. “Such good teachers.”

“Marcie LePoidevin,” both agreed with a moment’s thought. “High heels, beautiful dresses. So sweet.”

Helen and Irene were both in that first graduating eighth grade class that year after that most beautiful school in the world opened its doors.

They both graduated Bonners Ferry High School in 1954 and followed their own path, but neither let go of the one string that’s become the warp and weft of a rich tapestry of a friendship that can never be replicated, never be replaced.

Keeping meaningful and accurate notes proven beyond my abilities as they spoke as one … one would embark on an answer and somewhere along the way, unseen, unheard, unnoticed, you realized the other had taken over.

“We’d been gifted with something special,” one said. “I loved that old school,” said the other. “It smells like lunch,”

Both closed their eyes as if savoring what no one else could discern, smiled and nodded, their secret lost on Rosanna and I.

Helen worked as a cook at Valley View for years and seemed surprised we didn’t understand.

“The building was new then and mostly empty, it was still fresh,” Helen said. “It hadn’t yet taken on a smell of its own. Even the water fountains were new.”

Irene had a similar experience took a walk through Valley View not so long ago and came away feeling she wasn’t in the same school, that it was smaller somehow. Then it dawned on her … all the spaces that had been empty when she’d attended class had, over the course of decades, become filled, most to the point of overflowing. Walls mostly bare in 1950 were now covered with teaching aids and posters and the art of generations.

During the war, Irene’s Dad helped disassemble Farragut Naval Station, and she took a certain pride in learning that much of what he’d helped salvage came north to be used to build the new school. To save the taxpayer. Even when it was brand new a lot of what went into building Valley View was old.

Both Helen and Irene loved school.

“I had way too much fun in school,” Helen said, eyes sparkling.

“I loved school,” Irene said.

“A lot of Rice kids went into teaching,” Rosanna, one of Irene’s nine children and herself just one who is an educator, said. “I think we were hard-wired for education.”

Both Helen and Irene know and appreciate how much the people of Boundary gave — more than most, they feel the new elementary school they entered at the beginning of second semester in 1950, a school that felt safe, was a gift to them personally

“I don’t know how the county can afford higher taxes,” Helen said, “but I can see both sides … we need more room.”

“We need a new school,” Irene said.

On November, Boundary County School District 101 officials will ask local voters to renew the expiring two-year $2.4-million supplemental Maintenance and Operation Levy, which pays for safety, security, maintenance, all extra/co-curricular activities, special programs, salaries and benefits above what the State of Idaho funds, field trips, curricular materials, some technology, and a new bus each year, as well as a $10.5-million bond to replace Valley View Elementary.

School district officials will hold an informational meeting at 6 p.m. today in the Boundary County Middle School Library tp provide factual information on both measures and to answer any questions.

District officials are also available to put on the presentation to groups and organizations within the community.

You can call superintendent Jan Bayer at (208) 267-3146 or email jan.bayer@mail.bcsd101.com to schedule a time.