Earlier this week I was on the way to an area medical complex to get an X-ray of my right leg. Halfway there I passed a long line of cars of parents waiting for their kids to end their elementary-school day.
That’s something that was never seen when I was in elementary school in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Me and my friends walked the four blocks to the elementary school in the town of Rialto, California. And at school’s end, we walked home. Rarely did a mother pick up a kid. My mom was invariably seated in the den watching a soap opera when I opened the front door.
I didn’t have to ride a school bus until we moved to Corona, California, in 1964 and I began attending Norco Elementary and then Norco Junior High.
Those close-together schools were too far for walking. To reach those schools, I had to walk a couple of miles along a dirt path winding through several hills. My family had moved into a new housing development on the outskirts of Corona. Kids walked to the entrance of the development where we took a bus to school.
When we returned at the end of the school day, I’d often go into a nearby model home and pester the sales lady. She enjoyed chatting with 12-year-old me. Those model homes and their furnishings fascinated me.
In sixth and seventh grade, I first became aware that girls my age were becoming discerningly cute and adorable. As I waited for the bus to get to the development’s entrance, I’d sometimes sit with Cynthia on a waist-high brick wall and flirt with her. She lived one street away from me, and before too long I was walking her home after the bus dropped us off. Sadly, her family moved to Nevada at the beginning of eighth grade. As the eighth grade started, Cynthia was going ‘steady’ with a boy and it wasn’t me. It meant I no longer sat with her on the bus during school days.
Mid-way through the eighth grade, my family moved from California to Wadsworth, Ohio. We lived in a two-story house in the country a mile from the Wadsworth city limits. That meant taking the bus to and from Wadsworth Junior High and later Wadsworth High School. The bus would stop right in front of my house, which meant hardly any walking at all. That was convenient in the late afternoon. It meant I could race into the house just in time to watch Dark Shadows.
In the summer before 11th grade, dad moved us to southeast Ohio where I attended Fort Frye High School until I graduated in May 1970. No bus this time. I walked two blocks to and from the school. Déjà vu, eh? Yep, just like my days walking to and from Meyers Elementary School in Rialto.
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I’m Mike Staton and I’m an author with six published novels. Three are sword and sorcery novels, and the last three have American Civil War settings. The latest, which debuted on May 1, takes place during Reconstruction in North Carolina, and stars a newspaper editor, and his wife, a graphic artist. It’s part of a four-book series that will see my main characters head westward into the American frontier in the final novel, now being written. I’m currently writing that fourth book, which I’ve titled A Wyoming Dawn: A New Beginning.
Writing Wranglers and Warriors 