Taurusa Chatham School

This is Taurusa Chatham School which is located between the farm where I grew up in the Central Valley, Visalia, Ivanhoe, and Cutler, California. There were about 100 children in eight grades housed in four classrooms. The two classrooms for Grades One-Four were in a modern 50's fabricated structure (no longer on site), Fifth-Sixth were in an older wooden structure building, and Seventh-Eighth were in the original Taurusa School building complete with a bell tower. My dad had gone to Chatham school which was just south down the road from our farm, several miles away from the Taurusa site. Chatham and Taurusa combined sometime long before I was born, and no relics remain of the Chatham site, but a rose cutting taken from my folks' backyard, which now grows in our yard in Annapolis. The main floor of the original Taurusa building was the cafeteria and stage. The gate in front of the building was the passage from the school yard to the bus that took me to school and home each day.

Shown below is the remnant of the old structure that supported two swings. Lots of time during breaks was spent here. To the left of the swings was a small play-field, and next to the fence were the bleachers behind the kick ball backstop. We had to stop playing baseball here because the outfield was too short. I remember one of the older kids once taking a swing at a pitch, and the ball went through one of the windows on the north side of the First-Fourth classrooms - no more baseball after that.

When I was in fourth grade, we and the older grades were brought out to the bleachers and told that President Kennedy had been shot. I remember some of the older girls gasping. The only other remembrances of politics during that period were a kid who was one grade older than me supposedly having a bomb shelter in his back yard, the Johnson-Goldwater campaign a couple of years later, and Winston Churchill's death. But all-in-all, life was pretty simple then.


In first or second grade, I remember memorizing poems in Mrs. Williamson's First-Second combination class; one of these was "The Swing" by Robert Lewis Stevenson.

How do you like to go up in a swing, Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing Ever a child can do! Up in the air and over the wall, Till I can see so wide, River and trees and cattle and all Over the countryside-- Till I look down on the garden green, Down on the roof so brown-- Up in the air I go flying again, Up in the air and down! __________________________ See reference for Chatham School by clicking here. See reference for Taurusa School by clicking here, with more photographs here.