Nave Family

In 1945 Rod started to school at East Newport School in Newport, Arkansas. He is shown here with a friend, Jerry Sexton on the left at the front of the school. Jerry is remembered as a good friend and I remember being very disappointed when his family moved away.

Dorothy in August of 1945, age 16. She went to Owensboro, KY for the summer and worked in the 10 cents store.

In 1945 Rod started to school at East Newport School in Newport, Arkansas. This first grade picture is framed in the same way that Dorothy's picture in 1941 and Wanda's picture in 1939 were framed.

This is an image of the East Newport School where Rodney and Philippe attended from 1st to 6th grade. I am standing inside the covered front entrance with Jerry Sexton in the top photo. Our Mother, Naomi Nave started to work in the lunchroom there when Philippe started to school in 1947 and worked until he graduated from High School, I believe. Under the back of the first floor were the two large restrooms for boys and girls. They were bare concrete and always smelled of disinfectant, but were seen as advanced by me since we had an outhouse at home.

The Lunchroom was on the lower level in the back. There Mrs Hayden was the director and Mother with four or five others cooked and served the lunches. I still remember the cherry and apple pies they made in large pans a little over two inches in depth. If there was pie or other food left over, the Lunchroom ladies could take some home to their families. I remember all the food as being good, maybe partly because I was a growing boy, but the small containers of cherry pie that Mother sometimes brought were so good that they remain and indelible memory to me 75 years later.

There was a room assigned to each grade with the First Grade front left from the front of the building. Mrs Grimes was the teacher and she was very kind and friendly, a good introduction to education for me. The Second Grade was in the room behind it and there I was taught by Mrs McAuley, who lived across the street from my Aunt Pearl Bunch with her husband who was the veterinarian for our community. She was short and very plump and, though caring, had a very stern manner. An indelible memory for me was that she often wore a dress with small black and white checks. At the time, we raised a number of dominicker hens which had about the same size black and white checks on their feathers, and when they were setting on a group of eggs to hatch them, they were very belligerent and would peck you if you came close. So inevitably, I could never look at Mrs McAuley without the image of a dominicker setting hen coming to my mind. Yet I remember her as a good teacher, and patient with me because that year I had a lot of ear infections and earaches. At our 65th High School reunion, Earl Don Rawlings again reminded me that Mrs McAuley would send him out in the hall with me to help me hold my ear on a sock cap against the radiator for relief.

Our Fourth Grade was in the second floor room at back right and I was taught by my Aunt Pearl Bunch. Since I was probably a bit rowdy, she often disciplined me in the classroom by making me come up and sit beside her desk with a sentence to write multiple times. Not only did she accomplish the discipline, she was probably responsible for me having very smooth handwriting.

In the Fifth Grade we moved to the front right second floor room with Mrs Watkins. I remember her very positively, and she was passionate about us reading books. She offered a reward for the student who read the most books. Mind you, they were small story books mostly, but I read 196 books that year, coming in second to Donald Stamps who read 200. Mine were mostly horse and dog stories and stories about Alaska.

The back of the second floor was the auditorium where we often watched films on large reels from a projector. In the Sixth Grade I was usually responsible for handling and running the projector.

It is interesting to me that this framed photograph was crafted by Catherine Burrow, who was present at our 65th High School reunion in 2022 just a week before this writing. She must have crafted this many years ago, because it was in my sister Dorothy's old photographs.