Kellogg Junior High Memories...from my early years

This week it was my turn to assign the sibling assignment. Here is what I posed:

Think back to being a student at Kellogg Junior High School, think of a very vivid time you remember, and share a story about that memory. It had to happen at the school.

Here is Inland Empire Girl's pasta story, and Raymond Pert's bball story.

Well, I'm going to have a little different take on my own assignment. I'm going to focus more on being in the building, and not being in Junior High.

You see, when Inland Empire Girl was an eighth grader and Raymond Pert was a ninth grader at Kellogg Junior High School when it was uptown in the old Washington School building, I was also a student in that building.

My classroom was in the basement.

I was five-years-old.

I was in kindergarten.

I am amazed at how much I remember from kindergarten. I don't remember large memories, but little snippets of time that have stuck with me for 39 years. Here is what I remember from kindergarten.

*Seeing my sister coming down the stairs one day and saying hello.

*Going outside one day when it was snowing and catching snowflakes on black construction paper.

*Standing in line for a drink at the drinking fountain, and having BG and BE act rather snotty towards me.

*Doing a program at the end of the year, and I recited a poem about a top.

*Handing out papers in the room.

*Carpooling to kindergarten with the Lamb twins.

*I don't remember this...this is a story my mom always tells. When I was in kindergarten, apparently I knew how to read, because Mrs. Clark would ask me to hand out papers to the students, and I could read their names and was able to hand them out. But, apparently I was a bit stubborn at home, because when I was asked to read a book to a family member, I refused. Not sure why, but that is how the story goes.

As I look back at my earliest memories, they always seemed to involve a change in my normal routine. Even earlier I remember being in the Paulsen building in Spokane when I was four years old and having the gas mask come over my face, and the doctor told me to count back from five. This was when I had my tonsils removed.

I believe kindergarten was a special time for me, because I remember so many things, and it was such a big change.

And it was the only year the three Woolum siblings were ever in the same building going to school at the same time.

"I" Tower, Sandwich Game and Tonsilectomy...Some of my Earliest Memories

It is interesting to think back to some of my earliest memories. Some I’m not sure how old I was at the time. Other memories, because of what was going on, I know my age. I think when something was really different in my life is when I have a very vivid memory of that occasion.

*One summer my mom attended summer school in Moscow at the University of Idaho. I have a memory of running up to the “I” tower with my brother and sister. I was maybe three.

*I have a very vivid memory of having the mask come over my face, and being asked to count backwards from 10 when I was in the Paulsen Building in Spokane to have my tonsils removed. I was four.

*I remember having a toy iron and a toy toaster, and trying to iron or insert our cat Peter Twinkle Toes in the play toaster. I was three or four.

*I remember my brother and sister used to play “sandwich” where they would put me in between the mattress and box spring on the bed and then lay on the top mattress.

*Another “fun” thing my brother used to do was try and wake me up by blowing his baritone in my ear.

(Yeah, Raymond Pert and Inland Empire Girl SEEM like really wonderful people…can you believe the things they put me through!!!) LOL

*I remember attending a Tupperware Party and meeting a little girl named Tina. I was four. We are still friends today.

*I remember Mary McKenzie’s daughter babysitting me one time. I must have got in trouble, and she put me in my crib, because it was in the room downstairs that later became my brother’s room. If I was still in a crib, I must have been two or three.

*I remember being at Cummings’ house two doors down, because Lynne babysat me. I remember waking up from a nap one time on one of their beds. I was four.

*My dad was a bartender at the Sunshine Inn when I was pretty young, and occasionally we would go to dinner there and sit in the “Noah Kellogg” room. (It was the Noah Kellogg room because there was a large colored picture of Noah and his Jackass on the wall). The highlight of going to dinner at the Sunshine Inn was getting to drink a Shirley Temple.

The memories really began to become vivid when I turned five and started kindergarten.

But those remembrances are for another day.