Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - How Did You Get to School?

Here is our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing:

1)  How did you get to your school(s) through high school?

2)  Tell us in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or on Facebook or Google+.  Please leave a comment on this post with a link to your post.

My first years were in Pittsburg, California, until we moved in Spring of my Third grade year.

Kindergarten. I am not completely sure how I got to school in the early years. I attended Kindergarten at the Pittsburg Primary School. It was three blocks away and my mother did not drive. My guess, we walked there. There would have been a stroller coming along, too, because I had two younger brothers, aged 3, and 1.

First through mid-Third grade. I attended St. Peter Martyr School at 560 Montezuma Street. I imagine someone drove me to school, perhaps my grandmother. I do remember walking to school with my brother, so that would have been my third grade year, as he was two years behind me. When it rained, my mother sometimes sent a taxi to pick us up. She still did not drive, nor did we have an extra car. I checked my baby book, and my mother wrote that I walked to school, and that I walked alone to the library, two blocks away. She does not say how old I am.

We moved to Walnut Creek, California in April 1963.

Third through Eighth. We  rode the bus with our neighbors, the Dannels to Parkmead Elementary and Intermediate Schools, which were adjacent to each other. We had to walk over to the next block to catch the bus. Later, when the new Olympic Blvd was built, our stop was at the bottom of the hill. Sometime before the end of Sixth grade, we started walking home. Our stop was last. That was fine in the morning but it took almost an hour to get home in the afternoons. We either walked along Olympic, cut through an empty lot to get to Magnolia and then on to the school, or jumped to creek at the other end of our street, cut through Mr. Newell’s property, and then walked along Newell Avenue to school. It didn’t work well in the winter, as the creek was too wide to jump.

My sister Sabrina waiting for the bus at the bottom of our hill

High School. I walked to high school. It took about 45 minutes. One day, it was raining so hard, I kept begging my mom to drive me (she had a car and knew how to drive by now) but she wouldn’t do it. I was soaked by the time I got to school—and late, too, because I had dawdled trying to get her to take me. After we could start wearing pants to school (my sophomore year), I sometimes rode my bike. It was not a popular thing to do until the first Earth Day, then it was more acceptable. I didn't have my licence at all in high school, so never drove myself.

College. I drove an AMC Rambler the first year to Cal State University Hayward, along Highway 580, through Crow Canyon Road, and then through Hayward. Later, BART opened and I took it from Walnut Creek to Hayward, and then rode an AC Transit bus up the hill to the school. Riding BART was great—I got a lot of homework done!

Copyright © 2018 by Lisa Suzanne Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.