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The Paisley Years

This page is primarily for the enjoyment of past and present students of Paisley School in Paisley, Oregon.

Sorry about the slow page load, I will work on lowing the image sizes later in order to make it fast.  I am rather new a building Web Pages.

Paisley School in the mid to late 1970s was a relatively happy time for me.  My parents, my sister and I moved from Vancouver, Washington  to Christmas Valley, Oregon in 1976.  The first thing I noticed was that most people there made a point to converse with everyone they would meet, and if you passed somenone on the highway you were expected to wave, whether you knew them or not.  I now live in Portland, Oregon.  I know people in my neighborhood, and I converse with fellow dog owners in the park, but many passersby outside of my neighborhood are not always the most courteous.  I have to admit being torn between urban and rural sensibilities.  I love the city in many ways, but I miss the stronger sense of individuality I felt in the country.       You can never really go back, here is my attempt at re-living a portion of my school years in Paisley.         Paisley was about 55 miles from where I lived outside of Christmas Valley.  It was a long, sometimes tedious bus ride, but I was able to get a lot of homework done on the bus.  It took a few months at first before I could read while riding without feeling sick, but I was able to adjust.          I didn't have a lot of freinds.  Most of them I just saw at school.  We were so isolated.  My  nearest freind lived about 20 miles away.  Of course, our nearest neighbors were 1/4 mile, the next closest about a mile.  We shared a party line with our neighbor who lived a mile away.         Paisley wasn't big on accademics.  I wasn't the brightest kid in the class, not by far, but I was vying for the top grades with Hally Miles.  I was quickly lossing ground before I got GED and joined the Navy in 1979.  I attribute my good grades to my relentless effort at the time, and the fact that I had nothing else to do when I got home.  Some evenings we couldn't even get a decent television signal, even when we could, we had to sit across the room from the set in order to make out he image.          I would have been in the class of 1980, had I not ran away and joined the Navy.  Through most of the time I was there the class consisted of 16 students.  We had a few teachers that we all favored.  I think the two most popular teachers were Miss "Mac" (McElligott) and Mr Froemming.  It seemed that they were always with us, driving us the hundreds of miles to sporting events and just generally watching over us.  Boy, did they have a lot of patience.         I was a very shy, timid kid.  Paisley is probably the only place were I could have survived.  There really was only one bully.  For the most part, it was a good place to be at the time.         There were the usual school pranks kids played on one another, like putting Atomic Bomb in another kids jock.   There was the time that my class played  a game of tag football and Micheal Branum reached a little too far and totally ripped Marcella Brattain's shorts off.  The other girls quickly formed a tight circle around her and escorted her to the girl's locker room.  I believe one of the boys said, "Leaving so quickly?"

Paisley School      1977 or78

Mr Goodman, Principle, Paisley School                        1978

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