My teacher in sixth grade was Mr. Stevens. It was unusual at that time to have men teaching elementary school except for Mr. Capps, of course. I don’t know whether Mr. Stevens was the first male teacher in the Heber School System besides Mr. Capps or not, but I don’t remember any others.
Mr. Stevens was an OK teacher, but I don’t remember much about what he taught us. I do remember that after school he would sometimes spend time with the boys in the class. Several times he walked with us down to the little café that was next to the service station and we would have a pop with peanuts in it. I guess he may have been the one to teach me to pour a small bag of salted peanuts into a Barg’s Strawberry Soda and watch it fizz up. I’m not sure that is what he would have wanted to be remembered for but it is one thing I do remember about him.
Another thing I remember about him is that he decided that instead of an end of school play, we should put on a play at Christmas time. That was unheard of in Heber but he went ahead and did it. The name of the play was “Santa and the Spaceman.” I was Santa and Charlie Reidhead was the spaceman. I remember there were some neat props for the play but that is about all I remember about it. I wore a Santa suit and beard and had a pillow to pad my belly. In later years I replaced the pillow.
I guess the original LDS church building must have burned down about this time because up until it burned down, the school used the church gym for basketball practice and games. We also used the stage at the church for school plays because there was not a stage at the school. Following the fire, a gym and extra class room was added onto the school building. The sixth grade met in the new classroom. It had some lab-type tables and we were able to do some simple lab experiments that were fun.
The other thing I remember about sixth grade is playing four‑square. When the gym was added onto the school we had a place to play indoors. Someone had four‑square courts painted on the gym floor so that we could play four-square in the winter when the weather was bad outside. We played it a lot and had a lot of fun playing it. We could also play basketball indoors and that was lots of fun. Unfortunately, we did not have a backboard that extended out into the gym. All we had was a basketball hoop attached to the wall at approximately the correct height, but we were glad for an indoor hoop. The only problem was that when you went in to shoot a lay up, you ran splat into the wall. They didn’t worry about having a pad for us to run into. It was just the flat wooden wall, but we survived.
The gym also had a stage at one end where we could put on plays or have programs. That stage is where I graduated from the eighth grade.