1975: A Playground For Our School

      On Sunday, I walked the two miles down to the Takla Lake shore to talk to the Jack family.   I needed to confirm that their kids had indeed gone to the Lejac Residential School.  To my surprise, when I arrived at their cabin, I found the children still there, and I told the the parents that the law said that the kids had to go to school somewhere.  They urged me to talk to Frank the Camp boss about giving the father a job in the Camp.  I told them I would  do what I could.

            That afternoon I borrowed Shawn’s father’s pickup truck and my wife and I drove it down to a sandy area on the Takla Lake shoreline to get some sand.  I needed the sand for the sandbox I had built the day before for the school playground.   I spent an hour shoveling the heavy sand into the box of the pickup with the shovel I had borrowed from the mill.

    School was soon sliding into its familiar routine, and so were the evenings, with all of the planning and coordinating to keep all of the various grades busy during the next day.  Frank had come through with the wood and pipe that I had requested for use in building playground equipment for our school. 

             I spent a good bit of my free time during the weekends, digging holes constructing monkey bar turning poles and a pipe for tetherball.

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