School day memories

Yesterday afternoon  I found a picture of my sisters and me taken when we were quite young. I think I was maybe 9 years old  and my youngest sister was 5 years old . Our dog was named Skippy.  I noticed we were all wearing dresses ( that's what we wore when we went to school, no jeans or pants except when the weather was cold & snowy) then we could wear them under our dresses. Anyway, I was thinking back about how much work it must have been for my mom with 4 little girls wearing dresses to school everyday.. Her ironing must have taken forever to do. That was in the mid  50's. I remember my old elementary school and looked on line for a picture. This is the only one I found.  Roosevelt Elementary in Yakima, Washington.

I do remember the school being old with lots of steps up the front and inside it smelled of old paint stain and had really shiny polished wood floors.  Outside were two huge old trees where we sat, giggled and carved our initials in the trunk, when we weren't playing jump rope or hopscotch. Those trees are gone now & the school has been demolished and re built.

I recently purchased a lunchbox like I had when I went to grade school on Ebay.  My mom packed it with  a peanut butter & jelly sandwich, an apple or a banana and carrot or celery sticks and one cookie all wrapped in wax paper..I remember how that lunch box smelled after I broke the thermos and the milk soured, even after several scrubbings. My first grade class was in the basement, and we had a cafeteria where we took our lunches upstairs and bought milk for 5 cents for lunch and another 5 cents for afternoon snack during school or somedays we bought them for 25 cents.  We could also buy ice cream for 5 cents and sometimes I would spend my nickle on that instead of the milk, hoping I wouldn't get in trouble if my mom found out....I think we must have been really on a tight budget and 5 cents was not often extra change. Yes, those were the days...do you remember your elementary school? I have very good memories of this school that I attended for 5 years before we moved out of  the city.