Mr. Umbarger

I went to school down in Ceres. There I went to elementary and high school. We didn't do a lot of the things you do now, but we learned to read and write. We learned to work arithmetic problems and all that kind of thing, and we had science classes and history classes and chemistry classes. We had agriculture and economics, and we didn't have typing or computers or any of the modern things you have now. We had ball games in the spring of the year. We played against three high schools in basketball and baseball. We'd play ball with them every Friday.

For lunch my mother would probably pack me egg biscuits, ham biscuits, sausage biscuits, tomato biscuits, apple butter biscuits, or jelly biscuits. We rode the bus to school. It was an old bus with the seats that ran long ways in it. The one we rode didn't have no brakes on it. One boy rode up there and when we needed to stop the boy would grab the emergency brake. We didn't have no snow days. We went to school regardless of what the weather was. When snow got to deep; the bus couldn't get through it. So we would get out and push the thing.

I had a bunch of different teachers. Mr. Thomas was the principal when I was in high school, and Gabriel Orwin was the agriculture teacher. Mrs. Angela Davis, she taught all students. Margaret Touggle taught government. We didn’t have too many teachers growing up. They taught more than one subject, a lot of them.