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by Lauren Coodley with Lynn Wyckoff
Recently we read this comment from Barbara Henderson:
“A few years ago my sister and I went to Soda Canyon to see where our home was and
stopped at the old school. The gentleman who owns the school now told us how wonderful it was to see so many adults come back to see their old school. He also said that it must have been a wonderful place to grow up because everyone who ever stopped by usually had tears welling up as they told him how wonderful Soda Canyon School was.”
It inspired this essay. Lynn remembers:
In the fall of 1959, my parents moved us from the Westwood neighborhood out to Petra Drive. I started third grade at Soda Canyon Elementary School and attended through sixth grade (1963). It was a two-room school with three grades in each room and a multipurpose room in between. As you drive north on Silverado Trail, the school was the first building as you turn right onto Soda Canyon Road…what was exceptional was the large grassy meadow of several acres with the baseball diamond on one edge. In the spring, native wildflowers grew in the meadow and at lunchtime the girls wandered throughout the meadows, collecting wildflowers for our teacher which she graciously put in vases on her desk. In early summer, the meadows were mowed down to the ground, and it made me sad because I feared the wildflowers would die. Despite the mowing, the flowers returned every year.
Petra Drive is to the left off Silverado Trail after you cross the bridge over Soda Canyon Creek. We walked to school every day, walking up Petra Drive, making a trail through a grassy vacant lot, crossing the creek, and then climbing up the steep embankment to Silverado Trail, which we darted across, then finished our walk up Soda Canyon Road to the school grounds (usually just in time for the pledge of allegiance). When the creek was high in the winter, we had to walk the full length of Petra Drive to Silverado Trail so that we could cross on the bridge.
The kids that went to Soda Canyon came from as far south as Hardman Avenue, as far north as Oak Knoll Avenue, and from far up Soda Canyon Road. There were about 60 kids in the school, about 10 in each grade. Our teachers took turns instructing each grade while we worked on assignments. Once in a while a music specialist would come visit the school and we would pull out these very old green music books and an autoharp and sing traditional American folk songs. We learned the Mexican hat dance and quite a few square dances. When the Twist craze hit in 1963, we spent our lunch hours in the multipurpose room twisting to Chubby Checker until we got side aches.
One of the great things about going to a country school was that girls got to wear pants! All the girls who went to school in town had to wear dresses! We could run and jump and play without having to worry about getting our dresses dirty. And at Soda Canyon there was a culture of toughness: sports were co-ed and very competitive. We played softball, basketball, dodgeball, and foursquare with all three grades taking part. We played horses: neighing, rearing and galloping around the playground at recess and lunch.
My fourth-grade teacher was Mrs. Rae Jones, a short, round, soft spoken grandmotherly woman with a gentle demeanor. Some of the kids were so rambunctious, fighting at lunch and recess, that Mrs. Jones finally created a boxing ring, formalizing the fights and creating rules, since she could see, that fights were going to happen anyway.
We kids spent a great deal of time playing outdoors. After dinner, many of us would ride our bikes back up to the school grounds for a pick-up game of softball.
Mybrother and I spent many happy hours playing down at the creek. Soda Canyon Creek is seasonal, so it would begin to dry up in the spring, which isolated pools of small fish. We would watch these small trout, fascinated, and sometimes scooped them up and brought them up to the house. One time we tried putting them in our goldfish tank, but we had not accounted for the aggressiveness of native trout, which chewed the tails of our goldfish. The trout went back to the creek. My brother and I loved to make forts down at the creek. We collected feathers and pretty rocks to decorate the mossy branches of bay trees. There was a huge multi-trunked bay tree across the creek, which became the tree that I went to most often to climb. I climbed as high as I possibly could, completely unsupervised, and back down again. Never fell.
Our best, most memorable teacher was Mrs. Andrea Valentine, a warm, friendly yet no nonsense mother figure. She had spent a great deal of time living in Mediterranean countries, as her husband was a teacher at US military base schools. She opened our eyes to the amazing ruins of ancient cultures, particularly Turkey where she had lived longest. She taught us the hora, a joyful line dance of step kick, step kick, cross, step. She had a record of Hava Nagila that we danced to. It was so much fun! Every day after lunch, she would read a chapter of a novel to us until the book was finished.
In 1981, The New York Times documented the struggle to keep small schools open in Napa: the one and two-room schoolhouses that the Napa Unified School Board had voted twice to close.
A successful lawsuit brought by angry parents calling themselves the Save Our Schools Committee forced the board to vote a second time on the matter. Mary and Len Colson formed Save Our Schools with their Napa neighbors. Now two board members face a recall vote next spring that could oust them a year and a half before the end of their terms.
Part of the parents’ discontent can be traced to a 16-year-old promise. Back then, the parents say, the school board struck a deal with the area’s rural residents: Join the unified district and the tiny schools will never be closed. Donna Heine, one of the board members facing recall, said that none of the old board members remembered that pledge.
In September 1989, Soda Canyon became a school within a school, moving its 56 students into Vichy Elementary School five miles away. In the years since, too many public schools to count have been closed while private school enrollment has surged. Parents may be longing for the intimacy that small schools once offered to students. In the old days, you didn’t have to be rich to live in the country. Students like Lynn Wyckoff could pick wildflowers for the teachers and skip across creeks to get to school. As Susan Adams concludes: “It’s difficult for me to imagine Soda Canyon school without Phyllis Payne and MaryEllen Bess…the years with Phyllis, Mary Ellen, Mary Lou Schreuder were magical. I’m so glad my children were part of that era.”
Thanks to Stephanie Grohs for research assistance, to Jan Ohlandt for the pictures and to Elena Love for editorial assistance. New York Times, “Napa Valley tries to keep its tiny schools open,” Dec. 27, 1981.
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