Along with all our other activities, we had to get a little book learning. So we four boys went to Ballard School, three-and-a- half miles away. It was a two-room school house but we had classes in only one room. The teacher lived in the other room with her little five-year-old girl, her two-year-old boy, and a pig. The little boy needed attention periodically, you know, like bathroom attention. Sometimes his mother took him to the bathroom and sometimes one of the older girl students took him. And if you think the bathroom was in the house, you are wrong. Now the pig needed to go to the bathroom too at times. But he didn't go anywhere--he just used the bathroom wherever he happened to be at the time. Nor did he seem to understand that one room was the schoolroom and the other room was his. He didn't seem to realize he was a pig. He thought he was a "people" like the rest of us. And when his little brother and sister were in the schoolroom, that little pig wanted to be in there too. Needless to say, when he brought his bathroom activities into the schoolroom, he disrupted the entire learning process as prescribed by the school board and the State Education Agency. Ollie Mae was not quite seven when we boys started to school at Ballard in the fall of 1917. Mama thought it was too far for her to have to walk. So she taught Ollie Mae at home through the third grade. Our little sister was deprived of all the higher learning we others got at Ballard. It wasn't all book learning at Ballard either. One day a couple of girls had to "be excused." In a minute or so, they came running back into the schoolroom with the news that there was a rattlesnake in their closet. (In those days they were closets, not toilets. And no one had ever heard of "rest rooms.") Anyway, we got out there as fast as possible, some through the doors and some jumped out the windows. Sure, we killed the snake all right, but it was hard for us to settle back down to school work. Uncle Simpson was visiting us at that time and he was on his way to Lamesa in his car and he happened to be passing by Ballard School when we got news of the snake. When he saw us leaving the building as we did, he was somewhat shocked at our seeming total disregard for discipline and order. He thought we were getting out for recess and he was used to seeing kids march out in a straight line and stand at attention until the teacher said, "Dismissed." But back at home that night we told him he had witnessed a crash operation in an emergency. He was relieved to learn that it was not always that way at our school. We didn't dare tell him how nearly this procedure approached the normal at Ballard.