School buses & stuff

This from my cousin:

Finley Burchinal came to school when I was there too - not sure if he delivered those Pennsylvania map cover pencil tablets or not - but I would sure love to have one of those. Why didn't I keep one when I had one? I loved looking at the map "to see where I was." I think he was in charge of truancy when I was seeing him there. I have loved telling people who grew up in other states that I grew up in Pennsylvania and we had free tablets and pencils. It put me up a notch higher than some of those who didn't get anything at all in the way of supplies. Some of them had to write on brown paper lunch bags - every note they took that day in school went home on the inside and outside of their lunch bag. We can be proud of our school. Tillie and I had to walk too. Every year the school board would have a meeting about busses and other stuff. We lived exactly one mile from Point Marion. So the decision each year would be voted whether we could right or not. One year they voted we had to live more than 1 mile to ride it. Next year it was voted that if we lived a mile or less we could ride. Wouldn't you think that they could have made a change so we could ride since we lived that far. Not that it wasn't good for us - but the roads were really dangerous and Tillie and I walked side by side - not one behind the other. When Jean Swift (Ham Swift's daughter) started walking with us - because we were older than she was, we made her walk on the outside of us and so she was sometimes walking in the ditch. But we still thought that was safer than her walking on the road with us. That may explain why she is not in touch with us today. haha We really enjoyed having someone younger than us who we could boss around...since we were the youngest of the family of Lewises, Barnes and Porters. I get to laughing about it every so often but then I rationalize that we may have saved that kid's life.