Wednesday, May 20, 2009
although this states a condolence, I will instead write about my memories. Mr. Price, as I always knew him, was my grade 6 teacher at King George Public School in Kirkland Lake in the early 60's. He was always dressed well in his tweed suits and bow ties, had a skip in his step, and always seemed to know exactly what he was doing. He was a firm, but not strict, teacher but mostly what we students liked about him was that he was always fair. That was not a trait commonly found in teachers in that day. I can remember that as part of the curriculum we had to learn about agriculture. Mr. Price taught us about cows. Now, we never could get over how much he know about cows. It was at this time that he also introduced use to onionskin paper. We used it to sketch our cows and colour appropriately. Specialty paper was rare at that time and we tried to use onionskin for everything after that. To this day if I ever have to use oinionskin, I remember him walking in with this handful and explaining what it was. The other memory is of Fridays just before final bell, the girls would beg for Mr. Price to play us something on the piano that was in our classroom. The boys would roll their eyes and sigh but we knew that they liked it to. Mr. Price would play us a number of pieces and even Ken Weisbeckie ( the biggest boy in the room) would be tapping his toe. The Music Festival was a highlight of the school year and every student participated in the class choirs. Mr. Price would spend hours helping us practice and this was especially helpful for those soloists, and those in duets, trios, and double trios. For a month he must have lived at the school to help us all out. The best thing was that our double trio won first prize and Mr. Price came to direct us. We all celebrated together afterwards. He was just as excited as we were. Mr. Price somehow found out that I had married and moved to Perth as one day he showed up to visit me. I was so happy to see him. I can remembering being a little taken back as instead of his tweed suit he had a plaid shirt on. We both laughed at that. He was a wonderful man and I am so happy that I had him for a teacher. He will always bring back to me very special memories. I hope that this little note shows a different side of him that you not have known about.
