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potato crop. It was always a great break to have this fall vacation as very few students actually worked at the potato harvest. This practice ceased in the late 19605 or early 19703.

When school resumed, it was a short time before preparations began for the annual Christmas Concert. The teacher selected drills, monologues, dialogs, and the traditional opening and closing choruses. This was long before modern computers and photocopy machines so we spent hours hand copying, into our scribblers, scripts from the two or three books that provided the material.

The drills consisted of a number of students displaying an appropriately decorated cardboard letter that would eventually spell Merry