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| East Gulf Grade School. The back of this card, from about 1932, has a coal bill from Mead-East Gulf Coal Company. This photo was earlier incorrectly identified as the Killarney Graded School, with a note that children in Mead, Killarney, and East Gulf attended this school, grades 1 through 8. However, Jerry R. Mason writes, "In regard to the photo of Killarney Graded (sic) School, this is actually a picture of East Gulf Grade School (EGGS), which sat atop a small hill at the opposite end of East Gulf than the company store (C.H. Mead Coal Company store) depicted in another photograph. I lived in East Gulf as a child and went to school there from the first grade through the sixth, corresponding roughly to the years 1939-1945. Paul Craighead was the principal at EGGS and one of my early teachers (perhaps the first) was a Laura Laturco (unsure of spelling). The school had one classroom downstairs and two upstairs. It also had a large downstairs auditorium which was used as the local church on Sundays. The church attendance register was left up in the auditorium throughout the week (apparently there was no ACLU in those days). The church at the school was Methodist and the preacher was Reverend Walter Overstreet, a family friend. Still, I recall the creek (Riffe's Branch) at the bottom of the hill was dammed up from time to time and people were baptized by immersion, so its possible (probable) that the church was Baptist at one time or another. William 'Bill' Clark was manager of the company store; followed by Luther Kerns; and Tom Gross was the butcher at the store. My dad, L.W. Mason, managed the poolroom (euphemistically called an amusement hall) across the small creek from the company store. Anyway, as usual when I get behind a keyboard, I have rambled. All I really wanted to do was to point out the fact that the picture captioned Killarney Graded School is really a photo of East Gulf Grade School, Also, because of East Gulf's configuration and the fact that there were no elementary school buses in those days, I don't believe any children other than those from East Gulf attended school there." |