Gabriel and Hilda learned to speak
adequate English and continued to receive a Swedish newspaper
from home. Gabriel became a Canadian citizen in 1913. The naturalization
papers list his occupation as rancher, not `tie-hack". The
children learned English at school and from each other and were
reluctant to speak their parents' native language. Over the years,
their surname became Anglicized in spelling, from Mattson to Matson.
Elmer Hilding Matson was born
in 1917 in the house his father built, the ninth of the ten children.
The school that Elmer attended in Jaffray was built about 1916
for twenty to thirty students in grades one to eight. The school
was heated by a large furnace in the basement that took three-foot
lengths of wood. Whoever of the students arrived first in the
morning started the fire. It had modern flush toilets so it was
the latest thing in school architecture. Unfortunately, Jaffray
students were not used to such sophistication. They plugged the
toilets with left over lunches and other debris and so the indoor
plumbing was abandoned. Outhouses were reinstated for Jaffray.
A teacher at this time received
about $130 per month at Jaffray and boarded with a local family.
Although in the 1990s, school children have a reputation for being
rowdy, some teachers had a rough time in Jaffray, too. Pranks
played on the teacher included secretly dismantling the hand bell
so that when she rang it, the handle and bell separated and flew
in opposite directions, and gluing thumbtacks to the seat of her
chair. Another favourite trick was to fill a jam can with water,
tighten the lid, then place it on the hot stove to see how long
it took to explode. Once Elmer and his pals released a batch of
little frogs in the school. When the teacher tried to catch the
boys to punish them, they hid behind the big stumps that littered
the schoolyard.
