Guest Post: by Signa Mascot

For school work, Signa (my 11-year-old daughter) did a report on the history of Tracy, California.  She decided to focus on the schools in Tracy, but also decided to use census records to learn about the founder of the Tracy schools.   Then we took a trip to the cemetery to photograph Rufus' grave. I think she did a great job!!!

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The History of Tracy Schools

By Signa Mascot

The first school of Tracy was decided when a farmer named Rufus Saddlemire made a petition to make a school.

Rufus Saddlemire was born in 1832 in New York and then moved to Tracy. In that time he was a farmer and lived with his wife Helen Beverly who was born in 1838 and his son Jesse Saddlemire who was born in 1880.

Rufus knew that he wanted his children to have a good education, but there were no schools in Tracy.  In that time Tracy was still a coal mining city with not many children living there. Rufus made a school petition, and then in 1866, the Willow School District was made. 

Years went by, and Willow Schoolhouse wasn’t big enough to hold so many children and classes, so one class was held in an unused part of the Methodist church. Eventually, more schools were made, such as Tracy Grammar School built in 1912, West Park  and Southside Schools in 1920, West Side built in 1928, Central Grammar School built in 1938, and  Banta in 1950.  After 1938 Tracy Grammar School served different purposes like the Service Men’s Club and Town Hall, but in 1961, the building was torn down. There is another school, Early Day, which I cannot find the year it was built.  New Jerusalem School was built in Tracy in 1874, but it was outside of this school district.

In conclusion, one man who wanted his child to have a good education started a whole school district in Tracy and helped make Tracy a city.

Bibliography

Tracy Historical Society. Images of America Tracy.  Great Britain, Arcadia Publishing, 2004.

http://www.ancestry.com 1900 United States Census for Rufus Saddlemire, 1900.

http://www.newjfalcons.com/newjprofile New Jerusalem School’s History, 2013-2014.

http://www.findagrave.com. Tracy Public Cemetery, 2014

Tracy Public Cemetery Visit. March 19, 2014.  Tracy, California.

I Am No Longer Going to Be A Writer

I've been really wanting to be a writer lately. I've been listening to writing podcasts, reading books about writing, studying the process of writing, setting up my home office with writing in mind. Doing everything I can to be a writer except... writing.

Why? Why does my passion not have me passionate about it? Why can I think of nothing I want to write about except my ancestors' stories? I want to write fiction. I want to have a great idea for a great story and write it. Greatly. But instead, I'm stuck with writing the truth. Not even my own truth, but the truth of the lives of people no one except me really cares about. They are fascinating to me and I'm passionate for their stories, but I really want to have passion for a fake story in a fake world where I can have fake things happen. But the fake never comes to me. I've got nothing.

Just now, sitting at the kitchen table with my iPad (not in my writing home office using the writing applications on my writing computer), I realized that I don't get to choose what I write. This isn't my job, where I would have to find a way to write what they told me to, whether it called to me or not. These people are calling to me-- the Mariani's, my Civil War grandfather, Grampa's ghost town, my dad-- and they are what I should listen to. I hear them; I just haven't been listening, as I've been too busy whining about not hearing the fake.

So I sit at my iPad typing this out and promising myself that I am no longer going to be a writer. I'm just going to write.

And I feel so much better.

 

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