Recess was the highlight of the day.  Fresh air.  A room full of 63 children was miserable.  The atmosphere was laden with every kind of germ in existence.  Stuffy and smelly in the winter.  Hot and unbearable in the summer--when the heat was over one-hundred, with no air conditioners.  We were like packed sardines in a can.  Someone was always sick--they came anyway, and slept at their desks.

I don't think the government thought through what would happen to the school system when they built the powder (ammunition) plant for the war effort.  People from all over the nation flocked to Pryor that year for the jobs.  Bringing hundreds and hundreds of children.  It was a mess.  The town was overrun with people who had nowhere to live.  And children who needed a school.

By the second year, the city had figured out where to put some of us that wasn't so crowded.  They set up quonset huts in the park for the high-school, and farmed the junior-high kids to church buildings.  Then the government built another school building--and sold it to the town for a dollar.

The federal government constructed "court-houses" for people to rent and have a place to live.  Hundreds and hundreds of four room houses in courts of seven.  Three facing each other with one more at the end to block off the court.  Until they built those houses, people were living with multiple families to a house--if they could find one.  Three bedroom houses--three families.  Or they pitched tents in the park.  Times were so hard that people would put up with anything to get a job.

After the war was over and the powder plant closed, people drifted away and Pryor was never the same.  The plant closed, but the dam that the government built on Grand river to provide electricity for the plant was an attraction to industry--and the hundreds of acres surrounding the old powder plant were given to the state to develop into an industrial complex.  It is huge.  Google just closed their California site and moved to Pryor.  They say that the industrial park is the largest in the midwest.  All because of a war and the people who stayed.  Tulsa runs on Pryor electricity.

Right in the middle of all of that, April of 1942, a tornado hit Pryor, wiped out main street, and killed over fifty people.  Many of the children I started first grade with had lost parents.   When I hear people complain today about hard times, I can't help but wonder if they know what that means.