Jack Mason’s signature book, “Summer Town,” recounts the history of Inverness. Oddly, it contains no mention of life in the village during the war years of the 1940s.

A memoir that recently came my way helps close this information gap, at least for a fourth-grade youngster whose family moved to town in the spring of 1943. Inverness had its own elementary school district back then, and the Inverness and Inverness Park students from first through eighth grade attended a one-room school on the Inverness mesa that had been built in 1908. 

One corner of the large space was partitioned off for the first three grades (there was no kindergarten), and the main space was used by grades four through eight. There was a row of desks for each grade, and when you were promoted you moved to the next row.

The school day concentrated on academics in the morning, then shifted to art and music in the afternoon. Art came first, right after lunch, and the school was equipped with a large floor-model radio. The radio was switched on each day at the appointed hour for art class—which also happened to be when the daily “soaps” came on. While they dabbled away with their watercolors, the Inverness kids kept avidly up to date with the thrilling lives of “Mary Noble, Backstage Wife” and “Stella Dallas.”

What were they painting? They filled in scenes outlined on dittos produced from the school’s own, although “antique,” ditto machine. The job of running the ditto machine was a much-coveted assignment.

Some afternoons, all the school’s children got together for singing around the piano, played by Mrs. Frieda Mulvaney, the teacher for grades one through three. The “Hit Parade” songs of the day were popular, and everyone knew the words to all the tunes. Everyone also knew by heart the campfire classics, such as “Don’t Fence Me In,” “When It’s Night Time in Nevada” and “I Saw a Peaceful Old Valley.” 

Patriotic and wartime songs, such as “Over There,” also had great appeal. One that became a favorite was the “Army Air Corps” hymn, which the children first learned by looking over Mrs. Mulvaney’s shoulder to read the lyrics on the sheet music. When they read the rousing last lines, “We live in fame or go down in flame. Hey! SHOUT Nothing’ll stop the Army Air Corps!” they lustily sang out the word “SHOUT,” not realizing it was an instruction to shout the final line. (I remember in my grammar school around the same time how much we loved that song because we could holler that final line at the top of our lungs.) 

The children were acutely aware of the war. Gas rationing kept their families isolated in Inverness, which was especially hard on the mothers. The fathers went to work (several at the R.C.A. and AT&T installations in what is now the Point Reyes National Seashore), and the children had school and the safe and welcoming environment of Inverness to occupy their time. But mothers were stuck at home with only household and family chores to fill the dreary days.

Rationing of sugar and shoes was evident to the youngsters. Shoes were a special problem for growing children, because each person was allotted only three pairs a year, and what you got were flimsy, synthetic leather “ersatzes” that didn’t last very long. Moreover, Dad had to use up gas coupons to drive the family to San Rafael to buy new ones.

Sugar rationing meant that only rarely did Fleer’s Dubble Bubble gum show up at Mery’s store. When word reached the schoolyard that bubble gum had arrived, every child with 2 cents in their pocket made a beeline to town in hopes of snagging a cylinder of the rare pink treat.

Patriotism was important to the children. After school somedays, the older ones walked up the mesa to the Highland Lodge, where the Red Cross organized them to assemble packages of essentials, such as bandages and socks and cigarettes (!), to be sent to the troops overseas.

The girl whose memoir I’ve been reading notes that she felt frustrated that she wasn’t contributing more to the war effort. “Every night before I went to bed I would stand at attention and systematically turn to each direction of the compass and, with a crisp salute, proclaim, ‘I AM AN AMERICAN GIRL.’”

They were well-behaved children. They were also keenly aware of the whip that their teacher, Mrs. Collier, kept in a closet. Occasionally, the whip would be brought out into the open and placed, ominously, on top of the heater. That quickly quelled any incipient unruliness.

Until the day a new boy who had been shipped in to live with an aunt in Inverness defied Mrs. Collier when she disapproved of his efforts in penmanship class. “Sit down and do your work,” she commanded. “I’ll sit down, but I won’t do the work,” the boy retorted. There followed several tension-intensifying rounds of this exchange, with neither party willing to yield.

The class went deathly silent as Mrs. Collier turned toward the closet. When she returned, the boy was given one more chance to obey, but with tears streaming down his face (according to our chronicler) he again refused. Without another word and with a deft flick of the wrist, Mrs. Collier wrapped the working end of the whip around the boy’s legs. Crying but not flinching or uttering a word, he ran out of the classroom. In the writer’s recollection, neither the boy nor the whip was ever seen again at the Inverness School.

In the 1940s, Wade Holland, today a resident of Inverness, was an obedient boy in a very progressive elementary school in Long Beach, Calif., where there were definitely no whips.