Thursday night was paper night at BHS The small town of Blunt plans all-school reunions more often than most communities, and there is a good reason why. The very youngest of the people still alive who graduated from Blunt High School are 62 years old now, the school having closed in May 1970 to become part of the new Sully Buttes district. So with age creeping up on all those former Monarchs, they use every chance they have to get together and think back to---pardon the expression---the good old days. As one stands on the south side of the school block nowadays, it's hard to imagine the square two-story school building that once stood there, housing the junior high grades and the high school. And over there on the north side of the block was the old wooden gym with its potbellied stove at one end of the basketball court, dangerously close to the east basket. A new website has been established for BHS alumni to record their memories of their long-gone school years. This column will be one of my contributions there. I didn't attend school in Blunt, but I was on the BHS faculty from 1965 to 1970, the last five years the high school existed. One of the best things about those years was Thursday nights--the night the newspaper staff and I assembled the weekly school paper. When in that fall of 1965 I approached Supt. Milton Nelson with the notion that we should have a school paper at BHS, he agreed without a question, but he had no idea what he had just "approved." Nor did the school board have any idea how many dollars they would spend on reams of duplicator paper over the next five years. No one ever objected---not to me, at least. Blunt didn't have its own community newspaper, though Louise Kozel's news items---Sunday dinner guests, vacation trips, bridal showers, Study Club meetings, Legion Auxiliary meetings, etc.---appeared in the Onida and Pierre papers. But what we created was Blunt's own paper, and the community ate it up. I don't recall for sure, but I think the high school student body numbered about 60 students, maybe close to 70 a couple of those years. Being on the newspaper staff was a voluntary thing, and I never had to worry about too few students being involved. Each week I would assign stories, leaving each staffer his assignment in a note stuck to the bulletin board. As each week wore on, the stories dribbled in, and as they did, I typed page after page of the next week's newspaper on those purple sheets which we would later put on what we called "the ditto machine." The pages were printed over in the grade school building next door after school each day until Thursday night arrived. That was paper assembly time, and it grew into as much a social event as a school activity.

We slid the typewriter tables to the side, located a long table in the center of the room and put each page of the paper, one pile at a time, in order around the table with the staplers at the end. When enough kids arrived, the action commenced, each student compiling one copy of the newspaper, going from page to page around the table, then around again and again and again. The radio played the pop tunes of the '60s, and plates of goodies sent by moms were always a hit. I don't remember what we did when ballgames occurred on Thursday nights, but other than that, those Thursday night get-togethers were sacred. Once the papers were all stapled, they were counted into piles, so many for this classroom, so many for that one, this many more for the beauty shop and the grocery store and the Chuckwagon Cafe and the other places to where the papers would be delivered on Friday. For many years I saved every copy of the BHS school paper. Unfortunately somewhere in the 40-plus years since BHS closed, I lost track of my boxes of those papers. I wish now I still had them in order to read about those five golden years. When the Blunt students and I moved up to Onida, the weekly school paper idea continued for eight more years there, but we assembled those SBHS papers in Friday's class period, rather than at Thursday night social hours. Those, indeed, were the days!