Softball and waterslides at LPS

Wilma Kenny | Jun 27, 2018

Remember public school in that awful endless last week of June?

Steaming hot classrooms, courses and exams finished, teachers and children counting the days, longing for the freedom of summer? Long ago, the Sydenham Public School principal not only taught grades 6,7 and 8, but he was also the local softball umpire. Umpiring was his real job, the one he loved, the one that defined his role in the community. So for the last three years of public school, we mostly played ball that final week. Which was fine if you were good at softball, but not all of us were. Occasionally a few perennial outfielders would slide into the bushes that surrounded the schoolyard, scramble over the fence, and run down through the cow field for a quick swim at the Point.

The cows are long gone, along with the schoolyard fence and the trees and bushes that lined it, and the school has changed its name, but the Point remains.

In what has become an annual event, the South Frontenac Firefighters and the Public Works Department set up their Canada Day waterslide a few days early. A temporary water culvert is built across the roadway, a pumper truck and four firefighters arrive and lay out hoses and a huge plastic sheet on the steep grassy hill down from the tennis court. (Beside the ball diamond…) For one glorious afternoon, guided by teachers and firefighters, the younger grades of LPS go whooping down the waterslide.

Sometimes the teachers take a turn as well.