In the spring of 1971 two long-serving teachers in the Malad schools retired, and on Sunday, June 13, the Idaho State Journal gave them a pair of stories on page 3 of section D, each with a photograph. Hazel Jones Lusk had taught first grade at Malad for twenty years; Sarah Smith Beard had spent thirty-five at Malad High School. Early in their careers both had taught in the country schools of Buist, the dry-farm settlement at the south end of Arbon Valley, on the Oneida County side.
Hazel Jones Lusk
Born Hazel Jones in Oneida County to John L. Jones, she grew up in St. John, near Malad, had her grade schooling there, and in 1971 still made her home in the town. Her own education ran from Malad High School to a single year at Idaho Tech in Pocatello and then to the Albion State Normal School, which certified her to teach. The paper put her start in two country schools, Buist and Cedar Hill, and located them no more closely than Oneida County.
What she remembered of those years, as the paper told it, was the pay and the distance. Her salary was $70 a month, and for it she was expected to handle "teaching all the grades and doing the janitor work." Board and room cost her $20 of that, at a house a mile and a quarter away. For a time a horse covered the distance. Then, while saddling up one day, she cinched him too hard and he turned and bit her, and having lost her nerve with that animal she went on foot after that in every kind of weather. The article does not say whether this was at Buist or at Cedar Hill.
Her marriage to Cleon Lusk came in 1933, and she set teaching aside for some years while their daughters were young. St. John needed teachers, people there talked her into returning, and the Malad first grade became hers after that. By her retirement the county's grade schools had had her for twenty-nine and a half years in all. Cleon Lusk shared a surname with the Lusks of Pauline, who were also a Malad family, but nothing we have read connects him with them.
Sarah Smith Beard
A native of Fielding, Utah, Sarah Smith was a pupil herself at Malad and at Holbrook, the Oneida County town south of Buist. Holbrook was also where she first taught. Vineyard, Utah, came next, and after it Buist, where her school had a single room. Any drinking water had to come along from home. Blizzards turned the mile and a half she walked into an ordeal, by the paper's account. Fourteen children made up her school, and decades later she called them "the best behaved children I ever taught." Once Buist was behind her she returned to the University of Utah to finish a fifth year of college, and Malad High School hired her for what became a thirty-five-year stay.
When, and which school
Neither article gives a year for Buist. Hazel Lusk was there before her marriage in 1933. Sarah Beard was there before her thirty-five years at Malad High, which, counting back from 1971, began about 1936. The Buist account on this site says the community had two schools, Mountain View, open from 1914 to 1935, and the Buist School, from 1916 to 1931, so both women taught there before the mid-1930s, the years when, by that account, drought and the Depression were emptying the settlement. Which of the two schools either of them kept, where they boarded, and whose children they taught are not recorded in anything we have found.
On this site: the Buist area history and the valley's schools; the Buist families in Not only Mendon and Mathew and Louise Bird; another country teacher in Lila Wade's one-room schools; and the other Lusks in the Lusk brothers and the Bailey sisters of Pauline.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, June 13, 1971, section D, page 3. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Twenty-nine and a half years of elementary teaching in Oneida County came to an end in the spring of 1971 when Hazel Jones Lusk of St. John retired. The two decades before that had all been in Malad's first grade.
Her parents were the late Mr. and Mrs. John L. Jones. St. John, where she still lived, was where she had gone to grade school. Malad High School graduated her; Idaho Tech in Pocatello had her for one year; the Albion State Normal School gave her the certificate she taught on.
Buist and Cedar Hill, two country schools, were where she started. For $70 a month she taught every grade and did the cleaning as well, and $20 a month of it paid for board at a home a mile and a quarter off. She rode a horse there until it bit her one day when she had cinched the saddle too tight. She was afraid of the horse from then on and walked, whatever the weather.
Marriage to Cleon Lusk in 1933, and then two young daughters, kept her home from teaching for some years. A teacher shortage at St. John drew her back to the classroom there, and the Malad first grade followed. She kept at her own schooling along the way, by mail, by extension class, and by summers at Utah State University in Logan that meant 100 miles on the road every day. She completed her bachelor's degree in the 1960s.
Fellow teachers presented her with a gift when the Oneida Education Association honored her at a banquet shortly before the story ran. For many years she also taught Sunday School. In the American Legion Auxiliary she held three offices, district historian, local president, and at the time local historian, and she belonged to the 8 et 40 Salon 59 of Bannock County. Her retirement plans were travel and more visits with her two daughters and five grandchildren.
Sarah Smith Beard got her own profile on the same page. Forty years of teaching lay behind her, thirty-five of them at Malad, where she had taught art and physical education at the high school before switching lately to social studies in the junior high. Before Malad she had taught at Holbrook, at Vineyard, Utah, and at Buist, a one-room school of fourteen pupils with no water but what came from home and a mile-and-a-half walk that blizzards made hard.