Sex education in our growing-up days was regarded as unimportant, unnecessary or unmentionable. Certainly it was a closed subject in our home where we were sustained by an Adventist atmosphere with all of its high standards of morals and Christian ethics, though we were by no means angels. Besides we were still in the Victorian era and any reference to sex was thought to be obscene. Yet here we were, boys together, with a common anatomy which we all took for granted and were quite oblivious to the use of sex, and never questioned why we were made this way.
The Glenlusk boys were different. They came from an area on the opposite side of Bismarck; the school seemed to mark the dividing line. They lived in the hills and valleys from one to three miles back beyond the school in an equally fertile area where their parents wrested a living out of their hilly, hard, laborious farms. The boys were tough and a number of them older, thirteen and fourteen. One day I heard them plotting something together. It was very secretive and mysterious to me. It seemed that in some lonely area of the road they concertedly molested the girls on the way home from school. There was a great district furor over this and serious meetings were called for all those involved. The matter was all hush-hush and I was blissfully ignorant of the meaning and seriousness of the proceedings.
As boys, we often talked of matters such as where babies came from, and found it hard to swallow the stork story and other devious answers to our frank questions. For one thing, no one had ever seen a stork in this part of the country. We only saw magpies, crows and parrots, with numerous smaller birds that could barely carry a sizable worm, let alone a baby. So the answers given did not add up. Besides, there seemed to be a difference of opinion as to the origin of babies. How did I get here for instance? And when someone older suggested that father and mother had something to do with it, we would not believe it, and took it as grossly insulting and highly sacrilegious. It wasn’t until we were around eleven or twelve and mingled with older and wiser boys that we were let into the closely guarded secret that sex had something to do with babies. Then when we left school and went to work amongst the saw mill hands we were fully exposed to their language, knowledge, and the undisguised facts of life. Our sex education then made rapid progress, and we thought it was complete, though raw and simple. It was not until I read the little book “Almost a Man”, and went to college, that I could call myself knowledgeable on these matters. There was still much mystery shrouding the details. I read books and discussed the intriguing matter with my college pals, till I could claim that I had the theory straight, though unable to boast of the practical.
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