East Center School

By any kind of modern standards the teaching methods at East Center grade school would probably be described as very crude. There were twenty-some students altogether in eight grades in the same room. There was only one teacher in the whole school. Any one class reciting their lesson would seem to disturb all the other grades.

But it really didn’t work out this way at all. We got a really good understanding of the basics. And I think that that’s what grade school is all about. We drilled in phonics. We used flash cards to get the basics in elementary math. I can still feel the excitement (among the whole school, not just the third grade) as three third grade kids stood behind the teacher at his desk and tried to be the first to shout out, “Twenty four” when he turned up a flash card with “6 x 4”. I really believe that there was a kind of excitement about learning in that simple one-room school that seems to be missing in most modern grade schools today.

In my first couple of years at East Center I went to the “old” schoolhouse. This was a small, wooden, clapboard school with an old-fashioned heating stove in a back corner. (Both my father and my mother had attended school in this old building, and Dad taught there one year.) I don’t remember too much about my very early years there except that Donald once got into minor trouble when he made some comment about our teacher, Mr. Redfern, losing his thin hair. I also remember that once early in the first grade I had a terrible itch from a chigger bite on my penis and in all innocence I pulled it out of my pants to scratch it. Brother John saw this and later took me aside to tell me that showing one’s penis in mixed company was a major social “no-no”.

In the good times of 1929 school District 180 voted to build a grand new school. This new brick school had a nice basement, boys and girls cloak rooms and a reference alcove with a big dictionary and a World Book encyclopedia. What a wonderful improvement in the facilities! Too bad that by the time the new school was built the Depression had brought hard times to District 180. (At an auction Dad bought the coal house from the old school and moved it to alongside the Baird hog house, where it remained until very recent times.) But despite several other improvements, the toilet facilities remained the same. There was a separate boys and girls outhouse at the back of the school property. In this modern age there seems to be a widespread lack of any sense of propriety, but I will respectfully refrain from giving details about the day Melvin Burrows accidentally dropped his brand new dollar watch down the hole in the boys’ outhouse. (He made quite a valiant effort to retrieve it--but to no effect.)

One of my most interesting memories of the grade school years has to do with a spelling test when I was in about the sixth grade. There were six in my grade--the biggest class in the school. For scoring the test we traded papers with the student seated next to us on the recitation bench, and I traded papers with Leona Lamb. On one of the words I wrote “tough” and Leona marked it wrong and wrote “tuff” in the margin. Our teacher, Mr. Gray, thought that our class had rated poorly on the test, so he decided to repeat it the next day. Knowing that I would again trade papers with Leona, I wrote “tuff.” But, in the meantime, Leona had studied the assignment--and marked it wrong with “tough” in the margin. Some days you just can’t win--no matter what!

We walked a mile to school every day. Most of the time this was kind of fun and no big deal. We usually walked with the Burrows kids and we joked and laughed all the way to school. In the early fall we went to school barefoot, as did most of the kids, and walked along the side of the road because the oiled center of the road got just too hot from the sun. Sally Boyer, a cousin who lived across the road for the Prairie Home church, always drove her son, Baird Boyer, back and forth to school, but she never offered a ride to the rest of us. (From a longer-range perspective, this made a lot of sense; she didn’t have room in her car to offer all of us a ride, so it was better to not offer a ride to anybody.)

On bitter cold winter days--especially days with strong winds--that long walk to school was no fun at all! Our coats and winter gear back then were not nearly as warm and effective as today’s down parkas, etc. On those harsh days Paul and I used to alternate between running and walking, since running helped us keep warm. We’d run until we were out of breath and then walk until we got really cold, then run again. In those days there was an old corn crib alongside the road about three-quarters of the way to school; on the worst days we’d stop by in the lee of the building for a few minutes to get out of the wind and try to warm up our hands by putting them inside our coats. On the most severe day I can recall our teacher, Miss Fox, saw us walking against a bitter north wind and came out to walk with us on the last eighth of a mile. Bless her. In retrospect I’m not quite sure why Dad didn’t drive us to school on those really bad days. He certainly loved us and cared a great deal about our welfare. I think he probably figured we could make it OK and that it was good experience for us to learn how to handle some of life’s difficult situations. However, in all of my years since grade school--including two winters in the Aleutians in WW II--I have never once been nearly so bone-chilling cold as on those walks to East Center on the worst days of winter.

When I was in the fourth grade our teacher, Miss Fox, a good teacher, had some problems with the control of the “big boys” in school. It wasn’t a terribly serious issue by modern standards; the worst incident was that four of these big boys once barricaded themselves in the boys cloak room after the afternoon recess and wouldn’t come out until after school let out. But this incident was more than enough to convince the school directors that much more discipline was needed at East Center. So they re-hired Mr. Gray, who had taught the previous year and had maintained very good order. He was the teacher at East Center for about the next ten years and was a very good teacher. I don’t think that most parents or school directors realized that Mr. Gray was really an atheist--which was really quite unusual at that time and in the Prairie Home community. But atheism was not a big deal with him and he was a great teacher. And he sure maintained strict discipline. When he felt that there was any kind of a problem that required a quick remedy he would send that pupil out with a penknife to cut a limber sapling from a tree on the edge of the schoolyard. He would then have that kid bend over and grasp his ankles and Mr. Gray would deliver six or so lively hits on his posterior. This only happened a very few times a year--but it was considered routine and I never heard of a single instance where a parent objected. The most vivid recollection I have is the day when Aileen Bunning was whipped. I don’t remember what she did that brought this on, but during the ordeal she accidentally urinated onto the floor. Mr. Gray simply ordered her to get a rag and wipe it up--and that was that!

One of the highlights of our school week was the Friday afternoon spelling bee. Following the afternoon recess we would choose up sides, stand on opposite sides of the room and shout spelling words back and forth. When the first person on the north side spelled a word (“factory”) the first person on the south side would respond with a word starting with the last letter of that word (“yard”). And so on down the line. If a student couldn’t think of an appropriate word, he was “out” and had to sit down and the next person in that line was up. The big deal was to try to come up with a variety of words that ended in “x,” since that was most likely to stump those on the other side. I really liked these spelling games and was pretty good at it. I looked up words like “thorax” and even “tic douloureux” and also learned a lot of words starting with “x” so that I could usually handle any “x” word thrown at me. Eleanor Ekiss, my classmate, was a very good speller and she also liked to look up tricky words, so Eleanor and I were often the last kids standing on our respective sides.

Eleanor and I started first grade together and graduated from high school together--the only person I was classmates with for all twelve years. And during all those years I had to work really hard to try to keep ahead of her on good grades. On most years I was slightly ahead of her--but only by a little bit. And she was the first girl (of many) that I kind of thought of as being rather special. I must have been in the third or fourth grade when I apparently told some other kids that I really liked Eleanor, but I was far too shy to say anything at all about it to her. Once, when we were playing with a group of other kids, there was a quiet interlude and she whispered to me, “They tell me you really like me.” I absolutely froze up. I was dumbstruck and hadn’t the slightest notion as to what I was supposed to say--so I didn’t say anything at all. I was quite shy about any close relationship with a girl in grade school and through most of high school.

Eleanor took dancing lessons, which was a pretty unique experience in our little community at that time. Once, during the regular school day, she was persuaded to dance for us at school. There was no musical accompaniment of any kind and she didn’t have her tap shoes as she danced The Golliwog’s Cakewalk. I will never forget it. Nobody laughed, but it was kind of hilarious as she sort of hopped around beside the teacher’s desk. I had never seen anything like it--and I haven’t since, either. To this day I stop and listen whenever The Golliwog’s Cakewalk is played on the radio--and I think of Eleanor and her remarkable dance at East Center.

My older brothers often teased about my response to a test question in Physiology when I was in the fourth grade. We had been studying the skin and the sweating process. The test question was: What are pores? I wrote, “Pores are little holes in the skin to let the wet out.” When we were sweating while working hard on a hot day John loved to ask, “Roger, are those little holes letting the wet out OK?”