School days

It was the custom at Free Home School for five year olds to "visit" one day so they wouldn't feel strange the next year. So off I went in the spring of '28 to visit school. I don't remember the day in detail except that it was long but fun. My mother tells the story that I came home and proclaimed that I didn't wet my pants. Perhaps it's true since I was in the habit of waiting almost too long to make a trip to the outhouse.

I do remember the first day of school in September. I set out with Lewis Wesley and Ruby Mae wearing the prettiest of  the 5 of mother's hand-made dresses I had. I had high hopes to learn but was disappointed when the teacher ignored the first grade most of the day. She did draw a big letter on our desks, probably on A, and let us go out to pick sunflower petals to outline the letter. Seemed pretty childish to me. I already knew the alphabet, could count to a hundred and (thanks to the patience of sister Ruby Mae) could read all the primers and part of the first reader. But things improved as time went by and I was able to show off my reading abilities. I must have been insufferable for I was always quick to offer to help the "slow learners" with their reading, spelling and arithmetic. If I remember right, we had three first graders. One girl left after that year. My 2nd grade classmate had trouble with reading and arithmetic and often recited with the 1st graders. I did my work and sometimes recited with the 3rd graders. How proud I was one day when I went to the board with the 3rd graders and was able to write the Roman Numerals higher than any of them! Come spring my classmate "failed" and I was promoted to the 4th grade. It was not uncommon for a child to be allowed to "skip" a grade, but I cried a few tears in the fall before I finally mastered the times tables which I had missed by skipping 3rd grade. I had to put in extra time on geography also, but soon I was at the top of the class again.

Our school was the typical one room frame school with 3 outhouses in the two far corners of the school yard. Center back was a small barn, shed really, for the horses that some students rode to school. Carl Bode rode a pretty brown pony every day thru all eight grades. Paul became tall and had very long legs. He was the butt of much teasing in 7th and 8th as he stepped over that pony and drew his long legs up into the stirrups. Others rode horses from time to time. We rode Old Billy--a gentle white work horse. Since we had to walk a mile and three quarters, we usually got to ride the horse on muddy days. On good days we cut across the fields using our pasture and the Riggs pasture as far as possible and walked along the fence of the wheat field in the fall before the wheat was up and the ground was hard enough to make a short-cut path. On rainy days we were sometimes allowed to hitch Old Billy to the old buggy and ride to school in style. But that horse and buggy couldn't go thru snowdrifts which meant we had to hike across the fields on snowy days. We ran much of the way but still got bitter cold. The teacher stood me on top of the stove once to thaw me out. The standard remedy for frozen fingers was to soak them in cold water. My hands and face were always chapped from fall to spring. One time the snow drifts were so high we went over the pasture fence on the drift instead of crawling thru.