School Daze:

I started school about 2 months after D-Day in 1944 in a one room country school house in DeKalb county Indiana.  I was a farm kid just like all the other students in the school.  School was an unfair proposition from the start.  First of all, we were seated in alphabetical order.  Guess who sat in the rear?  Yep, me, Dal Wolf.  The reading class was split into two groups, the BLUE BIRDS and the RED BIRDS.  I was a RED BIRD.  I think it was the start of segregating classes by supposed learning ability.  Most of the other Red Birds were not too swift.  My cause was not helped by the fact that my brother started school 2 years before I did.  He was more interested in goofing off than any scholarly pursuits.

When it was our (red birds) turn to read, the teacher passed out reading books that both groups shared.  The first page showed a picture of a boy with the lettering DICK underneath.  I had never heard the name before.  As far as I was concerned DICK had an entirely different meaning.  We had kids in our class named   Orfus,    Opsey,    Melva,    and   Viola.  No Dicks.  Dick had a sister in the book.  We learned her name on the second day of school.  Her name was JANE.  I didn’t know anyone named Jane either.  On the third day they combined the words Dick & Jane.  You could tell that things were getting tougher. They had a dog named SPOT.  Spot was a Cocker Spaniel and he was not spotted.  If he had been a horse, he would have been referred to as a “paint”.  Then there was “Baby”.  I don’t know if baby had a real name.  (In proof reading this I remembered that her name was “SALLY”)  There was “Mother” and “Father”.  They didn’t have names either.  I don’t have any idea what “fathers” job was but he drove a big Art Deco styled car with lights atop the front fenders and two spare tires on the sides of the car.  I suspect he was in the mob.  We learned to “sight read”, not to sound out the letters to form a word.  I still have trouble today spelling some (most) words correctly, but I can spell Czechoslovakia correctly.

I did not like arithmetic class.  The teacher had one of those snotty Blue Birds help with grading the papers.  He always gave me a bad mark because he did not like the way I made the number “two”.  I made it look like a “Z” (I found out recently that the original number two was made like a “Z” because the figure contained 2 acute angles).  We did most of our advanced arithmetic from a notebook.  I remember one picture problem that contained 5 ducks.  I did not read the part about 2 of the ducks swimming away.  The question was, “how many ducks were left”?  Well, the picture showed 3 ducks facing one direction and 2 ducks facing the other way.  Any dang fool could see there were 5 ducks in the picture.  Wrong answer.  The hell with the stupid ducks, anyway.

Then there was writing class.  We always got warmed up by making a series of ovals at the top of the page.  The idea was to make 15 ovals in one spot and then move to the next practice oval.  Rather than count, (yes, I could count) I just made ovals in the same spot till my pencil wore its way thru the paper.  That was a lot easier.  Most first graders cannot multi-task anyway. I always got my ovals done faster than the snotty, Blue Bird, number checker.

Most of the kids had fancy new lunch boxes with cutesy cartoon characters on them.  Not this boy.  My dad had picked up this heavy duty box that was olive drab in color and had “30 Caliber” In yellow stenciled numbers on the side.  It had a really neat latch and was water proof.  It always made my baloney sandwich taste stale. But was a heck of a good weapon in a lunch box fight on the school bus.

  I did not have a pencil box.  There was one girl that had a pencil box the size of a small suitcase.  She had 6 pencils, scissors, a mirror, pencil sharpener, and a compass contained in that monster.  She was a cute girl but I coveted her pencil box, not her.  I had to keep my one penny pencil in the pencil groove on top the desk.  A penny pencil was a skinny brown pencil with soft lead and an eraser made from a coarse stone like material that wore its way right thru the paper.  The girl with the monster pencil box had yellow Eberhard-Faber (2H) pencils each with a metal ferrule and a genuine pink eraser.  Envy envy envy.  Our desks had these neat cup holders right next to the pencil groove but I never saw anyone use one. (Ok, they were really ink wells.  How do you explain “nibs”, “quills”, “nib holders”,” ink bottles” or even “fountain pens” to someone from the X generation.)  This was long before ball point pens had been invented. By the way, the early ball points always leaked.  The use of ink was far in the future for a first grader so I won’t dwell any more on the subject.

There was only one cup at the water jug for everyone to use.  Then one girl died of diphtheria and presto, disposable Dixie cups appeared overnight. We got the water, one bucket at a time from the farm across the road.  The well was right next to the farmer’s barnyard but no one cared.  I don’t think anyone thought of the word typhoid. We also had “milk day” twice a week.  For 10 cents a week you could have a half pint of milk. (Tue & Thurs).  After a month or so my folks decided that I did not need the milk.  Ten cents a week could really add up over the course of a school year.    I could only sit and drool on those special days when chocolate milk was delivered.

There were two different sized yellow lined “goldenrod” tablets that we used.  One cost a nickel, the other a dime.  The dime size had three times the paper as the nickel size did.  It was “during the war” so we had to use both sides of the paper.  I hated that.  When we took a new tablet to school we had to give it to the teacher.  She inspected our old tablet and only issued you your new tablet when every last line was filled on the old one.  White lined notebook paper was far in the future for a first grader.

Bathroom facilities were outside, down the hill.  Every Halloween they were upset and a local farmer had to come over with a team of horses and pull them upright.  When the teacher had to use the bathroom a covey of girls stood guard outside.  I was never quite able to figure that one out.

The building had 4 hang down light bulbs, one fire extinguisher, no storm windows, no insulation, one pencil sharpener, and a pot bellied coal stove.  The teacher doubled as the janitor and carried the coal from the coal shed into the school one hod at a time. (What is a hod, you say).  We old timers will just keep that a secret.

My guess is that my eight years in that school cost far far less that it costs to educate a child today just for one semester.  There was a lot more that happened in the first grade, but that was 66 years ago.

Dal Wolf.