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| This is not the one I attended, but similar. |
When I was 12 years old the world was a much calmer place.
Husbands and wives didn’t get divorced. I don’t think the thought of it ever
crossed their mind. The worse trouble a kid ever got into was talking back to
the teacher, and if that happened they got a sound beating from the teacher,
and when they went home they got another one from their father.
How would the
father know what happened? Because there was no phone in the school building;
why would they need such a useless thing in a school house? Yeah, we called
them school houses in that day. The father knew because the kid that was in
trouble had siblings that couldn’t resist sharing the exciting news with the
parents.
The school had a play ground with some swings, a slide and a
couple Teeter Totter’s. Ah yes, we had a thing we called Johnny Strikes, which
I have since discovered the real name is Giant Strides. It makes a lot more sense than Johnny
Strikes.
It was a steel pole with a
rotating device on the top with six or more chains hanging down at just the
right height for a child to grab the loop on the end of or you could put your
arm through the loop and hold the chain with both hands, then everyone would
run around the pole until we were almost flying. Most if the time we would take
turns with one kid taking his chain and walking around all the others, and when
we started running the kid wrapped around the top would become airborne, saved
by the chain.
If State Farm ever heard of that contraption they would have
tripled the rates. Schools didn’t carry insurance, in fact their overhead was
zilch. They had no school buses, meals, nurse, security guard or even indoor
plumbing. We had two smelly outhouses, one for girls and one for boys. A water well
that we pumped a bucket of water from each day for the students to drink. I
believe the teacher brought the bucket of water in each morning before the kids
arrived. The bucket of water had one dipper which we all used. We shared our
germs in that day.
Did I mention this
school only had one room, grades one through eight.
That is the way it was back in my day.
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| This is similar to the one we had, but not as tall as this one. |
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| This is what the bottom was like, |
