SCHOOL DAYS
As I begin writing on this chapter of my early days, I am reminded again of my first grade teacher, Viola Woodard, later Mrs. Viola James. (She had a long list of names: Viola Verona Hermina Otalia Ratche Woodard, and later, through marriage, she added Richter and then James!) Viola James returned to Richter School when I was in the 7th grade, and continued through the next year also. She was a great teacher! I just learned today (Fall, 1987) that she has passed on, several months ago, of cancer. She was in her eighties. I had last seen her at the graveside service for my younger sister, Mary, who died in l983. Viola James was there, as keen of mind as she was so many years ago.
Unless you, too, were one of those children who were anxious to get started in school, you can hardly imagine how eager I was to begin school. Robert and Jean were in school ahead of me, and that left me more or less alone at home. My little sister, Mary, who was four years younger than I, was too small to be much fun playing with. Each morning, when Mom would allow it, I would walk up the hill in front of our house, and watch Robert and Jean trudge off to school. Again in the afternoon, I would keep close tab on the time, and go to meet them, if the weather was good.
I learned all I could from them at home, and with their help, and my mother's, I learned the alphabet and how to count up to 100 long before I started to school. Mother had taught in high school in Wisconsin, before her marriage, and was fluent in German. So she taught all of us children how to count in German, how to recite the German alphabet, and a few German sayings and expressions when we were very small.
So when the year 1925 finally came around, and I was old enough to begin school, I already knew some of the basics. There were just two of us first graders that year--Vernon Richter and I--so our teacher, Viola Woodard, had a nice small class to work with. I can recall how proud she was of our fast progress in learning to read. We practiced our writing on the blackboard when it was our turn to use the board. And we played a lot outside, too; I think we had more time for play than the other children.
At some point in the year, I think it was the following spring, the County Superintendent of Schools came to visit our school, and I can remember showing off plenty--reading, writing, and rattling off the German stuff I knew. I'm sure she thought we were quite remarkable first graders!
Maybe a few things about the school would be helpful here, in understanding just how important the school was in all our lives. In the chapter on the homestead I have told of the location of the school, a mile and a half by road from our house, or about a mile and a quarter across lots--which was the way we nearly always went when walking.
But mere geographic location can't begin to explain how central the school was in our whole community. The school was quite literally the real center of everything to those who lived for miles around. Not only did we attend classes there during the school year, but there we had our Sunday School, vacation Bible school, and occasional worship services throughout the year, and there we had all sorts of social events. Although I don't recall anything at all about voting, I would guess that voting was done there, too.
There was nothing fancy about the school building itself. It was a wooden frame building with ship-lap exterior walls, and measured about twenty by thirty- four feet, set on a concrete foundation. It had a brick chimney for the big stove which provided heat when we needed it. The building was painted white, with a steep-pitched shingled roof. There were windows on the north, south, and west sides; none on the east. The door faced toward the north, and there was a porch with steps but no railing, perhaps eight feet by six feet, about two feet high.
Immediately behind the school, on the south, was the coal and wood shed. About eighty feet southwest of the building was the barn, which was added when I was in the third grade. It was small, and would house only four horses (or mules). Set out at precise distances, about one hundred feet from the south end of the schoolhouse were the two toilets, one for the girls and the other for boys, separated from each other about eighty feet--a good safe distance. Boys were never allowed to go anywhere near the girl's toilet, under threat of severe penalty. Even when playing ball at recess, if a ball should fall or roll near the girl's toilet, one of the girls had to be asked to bring it back.
The school buildings just described were situated on a fairly level area, with strong barbed wire fences and a lane running east and west in front of the school. The fence closest to the school belonged to the Richter family, on whose land the school was located. That is probably why it was named the Richter School from its beginning. The Roy Richter homestead buildings were about a mile and a quarter southeast of the school. The Richters were very good to all of us, allowing use of the grounds for our school games and other activities. I believe the school building was erected in 1922. My father was the first teacher to conduct school there, and was my brother Robert's first grade teacher in 1922-23.
About one hundred feet to the west of the school buildings there was a fairly steep hill, dropping down about seventy-five yards to a small creek which ran only during the wettest seasons of the year, mainly in the spring. That hill provided us a wonderful slope for coasting in the winter months, as well as a sort of break in the rather flat scenery to the north and east. Inside, coming in the door, one entered what we called the entry way. There were cupboards here for storage of books and materials of various kinds. On either side of the entry room were the cloak rooms, again separated for boys and girls. The communal water pail and dipper were located in the boys room; we all drank out of the same dipper, as was done in those days. On the walls of the cloak rooms were rows of hooks for our wraps, and benches where we sat to put on or take off our overshoes. Also these small rooms, which were only about eight feet long by maybe six feet wide, were sometimes used for classrooms for the older students, and were put to good use for Sunday School classes on Sundays.
Our lunch pails were always stored in the cloak rooms, and lunches would get mighty cold during winter weather, because there was no heat in either of those rooms. Sometimes the teachers would let us bring our lunches in before noon, and put them near the stove to thaw out before lunch time. If we had brought cocoa, as we Cumming kids often did, we could put our pail of cocoa on the top of the stove about fifteen minutes before noon, to heat it. Occasionally when someone (like me, for instance!) forgot to open the lid of the cocoa pail, we would have an explosion, and cocoa spilled over the top of the stove as the heat caused the lid to pop open.
Stepping from the cloak rooms into the main school room, one came first to the teacher's desk, which was centered at the front of the room. All the seats for the children faced toward the teacher's desk. There were blackboards covering the north wall (right behind the teacher's desk) and on the east wall. The big clock hung high on the east wall, to the teacher's left. That old clock had to be wound each week, and this was usually taken care of by the teacher. As I recall, only one teacher allowed one of us boys to wind the clock; that was a choice responsibility which had to be earned by good behavior and reliability. I don't recall ever winding the clock myself, though of course I was a model student!
The huge heating stove was located in the southeast corner of the room. The chimney took quite a bit of space in the center of the south wall. Just to the right of the chimney was the single bookcase, which had four or five shelves, and glass doors, holding the entire school library. The bottom shelf was occupied almost entirely by the set of World Book encyclopedias. Then there was a table for the big unabridged Webster's dictionary, too. Windows on the south and west sides took up most of the wall space. The windows were high, with hooks in the top sash so they could be opened for ventilation. We decorated the lower part of the windows in many different ways according to the different special occasions of the year. The floor was of curly maple, a fine, solid, and smooth floor. The seats, typical school furniture, were not anchored to the floor, but could be moved about according to need. Across the front of the room, in front of the teacher'sdesk, were low benches used for reciting.
Pictures? Oh, yes, we had pictures. Strung along above the blackboards were the pictures of all the presidents, and there was a large portrait of George Washington above all, on the north wall. Also, on the south wall, above the bookcase, was a lovely (I thought) picture of a little girl in sunbonnet, carrying a lunch pail, and accompanied by her big Saint Bernard dog, leaving home for school. The printed legend said "To school well fed on Grapenuts." That was my introduction to Grapenuts, though I didn't know until many years later what they were. I only knew peanuts and filberts and walnuts and Brazil nuts (which we ignorantly called "nigger toes") and I often wondered what Grapenuts were. But it was a nice picture!
There was quite an assortment of desks, with extras stored out in the coal shed. At the beginning of each school year, a lot of time was taken on the first day of school, fitting each student with an appropriate desk. Sometimes desks had to be drawn from the shed, and others taken out. Each teacher did her best (we never had any men teachers while I was going to school there) to make us as comfortable as possible.
The desks were of the ordinary sort, with cast iron frames, probably maple wood for seat, back, and writing surface. Some, I remember, were fairly well scarred by boy whittlers of past years. Some, too, had wads of gum, aged, hard stuff, stuck on the underside of the seats or book storage areas. The writing surface was hinged, and lifted up to allow placing books inside. Each desk had an ink well, and we used them regularly, at least in the upper grades, with stiff steel-pointed pens in holders.
There were few text books. They were furnished by the school, and used year after year. Some would get pretty badly battered after two or three years' use, and we all felt pretty sorry for ourselves at times, having to used tattered or back-less books. A big wall map, with maps of the United States, Montana, and the various continents hung on the wall behind the teacher's desk. How I loved those maps! Even when in the lower grades, I could readily draw a recognizable map of any of the continents from memory, and draw in most of the countries. We all used ruled pencil tablets, and had pencils and erasers of our own, and pen holders. Some of us had our own pencil cases, too, of which we were very proud. There was a pencil sharpener fastened on the window sill at the back of the room, next to the stove. That sharpener got a lot of use, especially on cold winter days when it was mighty cold sitting on the far side of the room away from the stove!
The stove itself was what was known as a circulating heater. It consisted of a big pot-bellied inner stove, set up on legs above the floor, with a large cylinder of embossed steel hung around it, with a space of about twelve or fourteen inches between the "jacket" and the stove proper. The theory was that as the fire heated the air around the inner stove, that air would rise, and fresh air be drawn in from under the jacket, thus creating a circular flow of air throughout the room. It worked quite well, if the fire in the stove was hot enough, and the weather not too cold. But often on very cold winter mornings, when it might be thirty--yes, thirty!--below zero outside, it took a long time to heat the whole room to the point where we could take off our wraps. Sometimes our teacher would have us all marching around the room, still in our coats and caps and mittens, while she played the old victrola, turning the record by hand, as the phonograph, too, would be too cold to run well. The tempo changed a lot, but through that practice I became familiar with some of the grand marches, like "The Jolly Coppersmith" and some of Sousa's marches. We all took it in stride, and actually thought it was fun, and not particularly a hardship. The teacher usually came to school early, walking there as most of us did, to build the fire and get the building warmed.
It is difficult for me, writing this more than sixty years later, to remember many of the details of my early school years. I do recall sitting at my desk, and watching the older children, especially my brother, Robert, recite. That was one of the secrets of the little one-room school: the younger children had plenty of opportunity to watch while the older children were at the board, or to listen to them recite. Early on I became skilled enough in arithmetic and spelling to detect errors made by the older ones, and could hardly contain myself, wiggling around in my seat, and hoping the teacher would ask me for the correct answer, which of course she never did. I think that experience had something to do with my undesirable critical nature--I learned too early to spot errors others made, and to let them know it! If one was observant at all--and I think I was--one could learn a great deal through this setup.
There was another factor working for me, in those early school days. From the time we were very small, our parents, who were both teachers and knew how to help us learn, had instructed us in all sorts of different ways. We learned to count eggs when we gathered them, and measurements from helping with the milking, and so on. So when, in school, I sat and watched the older children in their recitation, I was absorbing a lot of it. I practiced the multiplication tables with Robert and Jean, and knew them thoroughly long before I was expected to, at my grade level. In those days, children memorized the multiplication tables up through the 12's.
As I grew older, sometimes Dad would pose an arithmetic problem to be worked out in my head while milking, or hoeing in the garden. Really, I could do long division, quite complicated addition, multiplication, and even square root problems, without paper and pencil. To this day, I find that I can often do calculations (rather simple ones) faster in my head than many people can do them on paper.
Also, for some reason--probably because our parents were surely among the best educated and versatile people in the community--we Cumming kids had the idea that we were really smarter than the others in school. Teachers seemed to expect more of us, and I think that helped, too, because a person responds generally to the expectations of others. Whatever the reason, I had an easy time in school. I don't recall ever having to do homework while in elementary school, and rarely while in high school. Learning was easy and fun.
I read every book in the school bookcase before I was in the upper grades, and also the small library of books my parents had at home, even books of poetry (my Dad loved the poets). We borrowed books from the neighbors when we could, to supplement what we had at home.
I do recall how our mother used our great interest in reading to get us to read something she thought would be good for us. Whether she bought the books, or they were sent out by well-meaning relatives in Wisconsin, I'm not sure, but she had two volumes--"What a Young Boy Should Know," and "What a Young Girl Should Know." These were the closest we ever came to receiving sex instruction from our parents. Mom had the books, and assigned them to us to read--the boys to read the boy's book, and my sister Jean (our little sister, Mary, was far too young )to read the one for girls. Then Mom said we were not to read the other book--which of course we all did as soon as we could get away with it! It was pretty vague stuff, I remember. We already knew a lot more about sex than Mom ever dreamed we knew. But I'm pretty sure she worked us a little on that, knowing that of course we would read both books!
This blog entry is getting pretty long--I'd better cut it off here and return to this subject (school, not sex) later!