Hickory Hill

Hickory Hill

In the fall of 1953 I was six years old and the time came for me to start school.  I had filled many little calendar books with scribbles and done some coloring.  The adults made a big deal out of it so I was naturally skeptical.  They had gotten me some new blue jeans and plaid shirts.  I think my mother was working at Camp McCoy and Grandma Lill actually might have been as well.  She was earning extra money to pay for Uncle John's college tuition by cleaning out officers' barracks.

They had gotten me a little square lunch bucket with a cowboy scene painted on it and there I sat on the walnut stump out in front of the house.

It wasn't a full sized school bus like we see nowadays because there were only eight or ten of us that had to be transported.  It was more like a van and it seems to me that Morgan Jones was the driver. Morgan Jones lived in a square brick house just beyond Highway 71 and the Community Hall.  His son, Alan, lived on our side of the highway and to the south.  Alan farmed the old homestead and Grandpa Lee occasionally stopped there to talk about small, joint, cooperative ventures with grazing or cropping.

 I got in and took a seat.

There was a one room school house only a quarter of a mile down the road but it was from the real old days and wasn't used anymore.  It just sat there in a little carved out lot from George Hudson's farm.  Three and a half miles away was Hickory Hill School not too far off of highway 71.  That was where we were headed.

I immediately felt quite a bit of unease.  Not only did everyone else on the bus seem to know one another, but I was by far the smallest person.  It didn't even take a half mile of bouncing along on the dirt road for some of the more aggressive boys in the higher grades to begin laughing at me and invading my space, a little nudge here or a shove there, probing and grabbing at me.

I was about to cry over it when the biggest of them suddenly whapped one of the boys picking on me. It was Kermit Schultz who was probably a third grader.  He made it clear for them to leave me alone and that was the end of it.

The Schultz's lived further up the road and up over a ridge.  The road actually petered out into a farm path long before reaching their farmhouse.  They had no electricity and lived very primitively.  Grandpa Lee had some pasture sharing deals with them on and off, but they were treated by most people as pariahs.  I only met a few of them.  Erwin was the oldest sibling, I believe, and had had a part of a tree fall on him and he got a bad back injury from it.

Billy Schultz was an older juvenile and had a car which he somehow drove in and out of that farm, at least in the summer.  He would go zooming by once in a while, feeling his oats.

Kermit was just a little older than me and a large husky lad.  He wasn't scholarly, but had a sense of proper behavior of bullies toward little whelps.  I always liked him after that because, for no particular reason, he stood up for me against those little mobsters.

Hickory Hill school was another archetypical one-room school.  It had a little ante room that you walked through before getting into the big one, sort of like a small church.  There were about four of us first graders, two second graders (a boy and a girl), and maybe fifteen others spread across the higher grades up through eighth grade.  There was a high school in Sparta.

One teacher.  One teacher's helper.

They had us first graders up front and center because we were squirrely.  We would be given a piece of very thin paper, the quality of newspaper, which was ruled with dark horizontal lines and one dotted line between them.  We practiced making our letters with a fat pencil.  It was not easy to do and after a couple, I tired of this and just looked around for a while.  The teacher, having done a few practice rounds with each of us, had moved on to the two second graders, and then on to the third graders.  When she had gotten back to us, I had perhaps half of the top line of my page filled with attempts.  This, she informed me, was not good enough!

While I filled my page with attempts at copying letters, the rest of the kids went out for recess.  I could hear them laughing and yelling as they played football and ran around the back yard of the school.

We went on to reading after recess.  We had the so-called "Dick and Jane" books which consisted of a colorful picture and a smattering of words about it which we practiced over and over.

"Here is Dick."  "Dick can run."  See Dick Run!"  "Run, Dick, run!"  "This is Jane."  "Jane can run."  "Run, Jane, run!"  "Dick and Jane can run."

By the end of the first week we were reading also about Sally and Spot, their dog.  The teacher also had us memorizing the sounds each letter made and before long we had some word attack skills.  I took to it quickly because it was simple and fun.  When I would get home, Lill and Lee and particularly my mother, would be thrilled that I could read these little words.

I actually got to go out for recess after a few days of struggling for power with the teacher, and learned a disturbing thing.  I was very, very small.  I probably weighed forty pounds and the other children, even the girls, probably weighed fifty to seventy.  I was also, by a considerable margin, the shortest person in the place.  Playing football was not fun at all because I got shoved around quite easily.

My only consolation was that I was much faster on my feet than anyone else.  No one could catch me or beat me in a footrace, not even the sixth grade boys.

Lunchtime was an interesting event in the one room school.  We had our lunch boxes which were stowed in the anteroom along with our boots, coats, hats, and mittens.  We would be outside when the little bell was rung by the teacher.  Two of the older kids had, by then, obtained a pan of water from the hand pump in front of the school, and it had been warmed on the stove by the teacher or her helper.

We would file in, hang up our coats, and take off our boots if they had been needed.  Then we filed past these two children.  One of them poured a dipper of the warm water over our extended hands and we rubbed them together with a little soap.  Then a dipper of water was poured over them to rinse them off, and we dried them on a big towel.

Now we were free to take our lunch boxes and eat at our desks.

Grandma Lill would always have a sandwich made of a slab of home made bread with some butter and dried beef on it.  Dried beef was like our present day sandwich meat, only cut very thin and it was very salty.  There would also be a piece of fruit, usually an apple, and a cookie.  The school provided a little half-pint bottle of milk with a circular cardboard plug in the top, covered by a thin cardboard wrapper that was cinched around the top.  We removed the cardboard wrapper and then pried out the cardboard disk and drank right from the bottle.

Every two weeks or so, we would get the option of chocolate milk.

The school had two outdoor toilets, one on each side, a boys' outhouse and a girls' outhouse.  You learned to use them during recess time for sure, because the teacher was not going to play a lot of games with you later about needing to go to the outhouse over and over.  That was going to cost you.

About once a month these rather big, dark red pills were passed out, one to each child.  We didn't have iodized salt in those days and these pills, which were sucked on like a candy, provided us with a small dose of iodine.  They called these pills goiter pills, as iodine deficiency can result in goiters.  I am glad they gave us the goiter pills because if you look up a picture of someone with a goiter you will see that it is as if their head is sitting on top of a bowling ball instead of their neck.  Oddly enough, iodine deficiency can result also in cretinism and I just got done relating above that I was pretty close to being a cretin.  Maybe they helped me with this.  If they did, it sure took a while.

After several weeks, I was good enough with my phonics skills that I could read out of books that my mother had.  One book she had was called "Shakespeare's Sweetheart" and I could read this iambic pentameter stuff pretty well and it was exciting, except that I didn't have a clue as to what any of it meant.  I had no comprehension beyond Dick and Jane and see Spot run.   It was very frustrating and I would cry after reading it.  She would try and reassure me.

If I am not mistaken, we were pretty proud of ourselves for learning to count to a hundred without making mistakes, and we had internalized a general idea of tens, twenties, thirties, and so forth.  We might have been learning some simple addition and subtraction of quantities less than ten.

Sometimes children from the upper grades would be given the task of helping us while the teacher busied herself with the intermediate grades.  I don't know how she did it, except that there were small numbers in each grade.

I like to remind people that twelve men have walked on the moon and six of them attended one-room schools.  Deke Slayton, Sparta's astronaut.  didn't get to walk on the moon, but I am sure he attended a one-room school in the days that my mother was an elementary student, and he ended up being the chief administrator for the whole lot of them.

As I settled in to the routines at Hickory Hill school, who would ever guess that I would not even finish out the first grade year!