Hokah Elementary

Hokah Elementary

I had to ride a real school bus to Hokah Elementary.  It seemed to me a somewhat scary proposition, but what are you going to do?  We hadn't even really moved in completely when the big monster pulled into the yard and the door swung open.

I got on and took a seat.  A bus full of snotty-nosed kids of all ages sized me up, and I wasn't very big.  Al's farm was the next to the last one up Pfeffer Valley and the last one was owned by a middle-aged bachelor with no kids, so the bus turned around in the ample driveway in front of the house.  Only two more kids got on in the whole valley and still only two more on the way to Hokah, six or seven miles distant.  Two of the four got off at the Catholic church and school along with about half of the passengers.

Hokah Elementary was a square brick three-story building that looked monolithic to me as the bus dropped us off.  Everyone else knew one another and made off quickly for the playground in order to burn off a little energy before the bell rang to summon us inside.  A little old lady met me and brought me right in to show me around.

The building was really old.  The basement had a lunch cafeteria with benches and chairs and there were two actual bathrooms, one for the boys and the other for the girls, which had toilets and sinks to wash your hands in.  This was a new luxury after my time at Hickory Hill.  The fixtures were old and the faucets squeaked and dripped.

On the first floor were four classrooms for the lower grades and on the second floor were a couple of classrooms, some storage, and an office which belonged to the Principal.  This entire arrangement was far more complex than what I was used to, which was having one teacher who was also the Principal and one helper.

The classrooms were old fashioned, with a banged-up teacher's desk and rugged little desks with holes in the tops which used to be for inkwells in the earlier days before pencils were invented.  The seats were attached to the little desks so that once you were in there, you didn't get to move your chair around and make noise.

There were probably a dozen to fifteen first-graders and once the bell rang and they filed in, all sweaty from jumping around outside, they looked me over with a lot of curiosity.  I was extremely self-conscious, owing mostly to the fact that I was an only child and it was never really required of me to socialize with any peers.  I was also noticeably shorter and smaller than everyone in the room, including the girls, and one of the girls was quite small.  Her name was Rosemary and she had me by about a half-inch.  She was physically tiny and diminutive in affect as well, but probably delighted that someone actually smaller than her had arrived.

The teacher placed me near two boys, one named Bob Millen and the other named Don Botcher.  Don was my cousin by marriage.  Al Botcher had two brothers.  One lived in Caledonia about twenty miles distant.  The other lived in this little town of Hokah.

Once assured that I was on the bottom of the pecking order in school, they turned out to be quite friendly.  Don was a tallish lad and very nice. He had a great sense of humor and liked to laugh about anything, no matter how inane.  Bob was a budding young delinquent and I learned that he was regularly threatened by his parents to be sent to Red Wing.  Red Wing is a reform school, a prison for young offenders.  It sounded ominous and I can attest, after seeing it years later, that it is ominous.  It is surrounded by an impassible mesh fence that rises up about twenty feet and arcs inward.  Red Wing is where Robert Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan, sings about.

Bob Millen was destined to be my best friend at Hokah.  He took a liking to me for some strange reason.  I was very short and immature, but I had become a very good reader and speller, and understood the simple arithmetic exercises we were learning.  I think he got it in his mind that because I was so little, I was a prodigy of sorts.

Because Bob Millen liked me, nobody picked on me, but as it turned out, none of the boys seemed to be bullies, and the older children had recess at different times than we did.

Roger Johnson was one of the boys we picked up along our route and in another year, his younger brother Donnie would come to school.  Howard Wilson walked to school because his house adjoined the farther reach of the playground, which was huge, stretching from behind the school building over a hundred yards to the edge of an escarpment which led steeply down into a weedy swampy area.  He had a younger brother, too.  Ed Littlejohn was a short, compact boy who was very wiry, somewhat like myself, but stronger and more confident.

The school had a front yard which abutted the main street in an area where residences lined it.  A few short blocks to the east, it came through the two-block long town of Hokah and only a few more blocks west took you out into the farmland.  There was a primitive merry-go-round, a couple of teeter totters, and a large pipe frame with four swings hanging from long chains.  Everything squeaked and was a pinch-danger if you put your hands or fingers in the wrong place.

The backyard property of the school was immense.

There was one large pine tree with limbs low enough to climb into.  There were also a couple of areas where snow paths could be trampled down so that we could slide down into the swampy area.  The teachers didn't care if we climbed the tree or explored down into the swamp.  I can tell you that neither would be allowed these days.

We could actually be out of sight of the teachers, making secret forts and hiding places on the edge of the swamp, as long as when the bell rang we came hustling back to school.  We observed this rule religiously because our Principal, Mr Wagner, was supposedly a retired Navy officer and very tough.  Unlike many school children today, the last thing we wanted was to be sent to the Principal or worse, to have a call made to our parents.

I particularly wanted nothing to do with offending my new stepfather.  I hadn't the slightest clue as to how he would react and he was big and scary.  I even refrained from tantrums and misbehavior of all overt types because of this uncertainty.  You see, he was just what I needed!

Attached to the back of the school was a spiral slide which went up to the second story.  We would climb on the very bottom of this slide, which was almost irresistible, but never beyond the first of two or three turns, because the slide led directly up to Mr Wagner's office.  It was a fire escape.  If we knew for sure that he was gone somewhere we would take some liberties with it, but not many, because you could still have to answer to him when he got back if a teacher caught you.

About once a month we had a fire drill.  There were no lights or buzzers to go off in those days.  The teachers simply announced that there was a fire drill.  We got up out of our seats in an orderly fashion, actually went upstairs, through Mr Wagner's office and out a little door and slid down the slide.

It was the greatest thing ever!  In the event of a real fire--and the building looked like it could go up in flames at any moment--we would either go down the stairs if the fire was above us or up the stairs and down the slide.

Bob Millen and Don Botcher told me that Ed Littlejohn was an Indian.  I do not think that he was of native American descent, but his name reinforced that idea.  He was also very stealthy.  If he hid in the swamp, none of us could find him.  I have been in touch with him in older years and he appears as Norweigan or Danish as any of the rest of us.

There were girl classmates as well.  I remember a Nancy, a Sharon, Betty, and of course Rosemary.  I'm sure there were more.

At least once every other day, we filed up the stairs quietly past Mr Wagner's closed door and up another set of steps up in to the attic of the building where we sat on some wooden benches that had been installed up there.  All of the lights would be turned off and we were admonished to be as quiet as mice.  That wasn't going to happen, but we tried and there was always the concern about disturbing Mr Wagner.

An ancient projector clattered and clicked as a film rolled off of one reel, past a little light, and onto another reel, with a resultant picture jumping around on a large screen, which rolled down out of a large metal tube much like a window shade.  Some of the movies would be about personal hygiene--how to brush your teeth, wash your hands properly, wash your hair, and similar things.  Others would be like little newsreels showing us how to conduct ourselves when the flag is brought past, how to fold up the flag, and innumerable things like that.

We regarded the trips to the attic a real treat because it broke up the crushing boredom of trying to sit at a little desk without squirming.

After a week of habituation to the routines of Hokah Elementary school, I felt quite comfortable, and enjoyed playing with the first group of friends that I ever had.  There was no such thing as homework.  We had a couple of books which remained in our desk when we weren't reading from them, as did our pencils, crayons, and rulers.

The teacher would give us work sheets which we did in class and put on her desk when we were finished.  If she didn't like what we did with them, she called us up and we had it out right there.

Since we had no book bags or backpacks and took nothing home, once school let out, I was free to explore the other dimensions of my new reality--the new home, the farm on which it stood, and the comings and goings of my new family situation.