I started school eighty-six years ago. I was four years old. We lived in a tenant house on the farm owner’s land. Dad earned forty dollars a month milking cows and working in the fields. The Great Depression was well under way. Farm work was the only job Dad could find. He had worked previously as a lineman, setting poles and stringing telephone wire. Most country people didn’t have phones until them.
How could I start school so young? Yes, the rule was that a child had to be five by January 1st to begin. That rule was set aside for me in that little county one room school. I turned five on January 11th. Dad took me to school to introduce me to the teacher. She decided that I was mature enough to enter the chart class, a forerunner of kindergarten. I would be the youngest in my class all through my school years.
I walked to school on those old dirt roads. The first few days Dad went with me. I soon learned that if I turned right from the driveway, walked the mile to the first crossroad, turned left and walked the half mile to the end of the road, the school house was on the right side as the road dead ended into a blacktopped road. What was right and what was left? That was easy to remember, I held my pencil with my right hand to write.
There was hardly any traffic. If I saw a car coming off in the distance. I would hide in the ditch until they passed. That was what Dad taught me to do. I remember an old couple, the lady dressed in old-timey clothes, in a horse drawn buggy coming down the road. I wasn’t afraid of them. I didn’t hide in the ditch.
I wore brown cotton stockings with the tops pinned to my underpants or long johns. I hated them. They would always be baggy around my knees and ankles, but they kept my legs warm on that long cold walk to school. The roads were never snow-plowed, but I did have galoshes. They fit over my shoes and had snap closures. My mittens were either safety-pinned to my coat sleeves or pinned to a long piece of elastic that ran from one mitten up my sleeve across my shoulders down the other sleeve and pinned to the other mitten.. I would be laughed off the school yard today, but, back then, we all looked the same. “Shabby” would describe us all.
We carried our lunches in metal lunch boxes. Brown paper bags would have been a luxury. What lunches we had! Mother couldn’t bake bread for sour apples. We couldn’t afford store boughten bread. I might have a buttered biscuit and whatever else Mother could find to give me, maybe a hard boiled egg.
We all looked to see what each other had for lunch. I remember the time I opened my lunch box and took out a piece of chicken. Those around me went wild. “That’s not chicken,” they yelled. “That’s pheasant.” Yes, it was. But pheasant hunting season had long since passed and it was against the law to hunt pheasant out of season. I fiercely insisted that it was chicken. The farm kids around me knew better. They ate pheasant out of season, too, but didn’t bring it to school. I learned my lesson and didn’t do that again.
When we got home we took off our school clothes and carefully laid them aside. We would be wearing the same ones the next day. If we had home work and we usually did, we would complete that before going out to play. We didn’t sit and listen to the grown ups talk. We left the room until the company left. When we were told to do something, we did it. We didn’t say, “I’ll do it later.” We ate what was cooked or nothing at all. No special dishes for the fussy eater. A whipping was my Dad’s favorite form of discipline.
That’s the way I was raised. Dad’s word was law. I did resent it at the time, but with hindsight, the discipline helped me become the person I am today. I also helped develop a sense of humor. I can find something funny in almost anything. It was a way to survive. (734 words)