A certain amount of misadventure can come from dining in public, especially if that public meal is as a student in elementary school.

Recently I was talking with my good friend Chip Brown. We recalled the time when we were having lunch in seventh grade at Maynardville Elementary. In those days, ketchup and mustard were in plastic bottles in the middle of each table. (Even vinegar for the spinach was in glass bottles on the table! Just imagine, spinach for lunch!) I haven’t seen this in a school in decades, and probably in great reason this is due to our misadventures at Maynardville Elementary.

Chip remembered, as did I, the time that he and Kevin White (I’m almost certain it was) accidentally shot me in the head with ketchup. Chipper begged me to wipe it off before the teacher saw, but I told him I wanted everybody to see what he had done to me. Even I cringed at the righteous indignation our teacher, Ms. Martha Bridges Warwick, heaped upon them. I personally would rather have been beaten than to have endured the verbal wrath she spewed upon the perpetrators of the evil done to me.

Ah, but times were different then. The gymnasium at Maynardville Elementary doubled as the cafeteria. I recall there were five rows of five tables each, meaning that five classrooms could eat lunch at any one time. Each table had eight heavy, blue folding metal chairs around it, three on each side and one at each end. At full capacity, 200 students could be seated at one time. (In one of my increasing moments of self-doubt, I’m wondering if there weren’t six rows of five tables each—in that case 240 students could have been seated at full capacity.)

There was no breakfast program then. The lunch schedule was arranged so that as the last row of tables was being seated the first returned their trays to make room for the next class. During basketball season, the tables and chairs had to be folded and stored against the walls for basketball games. This task was assigned to the strongest boys in the last lunch group.

When Maynardville became overcrowded, classes would be set up in half of the gymnasium that doubled as cafeteria, and some classes had to eat in the classrooms with the teacher. This was before former Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander implemented duty free lunch for teachers. Teachers ate with their students, regardless of where lunch was served.

I only remember having to eat in the classroom in fourth grade, when I was in Ms. Wanza Sharp’s class. Her room was almost directly across the hall from the gym, so we didn’t have to carry lunch far. Nevertheless, there was no running back to get something you forgot. There were two trips—one to get lunch and another to take back the leftovers and dirty dishes. If it was forgotten, it was done without.

I remember fondly lunches in Ms. Sharp’s room. Ms. Sharp talked to us while we ate, and one of her favorite things to do was crossword puzzles. She introduced us to the joys of reading the newspaper and completing the crosswords. Having a crossword puzzle dictionary became a mission. She would teach fractions during lunch by slicing Phillip Richardson’s apples into sections and have us identify the resulting fractional parts.

Ms. Sharp also used lunch to teach thriftiness. She had a small refrigerator in her room that she obtained from one of the small one or two room schools that had shut down. She encouraged us to store leftovers in her fridge for the afternoon snack. We were allowed to buy Popsicles in her class, with the stipulation that we shared with a friend. Each friend contributed one half of the purchase price, and the Popsicle was halved and shared during afternoon snack. No sharing, no Popsicle. Imagine the outcry such a practice would cause today!

I also remember the barbeque sandwiches that were occasionally served for lunch. I loved them, but several of my classmates didn’t. Ms. Sharp was always a proponent of not wasting food. (Chip remembers her saying, in regard to students who received free lunch, that there was no such thing as a free lunch—somebody paid for it!) There were days that I would have as many as five barbeque sandwiches in a brown paper bag in the fridge—I happily ate them during afternoon snack and bus wait, which was also held in the classroom during my fourth grade year.

I’m sure that the lunch schedule was organized to ensure that those students farthest from the gym would not have to carry their lunches back to the classrooms, especially if those classrooms were in the outside portable buildings. Those students who ate in the classroom had to carry their lunches down the hall on heavy, brown trays. I would estimate that a full lunch loaded on these trays would have weighed anywhere from three to five pounds, a considerable weight for uncoordinated children like myself. Many times students dropped their lunches in the hall, and the verbal wrath was fierce, though no one ever did without lunch or was paddled for the accident. Students like me would ten times rather have had a swat from a paddle than to endure the tongue lashings that were sometimes handed out. Rarely if ever did one of those incredibly thick plates and bowls or one of those tough trays break or chip.

When a class ate lunch in the cafeteria, it was considered a privilege to collect the trays and return them to the kitchen. Usually two students were chosen for this task, and each tried to outdo the other to collect as many trays as possible. Often this did not end well for the victor, who more likely than not would drop their trays with a noisy clatter to the floor and have to pick them up. This also met with verbal wrath from the teacher.

Today our students have at least two choices for lunch. This is nothing new—in the elementary schools of my childhood we also had two choices—take it or leave it, but in Wanza Sharp’s room, it was better to leave it if you didn’t intend to eat it!

What a lovely time I was blessed with to be an elementary student, when even something as basic as school lunch was a learning opportunity. If I could live life over, there are a few small things I’d like to do once again. One of these is to once more with my class recite the prayer we said each day in Florence Chesney’s third grade just before lining up for lunch: “God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food. A-men.” Another is to eat one more lunch in the classroom with Ms. Wanza, her crossword puzzles, her apples, with a full belly looking forward to an afternoon snack of half a Popsicle or a nice, leftover barbeque sandwich for bus wait.