I grew up in the fifties and sixties of the last century.\u00a0 That sounds like so long ago, but to me it seems just like yesterday.\u00a0 I attended a little school in a little town of about 400 people where the first through the senior classes were all in one building.\u00a0 A two story brick school house with no air conditioning.\u00a0 When it got hot, we opened the windows.\u00a0 It was heated by a big furnace in the basement cared for by our one janitor, Mr. Mikesell.\u00a0\u00a0 I sat at desks where there were holes for inkwells\u00a0\u00a0in the top\u00a0though we didn’t use them anymore. My desk had carvings on it that other pupils had made while sitting in them.\u00a0\u00a0 Our books and yellow writing tablets were put underneath on a shelf.\u00a0\u00a0 The classroom smelled of chalkdust, paste and crayons.<\/p>\n
We had a music teach, Miss Hower. She seemed like a little woman to me even though I was a little girl. She would come to our classroom once or twice a week to teach music. She was always wearing a dress with a full gathered skirt, a jacket or sweater and tiny heels.\u00a0 She was soft spoken, but she taught us well. She had one of those pitch pipes she would blow to get the note we were to start on in a song.\u00a0 Our favorite time in music class\u00a0was when we could pick out the songs to sing in our songbook.\u00a0\u00a0 Now, I don’t know what crazy things they may or may not be teaching in public schools today, but our choice of music was not what I would think children should be singing in the classroom although I loved these songs.\u00a0 One of our favorites was called, and I am serious, “There is a Tavern in the Town.”\u00a0\u00a0 I can still remember all the words.\u00a0 Picture a classroom of second and third graders belting out this song at the top of their voices.<\/p>\n
There\u00a0 is a tavern in the town, in the town.<\/p>\n
And there my true love sits him down, sits him down<\/p>\n
And drinks his wine mid fancy free<\/p>\n
And never, ever thinks of me!<\/p>\n
Fair thee well for I must leave thee<\/p>\n
Do not let this parting grieve thee<\/p>\n
But remember that the best of friends<\/p>\n
Must part, must part.<\/p>\n
Adieu, adieu\u00a0kind friends,\u00a0 adieu, adieu, adieu<\/p>\n
I can not longer stay with you, stay with you-u-u<\/p>\n
I’ll hang my heart on a weeping willow tree,<\/p>\n
And may the world go well with thee.<\/p>\n
I can’t imagine what my father and mother thought of this song as they did not drink, but I am sure I sang it around our house. I loved it!<\/p>\n
Another song we sang was “Barbara Allen.\u00a0 A song that always made me sad.<\/p>\n
I know there are several verses to it, but I can only remember three of\u00a0 them<\/p>\n
Twas in the merry month of May<\/p>\n
When the green buds they were swelling,<\/p>\n
Sweet William on his death bed lay.<\/p>\n
For the love of Barbara Allen.<\/p>\n
Oh, mother, mother, make my bed<\/p>\n
Oh, make it long and narrow.<\/p>\n
Sweet William died for me today,<\/p>\n
I’ll die for him tomorrow.<\/p>\n
And here’s where I would feel like crying…..<\/p>\n
They buried her in\u00a0the old church yard,<\/p>\n
And they buried him beside her.<\/p>\n
And from his grave there grew a rose,<\/p>\n
And from hers grew a briar.<\/p>\n
And the song from the war years, years before any of us were born.<\/p>\n
Don’t sit under the apple tree<\/p>\n
With anyone else but me,<\/p>\n
Anyone else but me,<\/p>\n
Anyone else but me, no, no, no.<\/p>\n
Don’t sit under the apple tree,<\/p>\n
With anyone else but me,<\/p>\n
Til’ I come marching home.<\/p>\n
I just got word from a guy who heard<\/p>\n
From a guy next door to me,<\/p>\n
The girl he met just loves to pet<\/p>\n
And it fits you to a T!<\/p>\n
So, don’t sit under the apple tree<\/p>\n
With anyone else but me,<\/p>\n
Til’ I come marching home.<\/p>\n
We probably didn’t even know what petting was at that age, but we loved singing that song.\u00a0 My question is, who put those songs in children’s songbooks back in the fifties?\u00a0\u00a0 I find it funny now.<\/p>\n
We had three recesses every day. One in the morning. One after lunch and a third in the afternoon.\u00a0 In good weather we would race to the schoolyard trying to get one of the swings before they were all taken.\u00a0 These swings swung high and we’d swing so high the chain would buckle and of course we would jump out at the highest point.\u00a0 There were teetor-totters and we tried bumping each other off them by dropping down hard on the ground while the other one was in the air.\u00a0 I had the wind knocked out of me several times doing that.\u00a0 Playgrounds looks so dull and uninteresting now and I wonder how the children can have fun in them.\u00a0 We had a merry-go-round that the big boys would spin while the rest of us would hold on for dear life. I lost several dress sashes on the merry-go-round when they would get caught and I would fall off.\u00a0 I look back now and wonder how we all survived, but we did.\u00a0 And it was glorious fun.<\/p>\n
If you have seen the movie, Christmas Story, my classrooms\u00a0looked a lot like Ralphie’s\u00a0 and his teacher reminds me a whole lot of my first grade teacher, Mrs. Retherford.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I loved school, but would cry every Sunday night when I realized I had to go back to school on Monday.\u00a0\u00a0 We had three reading groups, the Cardinals, the Bluebirds and the\u00a0Robins. The Cardinals were the best readers and\u00a0I was in that group as\u00a0I had pretty much taught myself to read before I went to school.\u00a0 I have never lost\u00a0my love of reading.\u00a0\u00a0I felt sorry for the Bluebirds who were struggling learning to read.\u00a0\u00a0 They all learned to read, though and that is what was important.<\/p>\n
When someone would get sick in the classroom and didn’t make it to the bathroom which\u00a0was in the basement of the building,\u00a0Mr. Mikesell would come in with his mop and bucket and as we kids watched fascinated, he would mop up the mess without acting like it affected him at all while we kids went “eww”\u00a0and “ick,”\u00a0and when he left, our teacher would thank\u00a0him and he would shake\u00a0some good smelling powder on the floor.\u00a0\u00a0 It was a\u00a0common occurance in our classroom, it seemed.<\/p>\n
When it was too bad to take recess outdoors, we would play in our classroom, writing on the blackboard,\u00a0coloring or jumping rope.\u00a0I loved jumping rope and could jump hundreds of times\u00a0before the rope would catch my legs.<\/p>\n
Lunch\u00a0time was the social time of the day as we would sit with our friends\u00a0and either ate\u00a0our lunch we brought from home or ate a hot meal prepared by the cooks, who were usually someone’s mothers.\u00a0 The meals were delicious and we could go back for seconds.\u00a0 One of the cooks baked homemade cinnamon rolls once in a while and you could smell them baking\u00a0all over the school and by lunchtime you would be so hungry.\u00a0 Friday was fish day for the one Catholic family who lived in our school district.\u00a0 I loved fish day.<\/p>\n
So many memories of my school days.\u00a0 I pretty much loved learning and still do.\u00a0 My second grade teacher, Mrs. Farmer,\u00a0turned me onto writing and I thank her for teaching me how to write a good story.\u00a0 My first story was about an apple and what happened to him as he was picked and taken to be made into apple cider.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I wish I still had that paper.<\/p>\n
How was your school years?\u00a0 Do you have fond memories or would you rather forget them?\u00a0 Good teachers can make a big difference in how children look at education.\u00a0 Here’s to those teachers who made us\u00a0want to learn.\u00a0 Bye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I grew up in the fifties and sixties of the last century.\u00a0 That sounds like so long ago, but to me it seems just like yesterday.\u00a0 I attended a little school in a little town of about 400 people where the first through the senior classes were all in one building.\u00a0 A two story brick […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-things-on-my-mind","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7786"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7791,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7786\/revisions\/7791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}