Hill School Playground

I think it was 1950 when they built the "new" Hill School, just west of the "old" Hill School. We all moved over to the new school then but the old school remained and we would use it again in just a few short years.


The playground shared by both schools was enormous. Mainly open fields to the north of the schools, there was a baseball diamond in the northeast corner of the old school playground. All of the playground accesories remained there as well. I think that today none of them would be acceptable because if you behaved stupidly, you would certainly be hurt.


The swings were the least worrisome. Board seats with long, rather heavy chains supporting them with well-worn dirt depressions beneath each. The chains could pinch your fingers, especially if you went really high enough to cause slack in them. If you were holding them wrong, you received a nasty pinch when the slack was taken out. Naturally, the game for the boys was to swing as high as possible and then jump off onto the grass.

The teeter-totters were very long boards with concave cut-outs toward the end for young legs to hang down. They had metal handles and rested on a horizontal pipe, long enough to allow room for three or four boards. Under each board was a steel bracket which rested on the pipe and had three different positions available to balance differing weights. Of course we would try to get the girls in the air and then jump off...leaving the board...and girls...to come crashing to earth. It really hurt!

There was a long slide, metal, with a hump in the middle. Someone got the idea of throwing sand on the slide "to speed it up". Whether you went faster or not was debatable, but your school trousers certainly suffered causing Mother some degree of consternation.

Speaking of clothes wearing out, it was not uncommon, especially toward the end of the school year, for boys to have patches on their knees. Kids then were outdoors all the time and they played hard...so it was natural that the school clothes would get worn. However, most kids only had a couple of sets of clothes for school, purchased in the preceding fall...or inherited from an older brother. It really wasn't in the budget to buy new clothes until the next year.

I certainly don't mean to imply that we went to school looking like a bunch of scrufty little hobos...quite the contrary...cleanliness was very important...washing one's hands was mandatory due to the fear of polio...but parents took some pride in making sure their son or daughter went to school in clean...if not new...clothes.

Girls pretty much wore dresses or skirts and blouses. In the winter, they'd put on jeans or cords under their skirts to keep their legs warm, taking them off when they came to school. The teachers, particularly in the younger grades, spent an awful lot of time helping children on and off with their clothing in the winter. And they did it for each recess and when it was time to catch the bus. They must have had a great deal of patience.


The crowning jewel of the playground, however, was undoubtedly the merry-go-round. Composed of steel pipes, worn shiny by generations of little hands, and dried out wooden seat boards, it lacked the later addition of a kind of sprocket gizmo which kept the thing from smashing into the center pole. If you were uncareful enough to have a leg or an arm hanging over the inside, it would give you serious damage. Girls would hang on as boys ran at top speed around the thing, pushing it as fast as they could before jumping on themselves...at which time it would begin it's eccentric wobble. Kids were injured...but the teacher would bandage the cuts, and soothe the tears...and all would be well at the end of the day.

The tennis courts were concrete-walled and surrounded with a chain-link fence with a couple of gates. This was the site for kick-ball and "war"...kickball without the kicks...just throwing it as hard as possible to damage your target. In the spring, it was the home of myriads of june bug beetles which we caught and raced...if they were in the mood.

In the back of the playground, and reserved for lunch recess which was much longer and more or less unsupervised, was a neat heavy grove of tall old trees surrounding a little pond. We weren't supposed to play there but we did...coming back only when we heard the teacher ring her bell from the back steps.

The boys played softball, the girls could always be found playing jacks or hopscotch on the sidewalk or in the tennis court.

We had around 30 kids in each class. We had 3 recesses during the long day and the teachers did all the work themselves...yet the Minnesota schools were the best in the nation...and the US schools were the best in the world.

School was a wonderful place to be.

Hill School: First Memories

Hill School was in Crystal Bay. It was already an old building when I went there. Strangely, I haven't seen a picture of how it looked at that time...all show it as having wooden clapboard siding. Even a few years ago before they began remodeling it into a new private school, it had wooden siding. When I went there, however, it had a very rough stucco exterior...so rough that if you brushed it when playing, it would give you a serious scrape...or tear your clothes. I'm talking about the "old" school...the "new" one was built in 1950, I believe, and was next door across the tennis courts and playground.

The first day of 1st grade was a little bit scary. I had attended Long Lake the year before, and, except for Steve, whom I'd played with all summer, I knew no one. I seem to remember that for at least that first year, we had both 1st and 2nd grade classes in the same room...the one on the west side of the building. It must be so for when I was introduced to the class by my teacher, the big cheerful face in front of me turned around and, with a huge smile said, "Hi Charles". It was Don Short and I knew immediately that he was going to be a good friend.

As you entered the front door of the school, on the right, in a tiny little room, was our library. Filled to the ceiling with books, the little place barely had room for the small desk in the corner where we could sign out our choices. As I said, television had not yet caught on with the general public, stations and hours of broadcast were limited, and the cost was high. Books, therefore, were highly valued by kids. We could check out books anytime but had to return them before we could get another.

On the left side of the entryway, was the cloak room framed by the boys and girls bathrooms. We'd put our coats, boots, mittens and caps in here along with our lunches that each of us brought, either in a paper or bread bag, or in a lunchbox. Lunchboxes had become really a big deal and I had a Red Ryder one.

Looking toward the north end...the end away from the front door...were two rooms, side by side, with a long row of high windows on the outside wall of each. The inside wall was covered with a long blackboard, ( on which I wrote many, many times things like "I will not talk in class"). The teacher sat at her desk in the front of the room, (the north end, or back of the building). A large dark green metal garbage can sat on the floor next to her desk...(especially useful for naughty boys to throw their gum after wearing it on their noses). An American flag mounted in a metal flag pole stand was in the corner.

Perhaps a little humorously, I hear people today rant about the phrase "under God" in our Pledge of Allegiance...apparently they don't know that the phrase wasn't added until 1954. I remember saying the pledge that year and thinking how strange it sounded with the new words.

We sure had a lot of recess time in those days it seemed. We'd play after the bus brought us to school but before the old bell rang; we had a morning recess for half an hour; a long lunch hour recess governed only by how quickly you could eat your sandwich; an afternoon recess; and the time before the buses came to pick us up.

The teacher in the younger grades would be with us, teaching and playing games with us. I remember playing something called " cut the pie" in the winter. The children would walk around in a circular pattern, making a large pie in the snow. Then, we'd make the slices the same way. I don't remember exactly how it was played, but I do know you were in trouble if you "cut the pie"...that is stepped out of the tracks.

The basement was the lunchroom. We'd take our lunches down there, get a little bottle of milk...for which our parents paid 2 cents, and eat quickly so as to get outside for recess.

I have many more stories of our days at Hill School and will continue them in the future.

...A 1949 Summer Morning...

My bedroom window had been left open just a crack last night. It was May and although the nights still got quite cool, we'd had a run of very warm weather this spring and everything was coming alive again. I heard the jingle jingle first...then...as they came closer...the clop clop of the huge Belgians' hooves on the gravel road became louder. I rushed to wash my face, brush my teeth, pull on my jeans and get outside to talk with Mr. Redpath.

We lived in a small bungalow on the top of the hill on Fox Street. The house is still there though it's green now rather than white. In high school at St. Thomas I wrote a poem about the little house which, to my absolute surprise, won a prize in a national contest. Across the street was a field of tall grasses, golden rod and milkweed that belonged to the Weber family. Today it's called Weber Hills...an appropriate name, I guess. There were no houses there in 1949...in fact...there were very few houses in the area at all.

Our house was on 10 acres. All the land was open grassland...surrounded by a three-strand barbed wire fence with wooden fence posts that were old even then. There had been beef cattle in the fields when we moved in. One day...trucks came and took them all away. The livestock evidently controlled what grew in the fields due to their grazing... for today...those grassy fields where, as a child on a sunny and warm day, I would lie on my back with my dog and watch the cottony clouds cruise by...have been replaced by fully grown groves of huge trees.

The house sat toward the front of the lot...set back perhaps 75 to 100 feet from the gravel road that Fox Street was then. A long gravel driveway curved around the west side of the house to the back yard where the garage sat. It had a tall sliding door and a wooden plank floor and sat above what had been a small barn for milk cows. Four or five old stanchions were still down there and straw covered the floor. Next to the garage was a very old chicken coop.

Mother had a clothesline toward the back of the yard...it seemed to me to be always full. I can still remember the delicious smell of the clean sheets dried in the sun and almost constant breeze that we enjoyed on top of the hill. My Dad had dug a garden, by hand with a shovel, not far away where we grew our vegetables. It was my job to cultivate it, pull whichever weeds escaped the hoe, and keep it watered. A side benefit of the garden was that it produced a great crop of earthworms, easily found and collected in a coffee can for fishing bait.

Mr. Redpath was a large man, red-faced from working in the sun and wind, with thick, strong hands. It seems to me now that he must have always worn his bib overalls...not the solid blue ones...but the ones with the white pinstripes...like a railroad engineer. His land abutted ours and he was here this morning to plow. His plow was powered by Bob and Jake, two enormous Belgian draft horses...one white...one grey. In fact, all of his farm implements were powered by Bob and Jake.

By the time I got outside, he had already made his first trip down the field...cutting and rolling the sod under the fresh-smelling spring earth...and was on his way back toward Fox Street. As he got closer he waived at me and wished me a good morning! He had a strong, loud voice.

Hi, Mr. Redpath, I said as I walked to the side of the plow that he was riding on...Bob and Jake turned and looked at me for just a second then focused their attention on the field ahead. Hop on, he said and I jumped up beside where he sat...standing on a bar that ran across the rig. He always let me ride along. Could their be anything better in the world!

I looked at his huge hands holding the thick leather reins...two in each hand...and followed them with my eyes up along the horses to their bits. One hand held the right rein of each horse...one hand held the left. He could turn them by pulling on one hand or the other...though the truth be told...they knew when to turn by themselves and he just more or less encouraged them by saying their names. He didn't ever yell that I can remember...and he never got mad at his two powerful helpers.

It was delightful to ride along beside him as we went up and down the fields...the only noise was the jingle of the harness, the sound of the plow tearing the ground, and an occasional grunt from one of the horses. Seldom did a car come down Fox Street in those days...and when one did...the sound of the rocks and gravel bouncing off it gave it away long before it came into sight. Both Mr. Redpath and I would look up...trying to see if we recognized the car. He usually did...there was really no reason for anyone who didn't live around the area to use the road.

Around noon, Mom came over to the side of the field and called me in for lunch. She asked Mr. Redpath if he'd like a sandwich too...but he said that he was almost finished and would go home for lunch but thank you. I hopped off and told him thanks alot for the ride...he smiled and said he'd see me soon.