School Days

Each morning at the beginning of class, one child would be chosen to come to the front of the room, next to the teacher, and hold the flag for the Pledge of Allegiance. We all stood at our desks, hands over our hearts...more or less...and recited the Pledge. In some years we also sang "America the Beautiful"...though I don't remember singing the National Anthem...perhaps it was judged too difficult for young voices.

Although the classroom in the picture is not ours, the similarities are striking. The long blackboard on one side, the row of tall windows on the other, and the desks mounted on wooden planks. The upper windows were opened on hot days with a long pole with a "window hook" on the end that the teacher kept in the corner. The desk seats folded up to make for easy entry and exit and were especially handy when we had to get under our desks for the "duck and cover" atomic bomb drill.

The desks had a hole in the top...for an inkwell which we actually used one year. Each of us had to bring a bottle of ink, Schaeffer's Skrip...which had a little built-in well inside the bottle for easy filling of a fountain pen. I think we learned how to write with them...and then they were through. Can't imagine doing that with a room full of kids...

Of course we pulled the pigtails of the girl in front of us...particularly if we happened to like her. We also were not above putting gum on the seat of the person in front of us...though that meant serious trouble. We were not allowed to chew gum in class. When we did...and we did...and when we were caught...and we always were caught...there were two forms of punishment.

Usually, we were instructed to stick the gum to the bridge of our nose...much to the delight of the rest of the children...and keep it there for a length of time judged sufficient by our teacher. This would be followed by marching up front and dropping the gum into the teacher's wastebasket. Occasionally, under "special circumstances", we would merely be required to spit the gum into the basket.

As I've said, the recess at lunch was the longest of the day. In the warm weather, a few of us boys would sneak out of the gate at the far north end of the playground...it bordered on the street...and run down the 3 or 4 blocks into Crystal Bay to the old store. Naab's Hardware was on the right, (where we bought our fishing poles), and a little general store was on the left.

In front of the store, on the concrete , was a coke machine. It was one of those that resembled a chest. You had to lift and hold the top open, choose your flavor from those available, and slide the bottle through a series of rails into the jaw-like release. Then you put your nickle or dime into the machine, and hopefully, it would let you pull the bottle out.

We didn't go to the store for pop, however, we went to buy Chum Gum. Chum Gum came in a package of 5 sticks, just like Wrigley's, but the packaging was less fancy. Rather than the foil package, Chum Gum was mere paper...and each stick was also wrapped in thin paper. The good thing about it was that it only cost 2 cents a pack!

We'd each buy a pack or two, start chewing, and head back to school before we were missed. Chewing Chum Gum became a game among the boys. Before we were to go inside after recess, we would take the entire pack, 5 sticks, and put it in our mouths. On a young boy, 5 sticks of gum shows relatively easily...not to mention the drooling sugar coming out of the corners of our mouths as we attempted to chew. Some guys would eventually try more than a pack...this was considered very, very neat.

Mrs. Anderson, our 6th grade teacher, had an especially sharp eye when it came to gum-chewing. She was a small woman, perhaps not much more than 5 feet tall, thin, impecably dressed, with dark curly hair showing just a little gray. She wore glasses sometimes...gold, wire rimmed spectacles. She was very tough...and a very good teacher.

Mrs. Anderson caught me with more than a pack of gum in my mouth one day. "Charles", she said in that stern voice that meant trouble..."do you have gum in your mouth?". I could barely pronounce the words "Yes, Mrs. Anderson"...I managed, having to swallow as much of the sweet liquid in my mouth as I could to keep from drooling excessively. "Come up here and spit it in the wastebasket", she said.

Standing and lifting my seat, I made my way up to the front of the room...muffled giggles from the kids accompanying me... I stood there, next to her desk, returning her no nonsense look with a kind of gleepy half-smile...then bent my head over the wastebasket and let it go. The wad of gum was huge...enormous...the best ever...and the wastebasket was empty. The loud "CLUNK" was greeted with laughs from the class...and I think I even saw a tiny smile in the corner of Mrs. Anderson's mouth.

Afternoon recess would be spent in the classroom writing " I will not chew gum in class" 100 times on the big blackboard...it was worth it.

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.