School Days
When I was a little boy growing up in Beaver City, Nebraska during the late 1940's school started in the day after Labor Day.
The grade school was at the top of the hill and was made of big, rough blocks of stone. There was a bell tower that was used to signal the start of school each day.
Outside of the front door, flanking the entrance walk, were two shoe scrapers. Above them were railings to hold onto as you scraped the mud off your shoes before entering school. You could also 'skin the cat' by hanging onto the railing and rolling your body clear over it. I remember one boy licking one of the railings when it was covered with frost. His tongue stuck to the bar and a teacher had to pour warm water on the bar to get it loose.
Fire escapes were the old tube type on the outside of the build from the second floor to the ground. I guess they were for emergencies only as we didn't get to use them during fire drills. We had to line up and march out of the building.
There were two stories and a basement. The basement contained the restrooms and the furnace room. The kids from the lower grades had their rooms on the bottom floor and the upper grades were on the top floor. There was a big room on the top floor that the seventh and eight grades shared as kind of an assembly room as well as classrooms.
I remember teachers such as Miss Metzgar, Mrs. Woodruff, Mrs. Fletcher, and the Rawlings couple.
On the playground there was a merry-go-round and a set of gigantic swings. As one got older the 'big kid' challenge was to standup in the swing and pump so high that you were above the top bar of swing supports.
The high school was just to the east of the grade school and contained the cafeteria, an auditorium and the gym. The grade school kids got to go to the auditorium for special shows and movies. I don't remember using the gym until the seventh grade when we got to play basketball there during the winter.
Recess was probably the most anticipated part of the day by us little boys as we got to play tag and such running games when we were little and then had baseball and football games as we got into the upper grades.
I don't really remember what I thought about that school when I was there; but now I remember it with a kind of longing to go back to those days just once more . . .