Published: April 23, 2008 04:41 pm            

School days in a simpler time: blackboards and cloakrooms

There’s a lot of talk about schools these days. You know, poor student performance, shortage of teachers, budget cuts, along with when, if and how to build more schools. Teachers are stressed out. Administrators are losing sleep.

It was simpler back in the Dark Ages of My Youth. Schools existed unchanged for years. The kids who pounded through the doors every morning from September to May sat at the same desks their parents and grandparents had occupied, and played ball during recess in the same finely-pulverized dust of the playground.

Just about everything was different back then. The floors were oiled wood that started out light in September and turned black by mid-winter. The janitor used a sweeping compound — a pink-colored substance that looked like the contents from the pencil sharpener — to sweep the floor. Every summer they sanded the floor to bare wood again. I used to wonder how long it would be before they were so thin that someone fell through.

We didn’t have lockers in those days. We had cloakrooms, narrow ante-rooms located at the end of each classroom. Each had a long line of hooks on the wall where we hung our coats, and benches where we sat to take off our galoshes.

The cloakrooms always smelled of oranges and peanut butter because we also stowed our lunchboxes there. I never saw a school cafeteria until I hit high school. I do recall that we could get half-pint bottles of milk for 50 cents a week.

Most of the kids brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or maybe apple butter, along with a couple of cookies and an apple or orange. A few of the farm kids brought sandwiches made of homemade bread and layered with thick slices of home-cured ham. I never understood why, but these kids with their threadbare hand-me-down clothes and kitchen stool haircuts were always eager to swap their sandwiches for mine.

We also didn’t have air conditioning. What we had instead were enormous and complicated windows. You could raise the bottom windows and tilt open the top ones by using a long pole that had a hook on the end. Sometimes the bottoms would get jammed halfway up, and you never knew whether the top windows were going to return to their proper closed position. One cold winter day when I was in the third grade, the hook at the end of the pole came off and we had to retrieve our coats from the cloakroom to finish the day’s classes.

We also never moved around from classroom to classroom. Every grade had its room, and the stuff you deposited in your desk the day after Labor Day stayed there all year. It was your desk and yours alone. Most were permanently marked with carved initials of previous residents. I remember my fifth-grade desk had the name “ T. Collier – 1910” etched at the top next to the ink well.

On the last day of school, of course, we had to clean out our desks. The teacher wisely set the wastepaper basket in the middle of the room for deposits of questionable substance. It’s amazing what can happen to a Bartlett pear in eight months.

Our blackboards were made of polished slate and were, indeed, black. I never saw a green blackboard until I got to college. And it was years later that I saw my first whiteboard and erasable markers.

School started the day after Labor Day and ended at the end of April. We got out early back then so the farm kids could help with spring planting.

I returned to the small town in southern Missouri where I went to grade school a few summers ago. The old school was gone, and in its place was a sprawling single-story modern school. I walked around the grounds looking for vestigial remains of the past, but found none. Even the playground had been paved over, much of it transformed into a parking lot. Games and playtime had been moved indoors to the shiny gymnasium.

I asked a man who was working on lockers in the hallway what had happened to the old school.

“Burned down,” he said. “About 10 years ago. They’d been planning to build a new school for years, so it wasn’t much of a loss.”

Somehow, I didn’t see it that way. I doubt that T. Collier would have either.



Ward Degler is a Zionsville writer and artist. E-mail him at wdegler@att.net.

        

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