| *An article written by Billy Ward for the Cedar Creek Memorial Edition of PATHFINDER, published in 1987. by the Buffalo Review in Linden, Tennessee |
After school started in 1925 at the new building, the school was a beehive of activity in the community. Until early 50”s everything centered around the school since there was simply no other place to go. Usually every Friday afternoon, the school would have plays, debates, spelling bees, etc. and the publick was invited. The school had a stage and a rollup curtain with local advertising on it. Every summer there would be a traveling movie snow for a week. The show”s name was Fitz and Provo. They had a dynamo that sat behind the schoolhouse to kill the noise and ran a cord down to the basketball court and showed silent movies. That was the only kind of movies there were in the late 1920”s. They would take chickens or eggs if you had no money (most people didn”t) and they would take the goods to the store the next day and get their money. Sometimes they would have church at the school or have political speaking, Senatorial and Representative candidates spoke at Cedar Creek up to the early 50”s. Rep. Pat Sutton had a fish fry and speaking once that was the largest crowd ever. It was estimated at 2500-3000. Cars were parked down to Hobert Moore”s home and all around the Simmons Church.
The school was the voting precinct on Cedar Creek and had a fiddler”s contest every year. Although the school would be counted as primitive now, at that time it was considered modern. It had a wood stove and flue in each room and two flues in the auditorium. There was a well in front and each room had a bucket and dipper. The larger boys would draw water and you had to have a cup of some kind to drink with. Some students brought snuff glasses, some had metal cups, and, if all else failed, you could make a cup out of a sheet of paper.
The school had two outdoor toilets, one for the boys and one for the girls. They were the ultra-deluxe four hole models and the boys usually had a choice of a Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward catalog. I suppose the girls toilet had the same conveniences, but don”t actually know. This was another reason the school was the hub of activity. One of the government agencies built the outhouses. It might have been the WPA. I”m not sure.
When the Kentucky Dam was completed in 1945 the water would sometimes rise high enough to get over the basketball court and the outhouses. When that happened the students went up on the hill in front of the school. The girls went to the left of the Abb Moore home and the boys went to the right. This didn’t usually happen over once a year.
In the middle to late 30”s the WPA built a small frame building to the east of the school. It was to be a lunch room, but one of the students called it the Soup Kitchen and the name stuck forever. Some of the ladies went out in the community and asked for donations in the way of silverware, glasses, plates etc. If they didn”t get enough, they asked the students to bring what they needed. They cooked on a wood stove and carried their water in buckets from the well. When they washed dishes, it was in dishpans with water heated on the wood stove and they used homemade lye soap as that was the only soap available to them. The first few years of operation, the ladies all donated their labor. They went out in the community and asked for canned fruits and vegetables. It cost five cents per meal to eat and you could bring food to the lunchroom. They had a schedule worked out, but the only thing I remember was a gallon of milk was twenty five cents and you could eat a week.
It was nothing to get on the schoolbus and have a couple of dozen ears of corn, half a bushel or a bushel of beans, peas, greens, potatoes, apples, peaches, watermelon, eggs, even sides of bacon and occasionally a ham or shoulder.
What the cooks didn’t use they would can because there was no refrigeration. There were a few rules like no milk in the summertime, no fresh meat unless notified one day ahead, etc. The state would send some commodities along, but not on a regular schedule. Several times the menu was planned after the busses arrived and the ladies seen what they had. White beans or brown beans and prunes were the commodities the state sent along that didn’t need refrigeration. So when students didn”t bring anything we had brown beans and prunes one day, white beans and prunes the next. We always had cornbread as there were several gristmills in the community. In the summer, we always had water to drink.
In the period around 1940, the Soup Kitchen was moved downstairs under the auditorium. The state began to pay the cooks then, but they still had a wood stove to use and still had to carry their water in buckets, even farther than the first lunchroom.
They did have a sink to wash the dishes in, however, and they had a little room to store canned stuff and commodities. About 1945-46, the ice truck started running every other day from Parsons. This was a wonderful thing for everyone because now the cooks had refrigeration for milk, butter, meat and eggs. The best part for the students was having kool-aid with chipped ice in it. We were really uptown then.
During the middle 40’s while World War II was going on, the government sponsored a mattress project in the school. All material and you did the work. Most everybody partipitated because all they ever had was straw beds. Along about this time Jack Stevens started having agricultural fairs each summer. There would always be a big crowd and the school would sell sandwiches, homade ice cream and cokes. Some people say that was the first coke they ever drank, because the stores had no refrigeration and many people could not afford them anyway.
Up until the lunchroom was started, everybody brought their lunch. Some people had cloth sacks, some paper sacks, a few lunch baskets and a lot had gallon buckets or four or eight pound lard pails. In the winter, you brought what was left over from supper or breakfast, but in the summer you brought breakfast left overs only. Biscuits and cornbread were the breads, chicken and cured meats, and usually beans or peas or potatoes were the vegetables. Some students brought everything in snuff glasses with lids on them and just set them in their buckets. A gass of beans, a glass of fried ham, chicken or bacon, a glass of bread or biscuits, a glass of cobbler or molasses, with a spoon of butter on top. That way you could stir the butter up when you got ready to eat it.
The Middle 30”s brought a new act to Cedar Creek. The Grand Ole Opry was getting
started and the stars were out making personal appearances. They would come to Cedar Creek for $25. Everyone liked country music and the admission was usually fifteen or twenty-five cents. They started coming and kept coming until about 1950. The people who have appeared at Cedar Creek sound like the Country Music Hall of Fame, because that”s where most of them are. A partial list includes Bill Monroe, Roy Acuff, Flat and Scruggs, Johnny and Jack with Kitty Wells, Red Foley, Rod Brasfield, Bailes Bros, Carter Family with Chet Atkins, Uncle Dave Macon, Ernest Tubb, and Big Jeff and Radio Playboys. Several came more than once as this was a moneymaker for the school.
Cedar Creek at one time had a band of it”s own that played around surrounding counties and occasionally at the Cedar Creek School. The band”s name was the Pinetop Ramblers and it consisted of the Grooms Brothers and Sister Montie with Berlin Moore playing a washtub bass and doing the comedian routine. They were as good as some of the bands that played there but just didn”t have the publicity.
After the school was wired for electriciy, another downtown convenience appeared. We started having movies on Wednesday and Saturday nights. A fellow from Lutts in Wayne county came on Wednesday night and showed a western movie, RKO news, a chapter of a serial and a cartoon. Roy Bell, the retired teacher from Pineview, came on Saturday night with the same thing, but Roy alwats three or four boxes of candy to sell. You would be surprised at the crowds since they were showing the same thing at the theatre in Linden, except on weekends, when the theatre showed double features. I talked to Roy Bell recently. He still has his black 1939 Chevrolet that he brought the movies in. We had no tv just radio during this period.
The heat was wood stoves and sometimes it was too cold and sometimes it was too hot, but never just right. The huge stoves would hold a quarter rank of wood and since we burned slab wood, it was never right. There were no thermostats on the stove and the damper was the only cut off we had. The boys one day a week would fill the coatroom and the porch full of wood so as to stay dry. The first bus load there every morning built a fire and if it wasn”t real cold weather you fared okay, except sometimes it would get too hot and we would open a window or a door. Sometimes pranksters would fill the stove completely full of wood and the stove would get red hot, including the stovepipes, all the way to the flue. It was amazing the place never burned down.
The treat for the students was everytime the peddle truck ran. We had a rolling store come by the school once a week. Everyone that could manage a penny would go out to meet the truck. I never have understood how he happened to come at recess. We would buy a BB bat, a square of honetcomb candy or a dubble bubble. The BB bat was probably the best seller as it had 2 or 3 flavors.
A real treat if you had a nickel, was to go down to the J.M. Graham store and get a threemusketeers. It was five or six inches long and three fingers wide. You had to get them in the winter only because the chocolate would melt and run down in the summer.
One time I remember Miss Fuller and Mr. Delzell coming to our school for 4-H work. Miss Fuller brought some rice krispies and marshmallows and fixed them on top of the wood stove. She had to stand on a ladder to fix them, but we thought it was the best thing that we ever tasted.
We had several games we played at school when we weren”t playing ball. Some I remember were hip, wood pile, Red Rover, kick the can, and pop the whip. Usually a day or two or so was all pop the whip lasted before someone got hurt and the teachers stopped the game. A favorite trick was to build tunnels out of the slab wood. We usually had ten or twelve loads and we would build tunnels back and forth. Sometimes they would collapse, but I don”t ever remember anyone getting hurt.
In the spring young men”s fancy didn”t turn to love but to suckers spawning. Somebody would slip over to the creek and come back with the news that the suckers were running and that afternoon several boys would be gone from school. Sometimes they would be back with a sack full of suckers when school let out. Some teachers could be talked into making the punishment a little less with a nice mess of suckers and some couldn”t.
When we studied at night by a kerosene lamp, we sometimes listened to the battery radio. Some of our favorites were the Lone Ranger, FBI in Peace and War, Green Hornet, Mr. Keen, The Fat Man, Lum and Abner, Tennessee Jed, Jack Armstrong, The All American Boy, and Gangbusters. The adults would listen to Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Bob Hope and Fibber Magee and Molly.
Driving by Perry County High recently and seeing all of the students cars put me to thinking about something Dalton Moore had told me. Dalton drove a wagon school bus and hauled Swindle Creek down to the Cedar Creek School. At the start of the school year, 1931-1932, Thurman DePriest and his wife Bess started teaching at Cedar Creek School. The first part of the year Mr. and Mrs. DePriest, along with their children, rode the wagon from Buckfork up to the top of Furnace Hollow hill, turned and came down a ridge road to a point behind the Alex Richardson homeplace. From there they walked down the point just below where Tom and Betty Culp now live on Swindle Creek road and caught Dalton”s wagon to ride to school. That afternoon after school they returned the same way. Later in the school year Mr. DePriest got a car. He would drive his car in the mornings, but in the afternoons, Mrs. Bess and the children rode Dalton”s wagon to go home. Someone else came with them, but I can”t remember who Dalton said it was.
For a period of time up to the late 30”s, the Cedar Creek students had to go to Linden to take the 8th grade test. Once a year, the students formed different teams and met in Linden for a county wide meeting. Roy Culp said he remembered being a member of a quartet and winning the county competition.
The auditorium of the school was lit by Aladdin lamps that hung down from the ceiling. They had mantles and the fuel was white gasoline. The lamps had a little pump that was used to increase the pressure as you had to have a certain amount of pressure for the lamps to shine brightly. The lamps fit into a metal bracket that hooked in an eye in the ceiling.
At one time Cedar Creek had one of the few, if not the only, croquet in Perry County. It was located across from the lower outdoor court.
About once a week, the boys had to go up to the cedar glade across the road and get armloads of kindling so a supply would always be on hand to start fires.
Many a dinner has been eaten ender the old hackberry tree that the road curved around. Some of the girls would sing for the croud after eating.