One Room School

One room School
Your school had TWO rooms ? Wow ! We only had the one room…Teachers desk was up on a stage across the front of the room….and the blackboards were behind her….When she called out ‘4th grade Reading ‘ or some such  you got your book and went up and sat on a long bench at the front….My favorite things after reading were recess and lunch….We choked our food down as fast as we could in order to go play games like Red Rover, Annie Over, hide and seek, tag, baseball….London Bridge, etc, etc….Lets see…walked 4 or 5 miles to school…rested up till recess, ran and played the entire time….rest till lunch…Eat our lunch VERY quickly ,run and play the rest of the time…Take a much needed rest till second recess…rest till time to play our way home…usually involving some running and chasing…then get home and do chores ….Pick cotton till dark  when it was ready, Fall upon the delicious food Mom had prepared like a horde of starving refugees…As I’ve said before, nobody complained about the food….we were HUNGRY ! Mom was a wonderful cook…by the way…Do our homework….Go to sleep and get ready to face it all again the next day….How different from today’s children….They don’t have Home Ec at some schools anymore,and most don’t have physical education….Machines to get soda and candy  in the halls….No wonder we’re churning out little overweight children with multiple health problems!  
 
PS: We hardly ever had light bread sandwiches…just biscuits with a slice of home cured bacon, or maybe candied sweet potatoes, corn on the cob in season, boiled eggs…cookies, or whatever Mom could find to put in the lunches…She had to fix several lunches, so got to where she would wrap them in newspaper, and tie them with string from a big tall spool of khaki colored string she got somewhere…She didn’t fix as good  lunches as Ma….But then she had several to fix for….We started going to town school when I was in the 7th grade…

We Recycled Tin Cans
One way to walk on tin cans is to punch a hole near the bottoms on both sides of 2 cans and run a piece of baling wire through the holes, leaving a length on each side…Turn the cans up so you are able to stand on the bottoms, tie the wires at the top for a handhold ,hold the wires and walk…Kinda like stilts…Makes a grand clanking noise…Another way is to stomp a tin can so it clamps on to the heel of your shoe….A nephew told me they used to clamp a can on each side of the foot AND the heel….Boy, they must have been rich to have that many tin cans!

We rarely saw one when I was growing up…I can remember finding one that had washed down the Big Ditch and taking it home to make curlers out of…You never heard of that?  Well, you get your Dad’s mule shears…which are coarse looking scissors used to trim the mules mane…and cut the rims off so you have a cylinder…Cut the can into strips about 1/4 to 1/3 inches wide and as long as the can is tall. Wrap a piece of rag around it, then wind strands of your wet hair on it and crimp the ends over to hold it..You could also save the metal strip that was unwound to open a can of coffee. Makes for some rather weird dreams if you try to sleep in them…and I HAVE done that. Next morning take all your ‘curlers’ out and comb your hair into a gloriously frizzy ‘Do’….For someone born with dead straight hair it was highly desired….Luckily I got a permanent one time and now I have enough curl in my hair to wear it in the short hairdo I prefer…..I have read about girls rolling their hair on rags….