One Room School
We Recycled Tin Cans
by Jeannie Travis
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....