I like your "books"! I had an aunt who lived in the country, I grew up in city apartments - would have loved to be in a one-room school and have woods and fields to play in.
I went to a segregated school - no, not racial, but gender, all girl's school.
I send sunflowers to CJ's mom, hope she will be in remission soon.

Please keep writing your "books", they kept me lurking here. Oh those inkwells. The largest boy in the school had to refill them from a big bottle and there was always a light trail from the inkwell to the approx. paper location.
Who else learned to write on a slate? Mine still hangs in the house in Germany with the to-do-list.

Anneliese, I wrote on a slate, I also learned to use the abacus, did you? A handy calculator that is.

I also went to a country school and the desks had inkwells. I remember having to practice penmanship every day for years (at least it seemed like it). This was in the early 50's.

We had the desks with ink-wells in the early '70's in our city school system (town of 15,000). Since Ohio can't seem to solve its school funding crisis, I bet they are still in use in some poorer school districts.

In grade school our music books were from the 1940's. Lots of folk songs. I think they were influenced by the WPA program that sent folks out to record folk music during th depression.

Lilo, I was thinking of you when I wrote. Sure, I also had an abacus, but we were not allowed to use it in in school.
Kris, don't remind me of penmanship, please. That and singing destroyed my grade average. Don't know how many extra pages I had to write as homework, it was a weekly occurance and my handwriting still can rival any physician's.

We had the old-fashioned desks with ink wells (or at least the holes in the desks where an ink well would be) at my Chicago suburban high school in the 1960's. I don't think it was a question of money as thrift. The desks were perfectly functional, so why get rid of them?

Gandle, I'm glad little CJ is doing so well & I hope his mom feels better soon.

I'm so glad to hear the baby is doing well.Hopefully his mother will get better soon.

I love hearing the stories you tell, George please keep writing them.

I also had the desks with inkwells. Some of the more modern desks had them, but we still had the sled desks on runners and we really used the inkwells for penmanship classes. Our ink pens were huge, and orange plastic and you did dip them.

The teacher had a look of abject horror when this class rolled around. We got a lecture first and she always made eye contact with a couple of the boys who were known to be ornery. We were told if we dripped ink on our clothing how upset our parents would be. In this day and age, if we dripped ink on our clothes, the school would likely get sued instead.

The big orange ink pens turned into big orange ball point pens some years down the road, as that is what my children used for their penmanship classes.

One teacher had a wind up Victrola record player and if we were particularly good, she might let one of us do the winding. We were taught the Virginia Reel and some other group dances. I know our textbooks were left over from World War two times, because one arithmetic problem had to do with baking cookies when sugar war rationed. We still said prayers every morning, before the pledge of allegiance and it was a very big deal if your parents ever drove to the school to pick you up, usually reserved for an appointment or the last day of class. My sis, myself and my cousins were the only girls in the school with pierced ears and one teacher even made me bring a note home to my mother detailing her fears that it would cause me injury. rofl.

And yes, our school had a huge metal bell and the Janitor rang it. He'd let me try to ring it occasionally and it lifted me off my feet when the rope went up. It was rung twice in the morning, the first a warning bell and the second was the real thing.

When I moved back here as an adult, I heard they were tearing the old school down and dropped in one day to take one last look at it. The principle headed me off at the pass, and when I told him I went there in the first and second grade, he took me on a grand tour. My first grade teacher was still teaching first grade. Her grey gabardine suit and bun were replaced with a pastel pant suit and her hair was bobbed. Gone was the little lace hankie she wore in her pocket (and sometimes a little corsage of violets)

I believe it was built somewhere in the 1860-70s and was a particularly beautiful, light and airy building with windows almost ceiling to floor. I also remember there were no screens in them and wonder how they managed to use it so many years without a kid or two going out them, lol. But, in the spring when it started warming up, you could smell the grass when the janitor mowed it and there were many huge old maple trees surrounding the playground.

We had monkey bars (but the girls couldn't use them as they were not permitted to wear trousers), a swing set, and one of those merry go round thingies and that served six grades as far as equipment. Mostly the girls jumped rope, played hopscotch, or jacks.

On rainy days, we were allowed to play in the halls during recess or lunch hour. We had no lunch room or refrigeration and you brought your lunch in a little tin box or paper bag. No breakfasts, no school lunches, no auditorium, no intercom systems, and no lockers. All your stuff went in the cloak room. There were no school buses either. You walked. I don't ever, ever remember a snow day.

You know we never had snow days either & no school lunchrooms. It was assumed that mothers didn't work & we walked home for lunch & then walked back to school for the afternoon session.

In 1967 when a huge blizzard hit Chicago when I was home for semester break from college my mom called from work to tell me to make sure to stay inside. In an effort to stress the severity of the weather she told me that they had closed Oak Park High School, presumably the first time in living memory that had happened.

I'm curious how girls dressed for walking in the snow. I spent my childhood in southern states...I do remember black galoshes which buckled (?) I think and heavy brown laceup shoes one winter in OK. We lived on post at Ft.Sill and rode to school in canvas-covered Army trucks. Not sure if it snowed but I remember fierce wimter winds. Did y'all have snowpants...or full length socks at least? josh

The grade school I attended in the 1940's was still there when I was last in town....my father went to grade school there as did my grandfather...and it had a big bell too, but in my memory I never heard it ring.

There was a Jr High in the "complex" that had been the high school, before the new high school was built about 1928. We ran (in an orderly fashion of course)across the school yard to the auditorium for assemblies. Only cold lunch was an option, you brought your own and ordered milk, or you went home for lunch. In Jr High you could run across the yard to the highschool cafeteria and buy either hot or cold lunch, or eat your own sandwich and buy milk. My friends and I soon discovered that leaving school, we could peek into the window to the cafeteria and read what was on the menu for lunch and make up our mind to bring or buy.

We had snow days. I remember specifically several. One in particular when I didn't get the word and slogged to school only to find it closed.

Way back when, girls wore snow pants or even a show suit. we tucked our skirts into the snow pants, put on our boots, coats, hats, mittens and away we went. I remember one girl always left her skirt hanging out of her snow pants. I thought it looked strange...most girls tucked them in. For "good" you had leggins, with a zipper up the side of the leg and a sort of "spat" thing over the foot. Neat, tailored, unlike wool snow pants. With the leggins you had a matching coat, orten trimmed with velvet and a matching hat. Very spiffy and an expensive extravagance for Sunday School and birthday parties or going to aunt Norma's for Thanksgiving.

Big girls didn't wear snow pants, we just froze. We wore white rubber boots, looking very much like majorette boots and bare knees and a below the knee coat. And walking to school, with that hard rubber boot made a very rough, sore spot on the back or your calf. I swear sometimes it took until June for for that scar to heal up.

We had 2 sets of monkey bars....we called them jungle gyms...we had a set for boys and a set for girls. We played war ( remember the times!) and prisoner of war, kick ball, red rover, dodge ball and I remember in 7th grade playing mumblety peg for weeks and weeks at lunch recess. Can you imagine now if someone brought a knife with a 4 inch blade to school?

I learned to write with a black pen holder with a removable point and an inkwell which sat in my desk to dip into. In the supply closet was a large bottle of Schaffer ink that was used to fill th ink wells. Somewhere around 5th grade we were allowed to use a fountain pen, but not a ball point! Horrors!

By 7th grade we were allowed to use ball point, but they were messy and leaked and left oily globs on your papers, and teachers hated them. I used a fountain pen through high school and college and even after for writing letters and signing cards etc.

No one had pierced ears...no one! At least not until high school and then a few did, mostly Italian girls, they they wore simple gold hoops. I thought they were wonderful and one of the first pair of earrings I bought after getting my ears pierced was a pair of small gold hoops.

And 25 years later, when my daughter went to grade school, she still wasn't allowed to wear slacks to school until 6th grade when they lifted the ban....and she wasn't allowed to carry a purse to school...figure that one.

A couple of years back my grand daughter was writing a paper on family history and how things were "in the olden days" LOL! She wanted to know what we did without TV...I told her we had TV!! She wondered how old I was when we got electricity? I told her that I always had electricity and so did my mother from the time she could remember! Indoor plumbing?? Yep...had that too! I thinks he was disappointed!

However, there are mind bending changes in this last 25 years. Can you imagine my children telling their grand children how they had to go to the library to research a term paper?? LOL!
Linda C

Girls weren't allowed to wear slacks to school until I was a Junior in college! In grade school when it was snowy and/or really really cold we wore snow pants or slacks under our skirts. This was the state of affairs through about the 4th grade & then it just became too uncool to wear the pants. In grade school we wore rubber boots that went over your shoes. They looked sort of like Wellington boots, but were white or black or navy or red, and had a sort of fold-over flap that was secures by a piece of heavy elastic on a button on the side of the boot. And yes, the edge of the top of the boot always wore a really nasty chapped spot on the back of your leg.

Now when i got into Junior high & High School bundling up for winter's cold was definitely uncool. We usually wore camel-hair polo coats & I got a new one every year. The new one was for church & "dress-up" occasions & the previous year's model was to wear to school. We NEVER buttoned up our coats no matter how cold it was & would walk down the street with the winter winds just blowing our open coats about. WE did wear something on out heads - well sort of. We wore knitted strips of angora that covered our ears & that's about it.

The only time I ever remember really being cold was during the week or so that happened every January when we'd have a spell of weather when the temperatures seemed never to get above zero.

Of course, now I am freezing when the temperatures go down into the low forties! 10+ years of living in the south has seriously thinned my blood.

The desks with holes in them were used until at least junior high in Chicago. We studied penmanship and said the Pledge every morning, but if they ever tried school prayers there would have been a riot, as there were at least 2 "major" and more than one "minor" religions, even in the early 60's. We girls went to school with everything Andie said, those rubber boots over the shoes, the long slacks under skirts, and we had to undress in the hallway for some reason. But when junior high came around, it was 1969, and all of the girls at Lincoln Jr. High School held a demonstration, refusing to leave the hallway around the principal's office and staging a sit-in. We demanded the right to wear pants to school (later, we did it again to demand that the boys be made to take home ec and the girls be allowed to take woodshop). We won both fights, and yours truly the political activist was born. (Actually I was 10 when my mother took me to my first demonstration, so we can blame her).
My grandmother, born in 1898 in Chicago, was an elementary school teacher in the 20's... Her stories about all of the new immigrants, the culture shock, teaching "American manners", the tens of languages on one class, etc., were our favorite ctories as children.
Batya
P.S. My 16 year old son just walked in the door with his first notice from the Israeli army, saying that he should expect another in 6 months for his first interview. He'll go at 18, but they have had their hooks in him since his 16th b-day. Heaven help me, not again.

LOL Batya, I loved the story of the spunky junior high girls' sit in...what great years those were and you were just at the right age to benefit. I was married with a 3 year old and subscribed to all the underground papers I could get my hands on. I wished often I could have marched and protested...there wasn't as much going on in the south but it was bubbling here and there. I loved the kids looking around and saying "just because it's always been that way, it's totally dumb and has to change". Good for you to step out and be part of the solution! And the beat goes on...josh